The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

From this it was only a very short step to the sixth charge: that the SR’s had been Entente spies in 1918. Yesterday they had been revolutionaries, and today they were spies. At the time, this accusation probably sounded explosive. But since then, and after many, many trials, the whole thing makes one want to vomit.

A full quota of charges—and then some—had been piled up. And the tribunal could have gone out to confer and thereupon nailed each of the prisoners with his well-merited execution—but, alas, there was a big mix-up: a. Everything the Socialist Revolutionary Party had been accused of related to 1918. b. Since then, on February 27, 1919, an amnesty had been declared for SR’s exclusively, which pardoned all their past belligerency against the Bolsheviks on the sole stipulation that they would not continue the struggle into the future. c. And they had not continued the struggle since that time. d. And it was now 1922! How could Krylenko get around that one?

In fact, at the beginning of 1919, in the face of threats from Kolchak and Denikin, the SR’s had renounced their task of revolt against the Bolsheviks and had abandoned all armed struggle against them.

And specifically: in reply to the renunciation by the SR’s of armed opposition and to their peaceful proposals, they had put the entire Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in prison! (As many of them as they could catch.) That’s how we do it! But to keep them in prison—and hadn’t it already been three years?—wasn’t it necessary to try them? And what should they be charged with? “This period had not been sufficiently investigated in the pretrial examination,” our prosecutor complained. But in the meanwhile one charge was correct. In that same February, 1919, the SR’s had passed a resolution which they had not put into effect, though in terms of the new Criminal Code that didn’t matter at all: to carry on secret agitation in the ranks of the Red Army in order to induce the soldiers to refuse to participate in reprisals against the peasants. And that was a low-down, foul betrayal of the Revolution—to try to persuade men not to take part in reprisals.

But all that wasn’t enough. So here’s what they thought up: “Many defendants sitting here would not deserve to be indicted in the given case, were it not for the charge of having planned terrorist acts” Allegedly, when the amnesty of 1919 had been published, “none of the leaders of Soviet Justice had imagined” that the SR’s had also planned to use terrorism against the leaders of the Soviet state!

So this charge had not been amnestied (for, after all, struggle was the only offense that had been amnestied). And so Krylenko could now make the charge!

What made Krylenko’s task difficult was the fact that the use of terrorism against the Soviet government was discussed at the meeting of the SR Central Committee in 1918 and rejected. And now, years later, it was necessary to prove that the SR’s had been engaged in self-deception.

The SR Party carried out no terrorist acts whatever, and this was clear even from Krylenko’s summing up of the charges. But the prosecution kept stretching such facts as these: One of the defendants had in mind a plan for blowing up the locomotive of a train carrying the Council of People’s Commissars to Moscow. That meant the Central Committee of the SR’s was guilty of terrorism.

And what if they were, nevertheless, not guilty of overthrowing the government, and not guilty of terrorism, and if there had been hardly any “expropriations” at all, and if they had long since been forgiven for all the rest? Our favorite prosecutor pulled out his canonical weapon of last resort: “Ultimately, failure to denounce is a category of crime applying to all the defendants without exception, and it must be considered as having been proved.”29 The Socialist Revolutionary Party was guilty of not having squealed on itself! Now there’s something that couldn’t miss! This represented a discovery that juridical thought had made in the new Code. It was a paved highway along which they would keep driving and driving grateful descendants into Siberia!

And especially new and important was the fact that we did not draw the distinction between methods and means the old Tsarist Code had drawn. Such distinctions had no influence either on the classification of the charges or on the penalties imposed! For us, intent and action were identical! A resolution had been passed—we would try them for that. And whether it “was carried out or not had no essential significance.”30 Whether a man whispered to his wife in bed that it would be a good thing to overthrow the Soviet government or whether he engaged in propaganda during elections or threw a bomb, it was all one and the same! And the punishment was identical!!!

Krylenko no doubt resented having to spend half a year getting ready for this trial, then another two months barking at the defendants, and then having to drag out his summation for fifteen hours, when all these defendants “had more than once been in the hands of the extraordinary Organs at times when these Organs had extraordinary powers; but, thanks to some circumstances or other, they had succeeded in surviving”36 So now Krylenko had to slave away to try and get them executed legally.

the tribunal did demonstrate its daring in the sentences it imposed: it did not hand down the death penalty for “every last one of them,” but for fourteen only. Most of the rest got prison and camp sentences, while sentences in the form of productive labor were imposed on another hundred. And just remember, reader, remember: “All the other courts of the Republic watch what the Supreme Tribunal does. It provides them with guidelines.”

The members of the ruling Party read all sixty issues of Pravda devoted to the trial—for they all read the papers—and all of them said: “Yes, yes, yes” No one mumbled: “No!” What, then, were they surprised at in 1937? What was there to complain about? Hadn’t all the foundations of lawlessness been laid—first by the extrajudicial reprisals of the Cheka, and then by these early trials and this young Code? Wasn’t 1937 also expedient (expedient for Stalin’s purposes and, perhaps, History’s, too, for that matter)? Prophetically, Krylenko let it slip that they were judging not the past but the future. Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.

But where were those mobs insanely storming the barbed-wire barricades on our western borders whom we were going to shoot, under Article 71 of the Criminal Code, for unauthorized return to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic? Contrary to scientific prediction, there were no such crowds, and that article of the Code dictated by Lenin to Kursky remained useless.

On the other hand, the opposite penalty—exile abroad instead of execution—was tried out immediately on a large scale.

At the end of 1922, about three hundred prominent Russian humanists were loaded onto—a barge, perhaps? No, they were put on a steamer and sent off to the European garbage dump.

However, it didn’t work out constantly and systematically. Perhaps the roar with which the émigrés announced that they regarded it as a “gift” made it apparent that this punishment left something to be desired, that it was a mistake to have let go good material for the executioner, and that poisonous flowers might grow on that garbage dump. And so they abandoned this form of punishment. And all subsequent purging led to either the executioner or the Archipelago.

The catch swiftly expanded to include the engineering and technical intelligentsia; it was especially dangerous because it occupied a firm position in the economy and it was hard to keep an eye on it with the help of the Progressive Doctrine alone.

It had no sooner been established that wrecking was what had to be tracked down—notwithstanding the nonexistence of this concept in the entire history of mankind—than they began to discover it without any trouble in all branches of industry and in all individual enterprises.

K. The Shakhty Case—May 18-July 15, 1928

There were fifty-three defendants and fifty-six witnesses. How spectacular! Alas, in its spectacular aspect lay the weakness of this case. If one were to tie to each of the defendants only three threads of evidence, there would still have to be 159 of them. And meanwhile Krylenko had only ten fingers and Vyshinsky another ten. Of course, the “defendants strove to expose their heinous crimes to society”—but not all of them did, only sixteen; thirteen wiggled back and forth, and twenty-four didn’t admit their guilt at all.

Anyway, the whole scale of the Shakhty case, comprising as it did the coal industry alone and the Donets Basin alone, was disproportionately paltry for this era. It appears that then and there, on the day the Shakhty case ended, Krylenko began to dig a new, capacious pit.

And for this purpose it was essential to have several strong, prominent “wreckers” at its head. And what engineer was unaware of just such an unequivocally strong and impatiently proud leader—Pyotr Akimovich Palchinsky? An important mining engineer from as far back as the beginning of the century, he had been the Deputy Chairman of the War Industry Committee during World War I—in other words, he had directed the war efforts of all Russian industry, which had managed, during the course of the war, to make up for the failures in Tsarist preparations.

Krylenko’s choice turned out to be a mistake. Palchinsky resisted every pressure the OGPU knew—and did not surrender; in fact, he died without signing any sort of nonsense at all. N. K. von Meck and A. F. Velichko were subjected to torture with him, and they, too, appear not to have given in.

To cover up his defeat, on May 24, 1929, Yagoda published a brief GPU communique on the execution of the three for large-scale wrecking, which also announced the condemnation of many other unidentified persons.5

The country was waiting for the all-inclusive wreckers’ trial, and Comrade Stalin was waiting—but things just couldn’t seem to fall into place for Krylenko.6 It was only in the summer of 1930 that someone found or suggested Ramzin, the Director of the Thermal Engineering Institute!

L. The Promparty (Industrial Party) Trial—November 25-December 7, 1930

there were only eight defendants in all. (The mistakes of the Shakhty trial had been taken into account.) You are going to exclaim: Can eight men represent the entire industry of the country? Yes, indeed; we have more even than we need. Three out of eight are solely in textiles, representing the industrial branch most important for national defense.

The harmony of the trial was not at all disturbed by the defense, which agreed with all the prosecutor’s proposals. The principal defense lawyer called the prosecutor’s summation historic and described his own as narrow, admitting that in making it he had gone against the dictates of his heart, for “a Soviet defense lawyer is first of all a Soviet citizen” and “like all workers, he, too, is outraged” at the crimes of the defendants.

How foul-smelling were the crimes of these bourgeois engineers? Here is what they consisted of. They planned to reduce the tempo of development, as, for instance, to an over-all annual increase in production of only 20 to 22 percent, whereas the workers were prepared to increase it by 40 to 50 percent. They slowed down the rate of mining local fuels. They were too slow in developing the Kuznetsk Basin. They exploited theoretical and economic arguments—such as whether to supply the Donets Basin with electricity from the Dnieper power station or whether to build a supertrunk-line between Moscow and the Donbas—in order to delay the solutions of important problems. (The work stops while engineers argue!) They postponed considering new engineering projects (i.e., they did not authorize them immediately).

Then they leaped from minimal to maximal plans. And obvious wrecking began through the accelerated development of that same unfortunate textile industry. Most importantly, they planned sabotage in the field of electric power—even though none was ever carried out. Thus wrecking did not take the form of actual damage done but remained within the area of operational planning, yet it was intended to lead to a nationwide crisis and even to economic paralysis in 1930!

All the work of that unhappy generation of our engineers was squeezed between two such impossibilities. The Thermal Engineering Institute was proud of its principal research achievement, which was the sharply improved coefficient of fuel consumption. On this basis, lower requirements for fuel production had been stipulated in the preliminary plan. And that meant wrecking—reducing fuel resources.

In order to make more efficient use of single-track railroads, they decided to increase the size of the locomotives and freight cars. And was that considered modernization? No, it was wrecking. Because in that case it would have been necessary to invest funds in strengthening the roadbeds and the superstructures of the bridges.

They began to build new factories out of reinforced concrete, instead of cheaper ordinary concrete, on the grounds that over a hundred-year period reinforced concrete would recoup the additional investment many times over. So that, too, was wrecking: tying up capital; using up scarce reinforcing rods when iron was in short supply. (What was it supposed to be kept for—false teeth?)

Old Fedotov tries to explain where thousands and millions of rubles are lost in the insane rush of the Five-Year Plan: Cotton is not sorted where it is grown so that every factory can be sent that grade and kind of cotton it requires; instead, it is shipped any old way, all mixed up. But the prosecutor doesn’t listen to him.

Here was their kind of wrecking: “We had the capability of producing, say, 1,000 tons and we were ordered [in other words, by a nonsensical plan] to produce 3,000, so we took no steps to produce them.”

For the engineers (those who were still free, not yet imprisoned, and who had to face the necessity of working cheerfully after the defamation at the trial of their whole class), there was no way out. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. If they went forward, it was wrong, and if they went backward, it was wrong too. If they hurried, they were hurrying for the purpose of wrecking. If they moved methodically, it meant wrecking by slowing down tempos. If they were painstaking in developing some branch of industry, it was intentional delay, sabotage.

But just a moment! We’ve not had everything yet! The most important crimes all lie ahead! Here they are, here they come, comprehensible and intelligible to every illiterate! The Promparty (1) prepared the way for the Intervention; (2) took money from the imperialists; (3) conducted espionage; (4) assigned cabinet posts in a future government.

What about some more details? Why should you want more details? Well, then, if that’s the way you want it; but they will only be more frightening. They were all acting under orders from the French General Staff. After all, France doesn’t have enough worries, or difficulties, or party conflicts of its own, and it is enough just to whistle, and, lo and behold, divisions will march. . . . Intervention! First they planned it for 1928. But they couldn’t come to an agreement, they couldn’t tie up all the loose ends. All right, so they postponed it to 1930. But once more they couldn’t agree among themselves. All right, 1931 then.

But why didn’t the Intervention take place anyway? For various complex reasons. Either because Poincare hadn’t been elected in France, or else because our émigré industrialists decided that their former enterprises had not yet been sufficiently restored by the Bolsheviks—let the Bolsheviks do more. And then, too, they couldn’t seem to come to terms with Poland and Rumania. So, all right, there hadn’t been any intervention, but there was, at least, a Promparty!

But Krylenko pressed too hard. On the one hand he planned to disembowel the Promparty—to disclose its social basis. That was a question of class, and his analysis couldn’t go wrong. But Krylenko abandoned the Stanislavsky method, didn’t assign the roles, relied on improvisation. He let everyone tell his own story of his own life, and what his relationship to the Revolution had been, and how he was led to participate in wrecking. And, in one fell swoop, that thoughtless insertion, that human picture, spoiled all five acts. The first thing that we learn to our astonishment is that all eight of these big shots of the bourgeois intelligentsia came from poor families: the son of a peasant; one of the many children of a clerk; the son of an artisan; the son of a rural schoolteacher; the son of a peddler. At school, they were all impoverished and earned the money for their education themselves, from the ages of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Some gave lessons, and some worked on locomotives. And here was what was monstrous: no one barred their way to an education! They all completed the courses in high school and in higher technological institutions, and they became important and famous professors.

Ramzin uttered just one honest phrase during the whole trial: “The path of wrecking is alien to the inner structure of engineering.”

Krylenko hounded them with his theoretical questions—and as a result of simple human slips of the tongue inconsistent with their assigned roles, the nucleus of the truth is disclosed to us—as to what really had taken place and from what the entire bubble had been blown. What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d’etat was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn’t the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?

When NEP—the New Economic Policy—got under way, the engineers willingly went back to work. They accepted NEP as an indication that the government had come to its senses. But, alas, conditions were not what they had been. The engineers were looked on as a socially suspicious element that did not even have the right to provide an education for its own children. Engineers were paid immeasurably low salaries in proportion to their contribution to production. But while their superiors demanded successes in production from them, and discipline, they were deprived of the authority to impose this discipline. Any worker could not only refuse to carry out the instructions of an engineer, but could insult and even strike him and go unpunished—and as a representative of the ruling class the worker was always right in such a case.

So it was that the engineer was to blame for everything, even when he had done nothing wrong. But if he actually had made a real mistake, and after all he was a human being, he would be torn to pieces unless his colleagues could manage to cover things up. For would they value honesty? So the engineers then were forced at times to lie to the Party leadership?

Then came 1927. And the rationality of the NEP period went up in smoke. And it turned out that the entire NEP was merely a cynical deceit. Extravagantly unrealistic projections of a superindustrial forward leap had been announced; impossible plans and tasks had been assigned. In those conditions, what was there for the collective engineering intelligence to do—the engineering leadership of the State Planning Commission and the Supreme Council of the Economy? To submit to insanity? To stay on the sidelines? It would have cost them nothing. One can write any figures one pleases on a piece of paper. But “our comrades, our colleagues in actual production, will not be able to fulfill these assignments.” And that meant it was necessary to try to introduce some moderation into these plans, to bring them under the control of reason, to eliminate entirely the most outrageous assignments. To create, so to speak, their own State Planning Commission of engineers in order to correct the stupidities of the leaders. And the most amusing thing was that this was in their interests—the interests of the leaders—too. And in the interests of all industry and of all the people, since ruinous decisions could be avoided, and squandered, scattered millions could be picked up from the ground.

But to utter such thoughts aloud in 1930 meant being shot. And yet it was still too little and too invisible to arouse the wrath of the mob. It was therefore necessary to reprocess the silent and redeeming collusion of the engineers into crude wrecking and intervention.

Comrade Krylenko vouchsafed them a flash of his brilliant logic. “If we should admit even for one second that these people were telling untruths, then why were they arrested and why did they all at once start babbling their heads off?”23 Now that is the power of logic for you! For a thousand years prosecutors and accusers had never even imagined that the fact of arrest might in itself be a proof of guilt. If the defendants were innocent, then why had they been arrested? And once they had been arrested, that meant they were guilty!

So what it comes down to is that all Krylenko and the GPU had to do was select the right people. But the risk was small. Goods spoiled in interrogation could always be sent off to the grave. And whoever managed to get through both the frying pan and the fire could always be given medical treatment and be fattened up, and put on public trial!

The trial must work for the good of socialist society. And the defendants would fulfill all the conditions. Thus they served up all the subtlety of engineers’ intellectual opposition as dirty wrecking on a level low enough to be comprehensible to the last illiterate in the country.