Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago Read online

  It took no more than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon, sugar and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid. We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.[17]

  In persisting to put the Gulag archipelago in its proper perspective, the following is imperative. During the years when the prisoners’ cases did not carry any indication of their final destination, the transit prisons turned into slave markets. The conscientious merchants demanded that the ‘merchandise’ be displayed alive and bare-skinned for them to inspect. “Well, what merchandise have you brought? asked a buyer at Butyrki station, observing and inspecting the attributes of a seventeen-year old girl named Ira kalian. Solzhenitsyn continues in documenting an incident whereby twenty-four officers of the Gulag came for a ‘buy’ at Usman Prison in 1947. All the women prisoners were forced to undress and parade before these officers. Solzhenitsyn observes, “These officers were very seriously selecting bedmates for themselves and their colleagues.”[18]

  Moving along in time, let us now make reference to 1960, when Gennady Smelov, a non-political offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad Prison. The prosecutor went to his cell and asked him” “Why are you torturing yourself?” And Smelov replied: “Justice is more precious to me than life.” This phrase so astonished the prosecutor that the very next day Smelov was taken to Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor proceeded to tell him: “We suspect you may be a schizophrenic.”[19]

  As the political scientist Sidney Hook (1965) affirms in Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy, Stalin transformed dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union into dialectical terrorism.[20] The former constituted a view of the world as developing systems based upon the material forces which exist independently of all consciousness, human or divine. The latter, established by Stalin, held that the Central Committee leaders were the only person(s) vested in interpreting dialectical materialism. In brief, this meant that the power to decide what was valid and invalid rested with Stalin. Class enemies would be extirpated vis-a-vis purging.

  Continuing along this line, Stalin manifested social fascism in order to achieve hegemony over the working class.[21] All Social democrats were thus the moderate wing of fascism and they were to be destroyed due to their intermittent involvement in Western coalition governments. It appears that, unfortunately, consistency was maintained most methodically with relation to terroristic means. So pervasive was the repression, so fragile the human condition that, dissent had no demonstrative function.

  Tyrannous and oppressive governments are as old as mankind. Some human experiences, which occur under them are so traumatic that they leave forever their mark on those who have endured them-and survived. Few, not only feel compelled to recall the events, but thereafter to bear witness, to give testimony, to tell the world what they were like. So it has been and still is with the survivors of Hitler’s holocaust; so, too, with those who lived through the Stalinist reign of terror. Sporadically yet definitively, purposely and accidental, legally and illegally, works bearing witness are emerging out of the Soviet Union, and they have been on the increase since the death of Stalin. None of these Russian writings whether they be fiction, or non-fiction, has received greater attention than the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

  Solzhenitsyn’s work presents to a great extent a powerful attack on the Soviet system from inside. He constantly calls into question the morality of the Soviet leaders and their institutions, both high and low. The stress is on ethical rather than socialist principles: Solzhenitsyn’s views are basically moral rather than political, except insofar as ethics are ancillary to politics. As we will observe, Solzhenitsyn is more obsessed by the problem of man’s evil and goodness than he is by the political ramifications of those ethical considerations.

  Solzhenitsyn is unable to uncover the roots of evil or of goodness by tracing them to the social system and its production and class relations, by employing the orthodox and vulgar Marxist analysis of base and superstructure.

  Prior to examining the question of resistance as encountered in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle, it is imperative that we first come to appreciate how the Russian, generally speaking, perceives ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’. Materialism, too, indubitably plays a role here. As we will see soon, materialism served as a catalyst to certain forms of resistance manifested in the Gulag camps.

  One finds no deep-rooted tradition of and love for personal freedom per se, but there does exist a profound commitment to “justice”; it is from this commitment that Solzhenitsyn truly speaks for his people. Andrei Amalrik writing in his Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970) may be correct in maintaining that for most Russians “freedom” is synonymous with disorder, that “individual” and “personal” human personality has no particular value, and thus must be considered subordinate to the “communal” interest. He may even be accurate in contending that Russian love of justice is far less vigorous than Russian respect for brute force, and that in practice, what passes for love of justice is simply a kind of equalitarianism which says that no one should live better than the next person.

  This idea of justice is motivated by hatred of everything outstanding which we (Russians) make no effort to imitate, but, on the contrary, try to bring down to our level, by hatred of any sense of initiative, of any higher or more dynamic way of life than the life we live ourselves. This psychology is, of course, most typical of the peasantry and least typical of the “middle class.” However, peasants and those of peasant origin constitute the overwhelming majority of our country.[22]

  Yet Solzhenitsyn’s position is inimical to that which has been expressed by Amalrik. For Solzhenitsyn is convinced, that his stubborn insistence on justice may find more fertile ground in the Russian spirit, than his equally stubborn concern for freedom and the individual personality. Because Solzhenitsyn earnestly believes that the urge to justice is inherent, in the spirit of men, everywhere.

  Justice has been the common patrimony of humanity throughout the ages. It does not cease to exist for the majority even when it [is] twisted in some (“exclusive”) circles. Obviously it is a concept which is inherent in man, since it cannot be traced to any other source. Justice exists even if there are only a few individuals who recognize it as such. The love of justice seems to me to be a different sentiment from the love of people (or at least the two only coincide partially). And in periods of mass decadence, when the question is posed, “Why bother? What are the sacrifices for?” it is possible to answer with certainty: “for justice.” There is nothing relative about justice, as there is nothing relative about conscience. Indeed, justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually also recognizes the voice of justice. I consider that in all social or historical questions (if we are aware of them, not from heresay or books, but are touched by them spiritually), justice will always suggest a way of action (or thinking) that is not in conflict with one’s conscience.[23]

  But Solzhenitsyn and the remainder of that courageous band of dissidents and reformers in the Soviet Union, are living in a period and a society of mass decadence, and despite their intrepidity and moral courage, their prospects are surely bleak. Their numbers are small, their power is extremely limited, and they are trapped between a hostile regime and an indifferent populace. This represents a precarious position to say the least.

  Yet, both Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle end on a note of contingent optimism. In the former, Oleg Kostogolov finds that his body and the body politics have had simultaneous remissions from the cancers afflicting them, and though he returns to exile, he knows that it is no longer perpetual exile, and he has the hopes that things are on the mend. In the latter, Gleb Nerzhin deliberately
has himself sent from the first circle of hell to its lowest depths, consciously heartened and hardened by the determination to survive and to write his history, which will indict the institutions and individuals responsible for having brought him and his country to such a state. Throughout, Solzhenitsyn’s hopefulness is guarded, made ambiguous by irony and humor, sometimes even by gallows humor, but the hope is there nevertheless, refusing to die.

  In The First Circle we are witnessing a penal society throwing into dramatic relief the basic human condition: the trivial becomes tragic; the absurd becomes profound; weakness becomes strength and unseasoned faith gives life its only logic. Solzhenitsyn sets his story in a few fleeting hours from December 24th to the 28th, 1949. The scene is a special prison “institute” in Moscow. The characters are the prisoners, their guards, the directors of the Institute, the high officials of the Police Ministry.

  A Stalinist directive issued in 1948 has created this special prison and given it its purpose: a crash program to invent a voice scrambler and voice-identification technique. This technique will be used by Stalin and the Organs to indict those who thrive as “enemies of the state.”

  The spirits who inhabited Dante’s First Circle had committed no sins and this, in essence, is equally true of those who inhabit Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle. The gulag was hell on earth, and Solzhenitsyn was its Dante. As in Dante’s, this Circle stands on the edge of the eternal abyss, and descent is easy, frequent and almost inevitable. But Solzhenitsyn deals not with the spirits of the past. His men and women are composed of flesh and blood. All of their dreams are possible. Gleb Nerzhin, the brilliant prisoner-mathematician, distinguishes between the rhetorical objectives of the Bolshevik Revolution and the unequal operative values.

  What was the Revolution against? Against privileges. What were the Russian people sick of? Privileges: Some being dressed in overalls and others in sables, some dragging along on foot. While others rode in carriages, some listening for the factory whistle while others were fattening their faces in restaurants. True? Of course. Right. Then why is it that people don’t shun privileges but pursue them. I’ve simply come to the conclusion that if it’s to be equality, then it must be equality for everyone, and if it isn’t, then shove it.[24]

  Solzhenitsyn is resisting national inequality in the Soviet Union. This problem was foreseen by Marx and Engels as the noted Soviet historian Roy A. Medvedev (1972) documents in Let History Judge.

  Marx and Engels, who foresaw the possibility of the bureaucratic degeneration of a proletarian state, thought two measures would provide effective protection: universal election and recall of all officials and a level of salaries not exceeding workers wages.[25]

  Yet, the Soviet Union possesses no means, no organizations, and no political institutions to guarantee citizens democratic rights. For the most part, restrictions on official salaries turned out to be a livid deterrent to degeneration. Undoubtedly, there were some prisoners who constantly inquired into the limitations of the law and as to their rights. Solzhenitsyn, as portrayed by Gleb Nerzhin, was indubitably cognizant of his rights and the governmental violations thereof.

  The lieutenant colonel left Nerzhin waiting in the corridor of the Staff headquarters because in general Nerzhin was an insolent person (prisoner) always trying to find out what the law was.[26]

  For the most part, resistance in the Mavrino Institute focused on psychological games that were being played out by the zek prisoners seeking concessions from the prison administration. Nerzhin is protesting vis-a-vis a way of thinking by not being carried away by the exalted Joseph Stalin. Nerzhin, a righteous individual, is accepting of the consequences inherent in his outlook.

  …he [Gleb Nerzhin] clearly sensed the falsity in the exaggerated stifling exaltation of one man! If he was everything, did it not mean that other men were nothing. Out of pure protest Nerzhin refused to let himself be carried away.[27]

  A constant theme throughout much of Solzhenitsyn’s work is the belief in the reemerging of the free man, who has been previously been denied of everything, that which gave him freedom. This belief undermines those who imprison, whether they be high or low.

  Just understand one thing and pass it along to anyone at the top who still doesn’t know that you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.[28]

  This line of thought is dynamic for suddenly we are given to understanding that prison, terror, corruptibility, and sadism refine and purify the human ethos. It is not in the end the prisoners who are destroyed, even though they may lose their lives. It is the jailers Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the army of jailers which Stalin created and which flourished until, quite literally, one-third or one-half of Russia became a prison enterprise, run by prison engineers, directed by police generals, inhabited by police victims.

  The problem of finding new cadres of prisoners to satisfy the inexorable needs of the system was tremendous. In the end, of course, the system devoured its creators. The doomed are the oppressors. Stalin is doomed. Beria is doomed. His lieutenant, Abakumov, is doomed. The prison chief, Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev, is doomed. The system devours all of whom have been coopted by Stalin. The prisoners will endure in the end, if not found to have prevailed in a Faulknerian sense.

  No… that’s not hell. That’s not hell at all! We are returning to hell. The sharashka is the highest, the best, the first circle of hell. It was almost paradise… yes the taiga and the tundra awaited them, the record cold of Omyakon and the copper excavations of Dzhez-Kazgan; pick and barrow; starvation rations of soggy bread; the hospital; death. The very worst. But there was a peace in their hearts. They were filled with the fearlessness of those who have lost everything, the fearlessness which is not easy to come by, but which endures.[29]

  Cancer Ward is, in this writer’s opinion, Solzhenitsyn’s work of true genius on several levels. The story takes place in the cancer wing of a hospital in a city of one of the Soviet Asisatic republics. This novel, like The First Circle proceeds by episodes, many of which present sketches of the varieties of Soviet man. The least flattering of which is assigned to that of Rusanov, in civilian life a functionary in the record-keeping apparatus of the state; Rusanov’s records concern people, and accordingly bestow upon him the power to dispose of the lives of his fellow citizens.

  In the name of the proletariat, he Rusanov tyrannizes over proletarians, questioning, imprisoning, exiling, searching out subversion and disaffection, inventing them at need-whether at the request of the government—or on his own account. Once in the cancer ward as a patient, however, he finds himself cutoff among sufferers who cancer has too afflicted to acknowledge his power, and physicians who, on their own ground, exercise even greater power, and in a better cause.

  The most striking contrast to Rusanov is Oleg Kostoglotov, a former junior officer in the army who has been sentenced to forced labor for political disaffection, and later, to perpetual exile. Here we witness a clash between Kostaglotov and Rusanov.

  “Well why do you swallow all this talk about social origin then. That’s not Marxism. It’s racism.” “What did you say?” shouted Rusanov, almost roaring with pain. “Exactly what you heard.” Kostoglotov threw the reply back at him. “Listen to this! Listen to this!” shouted Rusanov, staggering and waving his arms as if calling everyone in the ward to gather round him. “I call you as witnesses, I call you as witnesses! This is ideological; sabotage. Quickly Kostoglotov lowered his legs off the bed. Swinging both elbows, he made a highly indecent gesture at Rusanov, at the same time exploding with one of the filthiest words written up on walks: “Go and ____ yourself, you and your ideological sabotage! A fine habit you’ve developed, you mother…… Every time someone disagrees with you, you call it ideological sabotage!… Why do you keep cackling on about social origins like a witch doctor? You know what they used to say in the twenties? ‘Show us your calluses! Why are your hands so white
and puffy?’ Now that was Marxism.”[30]

  Through Kostoglotov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn expresses his vehement disdain for the lack of respect for those who have gone to war out of patriotic reverence for Russia. This passage is indicative of Stalin’s blatant mistrust of Russian soldiers who were captured during the war and later returned as prisoners of war.

  The novel Cancer Ward, however, takes place following Stalin’s death yet, as we continue witnessing Stalinist attitudes remaining pervasive post mortem.

  Many of the cemeteries are shamefully neglected. I saw some in the Atlai Mountains and over toward Novosibirsk. There are no fences. The cattle wander into them, and pigs dig them up. Is that part of our national character? No, “we always used to respect graves…” “To revere graves”, Kostoglotov.[31]

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn also takes serious issue with the public fear in response to Stalin’s fanatical purging. It is not that the nation purchased Stalin’s demands wholesale, but rather, that they kept silent for they feared the loss of their own lives. To some extent, one cannot disregard this pregnant observation. Yet how far does it justify…

  “What sort of man are we talking about?” he continued. “Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turn out to be wreckers, and he believes it! The best Civil-War divisional commanders turn out to be German and Japanese spys, and he believes it! His own friends and acquaintances are unmasked as enemies of the people, and he believes it! Whole nations, old men and babies are mown down, and he believes it! Then what sort of man is he may I ask? He’s a fool. But can there really be a whole nation of fools? No, you’ll have to forgive me. The people are intelligent enough. It’s simply that they wanted to live. There’s a law big nations have-to endure and to survive. When each of us dies and History stands over and asks ‘What was he?’ there’ll be only one possible answer Pushkins: “In our vile times… man was, whatever his element, either tyrant or traitor or prisoner!”[32]