Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago (1918-1956) Read online

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  HUNGER STRIKES

  One of the most renowned weapons utilized by the incarcerated Social Democrats and Social revolutionaries was the hunger strike. The new prison heads, operating in secrecy and silence, had acquired several powerful methods for combatting hunger strikes. Firstly, patience was adopted on behalf of the prison administration. Secondly, deception was practiced on a large scale thanks to the total secrecy of the operations. When every step is reported vis-à-vis the media, one is not going to do much deceiving. Thirdly, forced artificial feeding was adapted without question, from experience derived from none other than, experience with wild animals in captivity. By 1937, artificial feeding was evidently already in wide use. For example, in the group hunger strike of socialists that occurred in the Yaroslavl Central Prison, artificial feeding was administered to all those participating on the fifteenth day. 12

  These three approaches to dealing with hunger strikes gave rise to a new view. That the hunger strike is to be viewed as a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and accordingly, must be punished with a new prison term. Thus in mid-1937, a new directive was handed down which stipulated that “from now on the prison administration will not in any respect be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes!” A literal translation went as follows: if you seek to kill yourself, go right ahead. For it was the socialists, after all, whom Stalin viewed as the most dangerous enemies of his socialism. For the most part, the concessions obtained through the hunger strikes were infinitesimal when balanced against the extensive loss of life.

  Solzhenitsyn also takes issue with the internal political continuum of the Soviet Union and shows how and why resistance gained no firm foundation. Stalin was free to play them off against one another to his political advantage. Divided they would err under Stalin’s fantasy.

  …those prisoners to the left of the socialists-the Trotskyites and the Communists-shunned the socialists, considering them exactly the same kind of KR’s (counterrevolutionaries) as the rest, and they closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring. The Trotskyites and the Communists, each considering their own direction more pure and lofty than all the rest, despised and even hated the socialists (and each other) who were imprisoned behind the bars of the same buildings and went outdoors to walk in the same prison courtyards. 13

  It is merely reasonable to understand the non-Western Soviet Union utilizing anti-western sentiments as a rationale for accelerating the industrialization of their nation. Granted, any lesser industrialized nation would have a reason to fear being conquered by a more industrialized nation. Yet, this position can be exploited beyond a reasonable standard of concern.

  In Civilization on Trial, Arnold J. Toynbee (1947) the noted historian, demonstrates how and why this anti-western creed is unquestioningly accepted, generation after generation.

  Marxism is, no doubt a Western creed, but it is a Western creed which puts the western civilization ‘on the spot’; and it was, therefore possible for a twentieth-century Russian whose father had been a nineteenth-century ‘Slavo-phil’ and his grandfather a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian to become a devoted Marxian without being required to make any reorientation of his inherited attitude toward the West. For the Russian Marxian, Russian Slavophil, and Russian Orthodox Christian alike, Russia is ‘Holy Russia’ and the Western world of the Borgia’s and Queen Victoria, Smiles’ Self-Help and Tammany Hall, is uniformly heretical, corrupt and decadent. A creed which allows the Russian people to preserve this traditional Russian condemnation of the West intact, while at the same time serving the Russian government as an instrument for industrializing Russia in order to save her from being conquered by an already industrialized West is one of those providentially convenient gifts of the gods that naturally fall into the laps of the chosen people. 14