The GULag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

1

1. The regulation, purposeless in itself, derives, N.M. recalls, from that strange time when the citizenry not only was supposed to but actually dared to verify the actions of the police.

2

2. When in 1937 they wiped out Dr. Kazakov’s institute, the “commission” broke up the jars containing the lysates developed by him, even though patients who had been cured and others still being treated rushed around them, begging them to preserve the miraculous medicines. (According to the official version, the lysates were supposed to be poisons; in that case, why should they not have been kept as material evidence?)

3

3. In other words, “We live in the cursed conditions in which a human being can disappear into the void and even his closest relatives, his mother and his wife… do not know for years what has become of him.” Is that right or not? That is what Lenin wrote in 1910 in his obituary of Babushkin. But let’s speak frankly: Babushkin was transporting arms for an uprising, and was caught with them when he was shot. He knew what he was doing. You couldn’t say that about helpless rabbits like us.

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4. And there is a separate Science of Searches too. I have had the chance to read a pamphlet on this subject for correspondence-school law students in Alma-Ata. Its author praises highly those police officials who in the course of their searches went so far as to turn over two tons of manure, eight cubic yards of firewood, or two loads of hay; cleaned the snow from an entire collective-farm vegetable plot, dismantled brick ovens, dug up cesspools, checked out toilet bowls, looked into doghouses, chicken coops, birdhouses, tore apart mattresses, ripped adhesive tape off people’s bodies and even tore out metal teeth in the search for microfilm. Students were advised to begin and to end with a body search (during the course of the search the arrested person might have grabbed up something that had already been examined). They were also advised to return to the site of a search at a different time of day and carry out the search all over again.

5

5. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! (Arthur Ransome describes a workers’ meeting in Yaroslavl in 1921. Delegates were sent to the workers from the Central Committee in Moscow to confer on the substance of the argument about trade unions. The representative of the opposition, Y. Larin, explained to the workers that their trade union must be their defense against the administration, that they possessed rights which they had won and upon which no one else had any right to infringe. The workers, however, were completely indifferent, simply not comprehending whom they still needed to be defended against and why they still needed any rights. When the spokesman for the Party line rebuked them for their laziness and for getting out of hand, and demanded sacrifices from them—overtime work without pay, reductions in food, military discipline in the factory administration—this aroused great elation and applause.) We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

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6. Here is what is most surprising of all: one can be a human being despite everything! Nothing happened to Travkin. Not long ago, we met again cordially, and I really got to know him for the first time. He is a retired general and an inspector of the Hunters’ Alliance.

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1. Vestnik NKVD (NKVD Herald), 1917, No. 1, p. 4.

8

2. Lenin, Sobrannye Sochineniya (Collected Works), fifth edition, Vol. 35, p. 68.

9

3. Ibid., p. 204.

10

4. Ibid.

11

7. Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet Regime), Vol. 4, Moscow, 1968, p. 627.

12

8. M. I. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte; Populyarni Obzor Deyatelnosti ChK (Two Years of Struggle on the Home Front; Popular Review of the Activity of the Cheka), Moscow, GIZ, 1920, p. 61.

13

9. Ibid., p. 60.

14

10. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 51, pp. 47, 48.

15

12. Ibid., p. 47.

16

14. “The hardest-working sector of the nation was positively uprooted.” Korolenko, letter to Gorky, August 10, 1921.

17

15. Tukhachevsky, “Borba s Kontrrevolyutsionnymi Vostaniyami” (“The Struggle Against Counterrevolutionary Revolts”), in Voina i Revolyutsiya (War and Revolution), 1926, No. 7/8.

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16. Korolenko’s letter to Gorky, September 14, 1921. Korolenko also reminds us of a particularly important situation in the prisons of 1921: “Everywhere they are saturated with typhus.” This has been confirmed by Skripnikova and others imprisoned at the time.

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17. V. G. Korolenko wrote to Gorky, June 29, 1921: “History will someday note that the Bolshevik Revolution used the same means to deal with true revolutionaries and socalists as did the Tsarist regime, in other words, purely police measures.”

20

18. Sometimes, reading a newspaper article, one is astonished to the point of disbelief. In Izvestiya of May 24, 1959, one could read that a year after Hitler came to power Maximilian Hauke was arrested for belonging to none other than the Communist Party. Was he destroyed? No, they sentenced him to two years. After this was he, naturally, sentenced to a second term? No, he was released. You can interpret that as you please! He proceeded to live quietly and build an underground organization, in connection with which the Izvestiya article on his courage appeared.

21

19. Evidently, the monarchist in question assassinated Voikov as an act of private vengeance: it is said that as Urals Provincial Commissar of Foodstuffs, in July, 1918, P. L. Voikov had directed the destruction of all traces of the shooting of the Tsar’s family (the dissection and dismemberment of the corpses, the cremation of the remains, and the dispersal of the ashes).

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20. A. F. Velichko, a military engineer, former professor of the Military Academy of the General Staff, and a lieutenant general, had been in charge of the Administration for Military Transport in the Tsarist War Ministry. He was shot. Oh, how useful he would have been in 1941!

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21. They say that when Ordzhonikidze used to talk with the old engineers, he would put one pistol on his desk beside his right hand and another beside his left.

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22. “The Sukhanov referred to here was the same Sukhanov in whose apartment, on the Karpovka, in Petrograd, and with whose knowledge (and the guides there nowadays are lying when they say it was without his knowledge), the Bolshevik Central Committee met on October 10, 1917, and adopted its decision to launch an armed uprising.

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23. He might well have been a better one than those who held the job for the next forty years! But how strange is human fate! As a matter of principle, Doyarenko was always nonpolitical! When his daughter used to bring home fellow students who expressed opinions savoring of Socialist Revolutionary views, he made them leave!

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24. Kondratyev, sentenced to solitary confinement, became mentally ill there and died. Yurovsky also died. Chayanov was exiled to Alma-Ata after five years in solitary and was arrested again there in 1948.

27

25. This kind of peasant and his fate were portrayed immortally in the character of Stepan Chausov in S. Zalygin’s novel.

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26. I remember very well that in our youth this term seemed quite logical; there was nothing in the least unclear about it.

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27. This particular unremitting wave grabbed up anyone at all at any moment. But when it came to outstanding intellectuals in the thirties, they sometimes considered it cleverer to fabricate a case based on some conspicuously shameful violation (like pederasty; or, in the case of Professor Pletnev, the allegation that, left alone with a woman patient, he bit her breast. A national newspaper reports such an incident—and just try to deny it!).

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28. A. Y. Vyshinsky (editor), Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam (From Prisons to Rehabilitative Institutions) , a collection of articles published by the Criminal Policy Institute, Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo Publishing House, 1934.

31

29. And very likely spy mania was not merely the narrow-minded predilection of Stalin alone. It was very useful for everyone who possessed any privileges. It became the natural justification for increasingly widespread secrecy, the withholding of information, closed doors and security passes, fenced-oflf dachas and secret, restricted special shops. People had no way of penetrating the armor plate of spy mania and learning how the bureaucracy made its cozy arrangements, loafed, blundered, ate, and took its amusements.

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30. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 190.

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31. This sounds like an exaggeration, a farce, but it was not I who invented that farce. I was in prison with these individuals.

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32. There are psychological bases for suspecting I. Stalin of having been liable under this section of Article 58 also. By no means all the documents relating to this type of service survived February, 1917, to become matters of public knowledge. V. F. Dzhunkovsky a former Tsarist police director, who died in the Kolyma, declared that the hasty burning of police archives in the first days of the February Revolution was a joint effort on the part of certain self-interested revolutionaries.

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33. It was similarly not by chance that the “Big House” in Leningrad was finished in 1934, just in time for Kirov’s asassination.

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34. The twenty-five-year term was added for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution in 1947.

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35. These days, as we observe the Chinese Cultural Revolution at the same stage—in the seventeenth year after its final victory—we can begin to consider it very likely that there exists a fundamental law of historical development. And even Stalin himself begins to seem only a blind and perfunctory executive agent.

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36. Told me by N. G-ko.

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37. Five of them died before trial from tortures suffered during interrogation. Twenty-four died in camps. The thirtieth, Ivan Aristaulovich Punich, returned after his release and rehabilitation. (Had he died, we would have known nothing about the thirty, just as we know nothing about millions of others.) And the many “witnesses” who testified against them are still there in Sverdlovsk today—prospering, occupying responsible positions, or living on as special pensioners. Darwinian selection!

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38. Who remembers them? They went on and on every day for hours! Stupefyingly identical! Levitan, the announcer, probably remembers them well: he used to read them in rolling tones, with great expression!

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39. Vyshinsky, op. cit.

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40. I myself almost felt the impact of that decree. I was standing in line at the bread store, when a policeman called me out and took me off for the sake of his score. If it had not been for a fortunate intervention, I might have started out in Gulag right away instead of going off to war.

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41. They judged blood by family name. The design engineer Vasily Okorokov had found it inconvenient to sign his drawings with his real name. Consequently, in the thirties, when it was still legally possible, he had changed his name to Robert Shtekker. It was elegant, and he was able to work up a good-looking professional signature with it. Now he was arrested as a German—and given no chance to prove he was not. So he was exiled. “Is this your real name? What assignments were you given by the Fascist intelligence service?” Then there was that native of Tambov whose real name was Kaverznev, and who changed it to Kolbe in 1918. At what point did he share Okorokov’s fate?

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42. That was not such a clear-cut decision at the start. Even in 1943 there were certain separate waves which were like no others—like the so-called “Africans,” who bore this nickname for a long time at the Vorkuta construction projects. These were Russian war prisoners of the Germans, who had been taken prisoner a second time when the Americans captured them from Rommel’s army in Africa (the “Hiwi”). In 1943 they were sent in Studebakers, through Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, to their Motherland. And on a desert gulf of the Caspian, they were immediately put behind barbed wire. The police who received them ripped off their military insignia and liberated them of all things the Americans had given them (keeping them for themselves, of course, not turning them over to the state); then they sent them off to Vorkuta to await special orders, without (due to inexperience) sentencing them to a specific term under any article of the Code. These “Africans” lived in Vorkuta in a betwixt-and-between condition. They were not under guard, but they were given no passes, and without passes they could not take so much as one step in Vorkuta. They were paid wages at the same rate as free workers, but they were treated like prisoners. And the special orders never did come. They were forgotten men.

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43. What happened to this group later makes an anecdote. In camp they kept their mouths shut about Sweden, fearing they’d get a second term. But people in Sweden somehow found out about their fate and published slanderous reports in the press. By that time the boys were scattered far and near among various camps. Suddenly, on the strength of special orders, they were all yanked out and taken to the Kresty Prison in Leningrad. There they were fed for two months as though for slaughter and allowed to let their hair grow. Then they were dressed with modest elegance, rehearsed on what to say and to whom, and warned that any bastard who dared to squeak out of turn would get a bullet in his skull—and they were led off to a press conference for selected foreign journalists and some others who had known the entire crew in Sweden. The former internees bore themselves cheerfully described where they were living, studying, and working, and expressed their indignation at the bourgeois slander they had read about not long before in the Western press (after all, Western papers are sold in the Soviet Union at every corner newsstand!). And so they had written to one another and decided to gather in Leningrad. (Their travel expenses didn’t bother them in the least.) Their fresh, shiny appearance completely gave the lie to the newspaper canard. The discredited journalists went off to write their apologies. It was wholly inconceivable to the Western imagination that there could be any other explanation. And the men who had been the subjects of the interview were taken off to a bath, had their hair cut off again, were dressed in their former rags, and sent back to the same camps. But because they had conducted themselves properly, none of them was given a second term.

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44. Without knowing the details, I am nevertheless convinced that a great many of these Japanese could not have been sentenced legitimately. It was an act of revenge, as well as a means of holding onto manpower for as long a period as possible.

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45. It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot be kept long, since they inevitably come out in print or are disclosed, the secret of this particular act of betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British and American governments. This is truly the last secret, or one of the last, of the Second World War. Having often encountered these people in camps, I was unable to believe for a whole quarter-century that the public in the West knew nothing of this action of the Western governments, this massive handing over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. “After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise…. They did not realize they were being repatriated…. They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment “reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial.” They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. (Author’s note, dated 1973.)

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46. In the actual documents of the “spool of thread” case, they wrote down “200 meters of sewing material.” The fact remains that they were ashamed to write “a spool of thread.”

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47. And the death penalty itself was kept veiled for a brief period only; the veil was removed, amid a show of bared fangs, two and a half years later—in January, 1950.

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48. It has always been impossible to learn the truth about anything in our country—now, and always, and from the beginning. But, according to Moscow rumors, Stalin’s plan was this: At the beginning of March the “doctor-murderers” were to be hanged on Red Square. The aroused patriots, spurred on, naturally, by instructors, were to rush into an anti-Jewish pogrom. At this point the government—and here Stalin’s character can be divined, can it not?—would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people, and that same night would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and Siberia—where barracks had already been prepared for them.

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1. Dr. S., according to the testimony of A.P.K.

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2. K. S. T e.

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3. Cf. Part I, Chapter 8, below.

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4. A. A. Akhmatova told me she was convinced that this was so. She even gave me the name of the Chekist who cooked up the case—Y. Agranov, it seems.

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5. Article 93 of the Code of Criminal Procedure has this to say: “An anonymous declaration can serve as reason for beginning a criminal case”! (And there is no need to be surprised at the word “criminal” here, since all “politicals” were considered criminals, too, under the Code.)

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6. N. V. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918-1922) (The Last Five Years [1918-1922]), Moscow-Petrograd, GIZ, 1923, p. 401.

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7. Y. Ginzburg writes that permission for “physical measures of persuasion” was given in April, 1938. V. Shalamov believes that tortures were permitted from the middle of 1938 on. The old prisoner M ch is convinced that there was an “order to simplify the questioning and to change from psychological methods to physical methods.” Ivanov-Razumnik singles out the middle of 1938 as the “period of the most cruel interrogations.”

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8. Perhaps Vyshinsky, no less than his listeners, needed this ideological comfort at this time. When he cried out from the prosecutor’s platform: “Shoot them all like mad dogs!” he, at least, who was both evil and quick of mind, understood that the accused were innocent. And in all probability he and that whale of Marxist dialectics, the defendant Bukharin, devoted themselves with all the greater passion to the dialectical elaboration of the judicial lie: for Bukharin it was too stupid and futile to die if he was altogether innocent (thus he needed to find his own guilt!); and for Vyshinsky it was more agreeable to see himself as a logician than as a plain downright scoundrel.

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9. Compare the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Not be compelled! (The same thing appears in the seventeenth-century Bill of Rights.)

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10. It is common talk that Rostov-on-the-Don and Krasnodar were particularly distinguished for the cruelty of their tortures, but this has not been proved.

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11. Under the harsh laws of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse to testify. And even if they gave testimony at a preliminary investigation, they could choose to repudiate it and refuse to permit it to be used in court. And, curiously enough, kinship or acquaintance with a criminal was never in itself considered evidence.

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12. Today she says: “After eleven years, during rehabilitation proceedings they let me reread those ‘depositions,’ and I was gripped by a feeling of spiritual nausea. What was there to be proud of?” I myself, during the rehabilitation period, felt the very same way on hearing excerpts from my earlier depositions. As the saying goes: They bent me into a bow, and I became someone else. I did not recognize myself—how could I have signed them and still think I had not gotten off too badly?

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13. This, evidently, is a Mongolian theme. In the magazine Niva (March 15, 1914, p. 218) there is a drawing of a Mongolian prison: each prisoner is shut in a separate trunk with a small opening for his head or for food. A jailer patrols between the trunks.

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14. That, after all, is how somebody’s career was launched—standing guard over a prisoner on his knees. And now, in all probability, that somebody has attained high rank and his children are already grown up.

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15. Just picture a foreigner, who knows no Russian, in this muddled state, being given something to sign. Under these conditions the Bavarian Jupp Aschen-brenner signed a document admitting that he had worked on wartime gas vans. It was not until 1954, in camp, that he was finally able to prove that at the time he had been in Munich, studying to become an electric welder.

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16. G. M-ch.

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17. Inspection, by the way, was so totally impossible and had so emphatically never taken place that in 1953, when real inspectors entered the cell of former Minister of State Security Abakumov, himself a prisoner by that time, he roared with laughter, thinking their appearance was a trick intended to confuse him.

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18. In the case of the Secretary of the Karelian Provincial Party Committee, G. Kupriyanov, arrested in 1949, some of the teeth they knocked out were just ordinary ones, of no particular account, but others were gold. At first they gave him a receipt that said his gold teeth were being kept for him. And then they caught themselves just in time and took away his receipt.

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19. In 1918 the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal convicted the former Tsarist jailer Bondar. The most extreme measure of his cruelty that was cited was the accusation that “in one case he had struck a political prisoner with such force that his eardrum had burst.” (Krylenko, op. cit., p. 16.)

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20. N.K.G.

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21. Those familiar with our atmosphere of suspicion will understand why it was impossible to ask for the Code in a people’s court or in the District Executive Committee. Your interest in the Code would be an extraordinary phenomenon: you must either be preparing to commit a crime or be trying to cover your tracks.

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22. And the interrogation there lasted eight to ten months at a time. “Maybe Klim [Voroshilov] had one of these to himself,” said the fellows there. (Was he, in fact, ever imprisoned?)

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23. That same year in the Butyrki, those newly arrested, who had already been processed through the bath and the boxes, sat on the stairs for several days at a stretch, waiting for departing prisoner transports to leave and release space in the cells. T-v had been imprisoned in the Butyrki seven years earlier, in 1931, and says that it was overcrowded under the bunks and that prisoners lay on the asphalt floor. I myself was imprisoned seven years later, in 1945, and it was just the same. But recently I received from M. K. B-ch valuable personal testimony about overcrowding in the Butyrki in 1918. In October of that year—during the second month of the Red Terror—it was so full that they even set up a cell for seventy women in the laundry. When, then, was the Butyrki not crowded?

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24. But this, too, is no miracle: in the Vladimir Internal Prison in 1948, thirty people had to stand in a cell ten feet by ten feet in size! (S. Potapov.)

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25. By and large there is a good deal in Ivanov-Razumnik’s book that is superficial and personal, and there are many exhaustingly monotonous jokes. But the real life of the cells in the 1937-1938 period is very well described there.

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26. In actual fact, he did lead his brigade at the parade, but for some reason he did not turn it against the government. But this was not taken into account. However, after these most varied tortures, he was sentenced to ten years by the OSO. To that degree, the gendarmes themselves had no faith in their achievements.

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27. In part, the reason for this was the same as in the case of Bukharin many years later. They were, after all, being interrogated by their social equals, their class brothers, and so their desire to explain everything was only natural.

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29. S. P. Melgunov, Vospominaniya i Dnevniki, (Memoirs and Diaries), Vol. 1, Paris, 1964, p. 139.

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30. A member of the group, Andreyushkin sent a frank letter to his friend in Kharkov: “I am firmly convinced that we are going to have the most merciless terror—and in the fairly near future too…. Red Terror is my hobby…. I am worried about my addressee…. If he gets it, then I may get it too, and that will be unfortunate because I will drag in a lot of very effective people.” It was not the first such letter he had written! And the unhurried search this letter initiated continued for five weeks, via Kharkov, in order to discover who in St. Petersburg had written it. Andreyushkin’s identity was not established until February 28. On March 1, the bomb throwers, bombs in hand, were arrested on Nevsky Prospekt just before the attempted assassination.

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31. One of our school friends was nearly arrested because of me at this time. It was an enormous relief to me to learn later that he was still free! But then, twenty-two years later, he wrote to me: “On the basis of your published works I conclude that you take a one-sided view of life…. Objectively speaking, you have become the standard-bearer of Fascist reactionaries in the West, in West Germany and the United States, for example…. Lenin, whom, I’m convinced, you love and honor just as much as you used to, yes, and old Marx and Engels, too, would have condemned you in the severest fashion. Think about that!” Indeed, I do think about that: How sorry I am that you didn’t get arrested then! How much you lost!

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32. KRD = Counter-Revolutionary Activity.

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1. There is no way of sidestepping this comparison: both the years and the methods coincide too closely. And the comparison occurred even more naturally to those who had passed through the hands of both the Gestapo and the MGB. One of these was Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich, an émigré and preacher of Orthodox Christianity. The Gestapo accused him of Communist activities among Russian workers in Germany, and the MGB charged him with having ties to the international bourgeoisie. Divnich’s verdict was unfavorable to the MGB. He was tortured by both, but the Gestapo was nonetheless trying to get at the truth, and when the accusation did not hold up, Divnich was released. The MGB wasn’t interested in the truth and had no intention of letting anyone out of its grip once he was arrested.

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2. An affectionate term for torture.

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4. Ilinin 1931.

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5. The violent Yaroslavl interrogator Volkopyalov, appointed Plenipotentiary in Charge of Church Affairs in Moldavia.

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6. Another llin—this one Viktor Nikolayevich, a former lieutenant general of State Security.

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7. “Who are you?” asked General Serov in Berlin of the world-renowned biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, offensively using the familiar form of address. And the scientist, who was undismayed and who possessed a Cossack’s hereditary daring, replied, using the same familiar form: “And who are you?” Serov corrected himself and, this time using the formal and correct form, asked: “Are you a scientist?”

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8. As happened with Vasilyev, according to Ivanov-Razumnik.

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10. Interrogator Pokhilko, Kemerovo State Security Administration.

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11. The schoolboy Misha B.

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12. For a long time I’ve been hanging on to a theme for a story to be called “The Spoiled Wife.” But it looks as though I will never get the chance to write it, so here it is. In a certain Far Eastern aviation unit before the Korean War, a certain lieutenant colonel returned from an assignment to find his wife in a hospital. The doctors did not hide the truth from him: her sexual organs had been injured by perverted sexual practices. The lieutenant colonel got in to see his wife and wrung from her the admission that the man responsible was the osobist in their unit, a senior lieutenant. (It would seem, by the way, that this incident had not occurred without some cooperation on her part.) In a rage the lieutenant colonel ran to the osobist’s office, took out his pistol, and threatened to kill him. But the senior lieutenant very quickly forced him to back down and leave the office defeated and pitiful. He threatened to send the lieutenant colonel to rot in the most horrible of camps, where he’d pray to be released from life without further torment, and he ordered him to take his wife back just as he found her—with an injury that was to some extent incurable—and to live with her, not to dare get a divorce, and not to dare complain. And all this was the price for not being arrested! The lieutenant colonel did just as he was ordered. (I was told the story by the osobist’s chauffeur.)

There must have been many such cases, because the abuse of power was particularly attractive in this area. In 1944, another gaybist—State Security officer—forced the daughter of an army general to marry him by threatening to arrest her father. The girl had a fiance, but to save her father she married the gaybist. She kept a diary during her brief marriage, gave it to her true love, and then committed suicide.

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13. In 1954, although her husband, who had forgiven them everything, including a death sentence that had been commuted, kept trying to persuade her not to pursue the matter, this energetic and implacable woman testified against Kruzhkov at a trial. Because this was not Kruzhkov’s first offense, and because the interests of the Organs had been violated, he was given a twenty-five-year sentence. Has he really been in the jug that long?

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14. Roman Gul, Dzerzhinsky. Menzhinsky—Peters—Latsis—Yagoda, Paris, 1936.

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15. This, too, is a theme for a story—and how many more there are in this field! Maybe someone will make use of them someday.

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16. VOKhR: Militarized Guard Service, formerly the Internal Guard Service of the Republic.

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17. This is true. On the whole, D. Terekhov is a man of uncommon strength of will and courage (which were what was required in bringing the big Stalinists to justice in an uneasy situation). And he evidently has a lively mind as well. If Khrushchev’s reforms had been more thoroughgoing and consistent, Terekhov might have excelled in carrying them out. That is how historic leaders fail to materialize in our country.

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18. Here is one more of his eccentricities as a VIP: he used to change into civilian clothes and walk around Moscow with Kuznetsov, the head of his bodyguard, and whenever he felt like it, he would hand out money from the Cheka operations funds. Does not this smell of Old Russia—charity for the sake of one’s soul?

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19. During the war, a certain Leningrad aviator, after being discharged from the hospital in Ryazan, went to a TB clinic and begged: “Please find something wrong with me! I’m under orders to go into the Organs.” The radiologists dreamed up a touch of TB for him—and the Organs dropped him posthaste.

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20. An episode with Terekhov: Attempting to prove to me the fairness of the judicial system under Khrushchev, he energetically struck the plate-glass desk top with his hand and cut his wrist on the edge. He rang for help. His subordinates were at the ready. The senior officer on duty brought him iodine and hydrogen peroxide. Continuing the conversation, he helplessly held dampened cotton to the wound: it appears that his blood coagulates poorly. And thus God showed him clearly the limitations of the human being! And he had delivered verdicts, imposed death sentences on others.

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21. Even in connection with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the retired bluecaps living on pensions objected because the book might reopen the wounds of those who had been imprisoned in camp. Allegedly, they were the ones to be protected.

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22. Meanwhile, in East Germany, nothing of the sort is to be heard. Which means that there they have been shod with new shoes; they are valued in the service of the state.

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1. KPZ = Cell for Preliminary Detention. DPZ = House of Preliminary Detention. In other words, where interrogations are conducted, not where sentences are served.

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2. Alexander D.

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3. To be absolutely precise, they were 156 centimeters by 209 centimeters. How do we know? Through a triumph of engineering calculation and a strong heart that even Sukhanovka could not break. The measurements were the work of Alexander D., who would not allow them to drive him to madness or despair. He resisted by striving to use his mind to calculate distances. In Lefortovo he counted steps, converted them into kilometers, remembered from a map how many kilometers it was from Moscow to the border, and then how many across all Europe, and how many across the Atlantic Ocean. He was sustained in this by the hope of returning to America. And in one year in Lefortovo solitary he got, so to speak, halfway across the Atlantic. Thereupon they took him to Sukhanovka. Here, realizing how few would survive to tell of it—and all our information about it comes from him—he invented a method of measuring the cell. The numbers 10/22 were stamped on the bottom of his prison bowl, and he guessed that “10” was the diameter of the bottom and “22” the diameter of the outside edge. Then he pulled a thread from a towel, made himself a tape measure, and measured everything with it. Then he began to invent a way of sleeping standing up, propping his knees against the small chair, and of deceiving the guard into thinking his eyes were open. He succeeded in this deception, and that was how he managed not to go insane when Ryumin kept him sleepless for a month.

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4. And if this was in the Big House in Leningrad during the siege, you may also have seen cannibals. Those who had eaten human flesh, those who had traded in human livers from dissecting rooms, were for some reason kept by the MGB with the political prisoners.

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5. New measures of oppression, additions to the traditional prison regulations, were invented only gradually in the internal prisons of the GPU-NKVD-MGB. At the beginning of the twenties, prisoners were not subjected to this particular measure, and lights were turned off at night as in the ordinary world. But they began to keep the lights on, on the logical grounds that they needed to keep the prisoners in view at all times. (When they used to turn the lights on for inspection, it had been even worse.) Arms had to be kept outside the blanket, allegedly to prevent the prisoner from strangling himself beneath the blanket and thus escaping his just interrogation. It was demonstrated experimentally that in the winter a human being always wants to keep his arms under the bedclothes for warmth; consequently the measure was made permanent.

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6. I am almost fearful of saying it, but it seems as though on the eve of the 1970’s these people are emerging once again. That is surprising. It was almost too much to hope for.

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7. One attached to a State Security headquarters.

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8. Who among us has not learned by heart from our school history courses, as well as from the Short Course in the history of the Soviet Communist Party, that this “provocative and foul manifesto” was a mockery of freedom, that the Tsar had proclaimed: “Freedom for the dead, and prison for the living”? But the epigram was bogus. The manifesto declared that all political parties were to be tolerated and that a State Duma was to be convened, and it provided for an amnesty which was honest and extremely extensive. (The fact that it had been issued under duress was something else again.) Indeed, under its terms none other than all political prisoners without exception were to be released without reference to the term and type of punishment they had been sentenced to. Only criminals remained imprisoned. The Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945—true, it was not issued under duress—was exactly the opposite. All the political prisoners remained imprisoned.

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9. After Stalin’s amnesty, as I will recount later, those amnestied were held in prison for another two or three months and were forced to slog away just as before. And no one considered this illegal.

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10. Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Potemkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm.

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11. G. V. Plekhanov, “An Open Letter to the Workers of Petrograd,” in the newspaper Yedinstvo, October 28, 1917.

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12. This was one of Stalin’s pet themes—to ascribe to every arrested Bolshevik, and in general to every arrested revolutionary, service in the Tsarist Okhrana. Was this merely his intolerant suspiciousness? Or was it intuition? Or, perhaps, analogy?…

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13. Special large openings in the cell doors of many Russian prisons [known to the prisoners as “kormushki,” meaning “swill troughs” or “fodder bins”]. Their lids dropped down to make tiny tables. Conversations with the jailers were carried on through these openings, food was handed through, and prison papers were shoved through for the prisoners to sign.

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14. During my time this word “vertukhai” had already come into wide currency for the jailers. It was said to have originated with Ukrainian guards who were always ordering: “Stoi, ta ne vertukhais!” And yet it is also worth recalling the English word for jailer, “turnkey,” is “verti klyuch” in Russian. Perhaps a “vertukhai” here in Russia is also “one who turns the key.”

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15. Where indeed in our country did this casting of lots not happen? It was the result of our universal and endless hunger. In the army, all rations were divided up the same way. And the Germans, who could hear what was going on from their trenches, teased us about it: “Who gets it? The political commissar!”

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16. Soon the biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, whom I have already mentioned, would be brought here from Berlin. There was nothing at the Lubyanka, it appeared, which so offended him as this spilling on the floor. He considered it striking evidence of the lack of professional pride on the part of the jailers, and of all of us in our chosen work. He multiplied the 27 years of Lubyanka’s existence as a prison by 730 times (twice for each day of the year), and then by 111 cells—and he would seethe for a long time because it was easier to spill boiling water on the floor 2,188,000 times and then come and wipe it up with a rag the same number of times than to make pails with spouts.

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17. Dr. F. P. Gaaz would have earned nothing extra in our country.

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18. This company acquired a piece of Moscow earth that was well acquainted with blood. The innocent Vereshchagin was torn to pieces in 1812 on Furkasovsky, near the Rostopchin house. And the murderess and serf-owner Saltychikha lived—and killed serfs—on the other side of the Bolshaya Lubyanka. (Po Moskve [In Moscow], edited by N. A. Geinike and others, Moscow, Sabashnikov Publishers, 1917, p. 231.)

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19. Susi remembered me later as a strange mixture of Marxist and democrat. Yes, things were wildly mixed up inside me at that time.

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20. We did not recognize that 1907 Convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go through for its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners—simply in order to prevent rumors about the good life of war prisoners inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here. (Melgunov, Vos-pominaniya i Dnevniki, Vol. I, pp. 199 and 203.)

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21. Of course, our Soviet interrogators did not accept this line of reasoning. What right did they have to want to live—at a time when privileged families in the Soviet rear lived well without collaborating? No one ever thought of considering that these boys had refused to take up German arms against their own people. For playing spies, they were nailed with the very worst and most serious charges of all—Article 58-6, plus sabotage with intent. This meant: to be held until dead.

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22. He used to describe how the obese Shcherbakov hated to see people around when he arrived at his Informburo, so they temporarily removed all those who were working in the offices he had to walk through. Grunting because of his fat, he would lean down and pull back a corner of the carpet. And the whole Informburo caught it if he found any dust there.

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23. The prophetic old man made only one mistake. He confused the chauffeur with his former employer.

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24. When they introduced me to Khrushchev in 1962, I wanted to say to him: “Nikita Sergeyevich! You and I have an acquaintance in common.” But I told him something else, more urgent, on behalf of former prisoners.

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1. Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have survived an annihilation camp? Something doesn’t smell right!

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2. Now, after twenty-seven years, the first honest work on this subject has appeared—P. G. Grigorenko, “A Letter to the Magazine Problems of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” samizdat, 1968—and such works are going to multiply from here on out. Not all the witnesses died. And soon no one will call Stalin’s government anything but a government of insanity and treason.

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3. One of the biggest war criminals, Colonel General Golikov, former chief of the Red Army’s intelligence administration, was put in charge of coaxing the repatriates home and swallowing them up.

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4. Vitkovsky writes about this, on the basis of the thirties, in more general terms. It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren’t wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn’t worked for foreign intelligence services and had hot sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.

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5. It has become the accepted thing for our literary critics to say that Shol-okhov, in his immortal story “Sudba Cheloveka”—“The Fate of a Man”—spoke the “bitter truth” about “this side of our life” and that he “revealed” the problem. But we must retort that in this story, which is in general very inferior, and in which the passages about the war are pale and unconvincing—since the author evidently knew nothing about the last war—and the descriptions of Germans are unconvincing cartoon cliches (only the hero’s wife is successfully portrayed—because she is a pure Christian straight out of Dostoyevsky), in this story about a war prisoner, the real problem of the war prisoners was hidden or distorted:

(1) The author picked the least incriminating form of being taken prisoner conceivable—the soldier was captured while unconscious, so as to make him noncontroversial and to bypass the whole poignancy of the problem. (What if he had been conscious when he was taken prisoner, as was most often the case? What would have happened to him then?)

(2) The fact that the Motherland had deserted us, had renounced us, had cursed us, was not presented as the war prisoner’s chief problem. Sholokhov says not a word about it. But it was because of that particular factor that there was no way out. On the contrary, he identifies the presence of traitors among us as constituting the problem. (But if this really was the main thing, one might then expect him to have investigated further and explained where they came from a full quarter-century after a Revolution that was supported by the entire people!)

(3) Sholokhov dreamed up a fantastic, spy-story escape from captivity, stretching innumerable points to avoid the obligatory, inevitable procedural step of the returned war prisoner’s reception in SMERSH—the Identification and Screening Camp. Not only was Sokolov, the hero, not put behind barbed wire, as provided in the regulations, but—and this is a real joke—he was given a month’s holiday by his colonel! (In other words: the freedom to carry out the assignment given him by the Fascist intelligence service. So his colonel would end up in the same place as he!)

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6. Iosip Tito just barely escaped this fate. And Popov and Tanev, fellow defendants of Dimitrov in the Leipzig trial, both got prison terms. (For Dimi-trov himself Stalin prepared’ another fate.)

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7. In actual fact, even when POWs actually knew what would happen to them, they behaved in exactly the same way. Vasily Aleksandrov was taken prisoner in Finland. He was sought out there by some elderly Petersburg merchant who asked him his name and patronymic and then said: “In 1917 I owed your grandfather a large debt, and I didn’t have the chance to pay it. Here you are—take it!” An old debt is a windfall! After the war Aleksandrov was accepted by the circle of.Russian 6migres, and he got engaged to a girl there whom he came to love—and not just casually. To educate him, his future father-in-law gave him a bound set of Pravda—just as it was issued from 1918 to 1941, without any deletions or corrections. At the same time, he recounted to him more or less completely the history of the waves of arrests, as we have set it forth in Chapter 2, above. And nevertheless… Aleksandrov abandoned his fiancee, and his wealth, and returned to the U.S.S.R., where he was given, as one can easily guess, ten years and disenfranchisement for five more. In 1953 he was happy to have managed to snag himself a job as foreman in a Special Camp.

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8. As far as one can establish at this late date, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, prevented by the Revolution from completing his studies at the Nizhni Novgorod Orthodox Seminary, was drafted into the Red Army in 1919 and fought as an enlisted man. On the southern front, against Denikin and Wrangel, he rose to be commander of a platoon, then of a company. In the twenties he completed the Vystrel courses. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1930. In 1936, having attained the rank of regimental commander, he was sent to China as a military adviser. Evidently he had no ties to the top military and Party circles, and he therefore turned up naturally in that Stalinist “second echelon” of officers promoted to replace the purged commanders of armies, divisions, and brigades. From 1938 on he commanded a division. And in 1940, when “new” (in other words, old) officer ranks were created, he became a major general. From additional information one can conclude that in that corps of newly made generals, many of whom were totally stupid and inexperienced, Vlasov was one of the most talented. His 99th Infantry Division, which he had instructed and trained from the summer of 1940 on, was not caught off balance by the German attack. On the contrary, while the rest of the army reeled backward, his division advanced, retook Przemysl, and held it for six days. Quickly skipping the rank of corps commander, in 1941 Lieutenant General Vlasov was in command of the Thirty-seventh Army near Kiev. He made his way out of the enormous Kiev encirclement and in December, 1941, near Moscow he commanded the Twentieth Army, whose successful Soviet counter-offensive for defense of the capital (the taking of Solnechnogorsk) was noted in the Sovinformburo communique for December 12. And the list of generals mentioned there was as follows: Zhukov, Lelyushenko, Kuznetsov, Vlasov, Rokossovsky, Govorov. Thanks to the speed with which officers were promoted in those months, he became Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front (under Meretskov), and took over command of the Second Shock Army. On January 7, 1942, at the head of that army, he began a drive to break the Leningrad blockade—an attack across the Volkhov River to the northwest. This had been planned as a combined operation, a concerted push from several directions and from Leningrad itself. At scheduled intervals the Fifty-fourth, the Fourth, and the Fifty-second armies were to take part in it also. But those three armies either did not advance because they were unready or else came to a quick halt. At that time we still didn’t have the capacity to plan such complex combined operations, and, more importantly, provide supplies for them. Vlasov’s Second Shock Army, however, was successful in its assault, and by February, 1942, it was 46 miles deep inside the German lines! And from then on, the reckless Stalinist Supreme Command could find neither men nor ammunition to reinforce even those troops. (That’s the kind of reserves they had begun the offensive with!) Leningrad, too, was left to die behind the blockade, having received no specific information from Novgorod. During March the winter roads still held up. From April on, however, the entire swampy area through which the Second Army had advanced melted into mud, and there were no supply roads, and there was no help from the air. The army was without food and, at the same time, Vlasov was refused permission to retreat. For two months they endured starvation and extermination. In the Butyrki, soldiers from that army told me how they had cut off the hoofs of dead and rotting horses and boiled the scrapings and eaten them. Then, on May 14, a German attack was launched from all sides against the encircled army. The only planes in the air, of course, were German. And only then, in mockery, were they given permission to pull back behind the Volkhov. They made several hopeless attempts to break through—until the beginning of July.

And so it was that Vlasov’s Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitulating the fate of Samsonov’s Russian Second Army in World War I, having been just as insanely thrown into encirclement.

Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin’s. Treason does not necessarily involve selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one’s own marshal’s uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?

Unlike Samsonov, Vlasov did not commit suicide. After his army had been wiped out, he wandered among the woods and swamps and, on July 6, personally surrendered in the area of Siverskaya. He was taken to the German headquarters near Lotzen in East Prussia, where they were holding several captured generals and a brigade political commissar, G. N. Zhilenkov, formerly a successful Party official and secretary of one of the Moscow District Party Committees. These captives had already confessed their disagreement with the policy of the Stalin government. But they had no real leader. Vlasov became it.

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9. In reality there was no Russian Liberation Army until almost the very end of the war. Both the name and the insignia devised for it were invented by a German of Russian origin, Captain Strik-Strikfeldt, in the Ost-Propaganda-Abteilung. Although he held only a minor position, he had influence, and he tried to convince the Hitlerite leadership that a German-Russian alliance was essential and that the Russians should be encouraged to collaborate with Germany. A vain undertaking for both sides! Each side wanted only to use and deceive the other. But, in the given situation, the Germans had power—they were on top of the setup. And the Vlasov officers had only their fantasy—at the bottom of the abyss. There was no such army, but anti-Soviet formations made up of Soviet citizens were organized from the very start of the war. The first to support the Germans were the Lithuanians. In the one year we had been there we had aroused their deep, angry hostility! And then the SS-Galicia Division was created from Ukrainian volunteers. And Estonian units afterward. In the fall of 1941, guard companies appeared in Byelorussia. And a Tatar battalion in the Crimea. We ourselves had sowed the seeds of all this! Take, for example, our stupid twenty-year policy of closing and destroying the Moslem mosques in the Crimea. And compare that with the policy of the farsighted conqueror Catherine the Great, who contributed state funds for building and expanding the Crimean mosques. And the Hitlerites, when they arrived, were smart enough to present themselves as their defenders. Later, Caucasian detachments and Cossack armies—more than a cavalry corps—put in an appearance on the German side. In the first winter of the war, platoons and companies of Russian volunteers began to be formed. But the German Command was very distrustful of these Russian units, and their master sergeants and lieutenants were Germans. Only their noncoms below master sergeant were Russian. They also used such German commands as “Achtung!,” “Halt!” etc. More significant and entirely Russian were the following units: a brigade in Lokot, in Bryansk Province, from November, 1941, when a local teacher of engineering, K. P. Voskoboinikov, proclaimed the “National Labor Party of Russia” and issued a manifesto to the citizens of the nation, hoisting the flag of St. George; a unit in the Osintorf settlement near Orsha, formed at the beginning of 1942 under the leadership of Russian émigrés (it must be said that only a small group of Russian Emigres joined this movement, and even they did not conceal their anti-German feelings and allowed many crossovers [including a whole battalion] to the Soviet side… after which they were dropped by the Germans); and a unit formed by Gil, in the summer of 1942, near Lublin. (V. V. Gil, a Communist Party member and even, it seems, a Jew, not only survived as a POW but, with the help of other POW’s, became the head of a camp near Suwalki and offered to create a “fighting alliance of Russian nationalists” for the Germans.) However, there was as yet no Russian Liberation Army in all of this and no Vlasov. The companies under German command were put on the Russian front, as an experiment, and the Russian units were sent against the Bryansk, Orsha, and Polish partisans.

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10. These letters became even better known, although, as before, there was still no real Russian Liberation Army. The units were all scattered and kept subordinate to German orders, and the Vlasov generals had nothing to do but play cards in Dahlemdorf, near Berlin. By the middle of 1942, Voskoboinikov’s brigade, which, after his death, was commanded by Kaminsky, numbered five infantry regiments of 2,500 to 3,000 men each, with attached artillery crews, a tank battalion consisting of two dozen Soviet tanks, and an artillery battalion with three dozen guns. The commanding officers were POW officers, and the rank and file was made up, in considerable part, of local Bryansk volunteers. This brigade was under orders to guard the area against partisans. In the summer of 1942, the brigade of Gil-Blazhevich was transferred for the same purpose from Poland, where it had been notable for its cruelty toward Poles and Jews, to the area near Mogilev. At the beginning of 1943, its command refused to acknowledge Vlasov’s authority, demanding that he explain why, in his stated program, there was no reference to the “struggle against world Jewry and Jew-loving commissars.” These were the very men—called the Rodionovites, because Gil had changed his name to Rodionov—who in August, 1943, when Hitler’s approaching defeat became apparent, changed their black flag with a silver skull to a red flag, and proclaimed Soviet authority and a large “partisan region” in the northeast corner of Byelorussia.

At that time, Soviet newspapers began to write about the “partisan region,” but without explaining its origins. Later on, all surviving Rodionovites were imprisoned. And whom did the Germans immediately throw in against the Rodionovites? The Kaminsky brigade! That was in May, 1944, and they also threw in thirteen of their own divisions in an effort to liquidate the “partisan region.” That was the extent to which Germans understood all those tricolor cockades, St. George, and the field of St. Andrew. The Russian and German languages were mutually untranslatable, inexpressible, uncorrelatable. Still worse: in October, 1944, the Germans threw in Kaminsky’s brigade—with its Moslem units—to suppress the Warsaw uprising. While one group of Russians sat traitorously dozing beyond the Vistula, watching the death of Warsaw through their binoculars, other Russians crushed the uprising! Hadn’t the Poles had enough Russian villainy to bear in the nineteenth century without having to endure more of it in the twentieth? For that matter, was that the last of it? Perhaps more is still to come. The career of the Osintorf Battalion was apparently more straightforward. This consisted of about six hundred soldiers and two hundred officers, with an émigré command, I. K. Sakharov and Lamsdorf, Russian uniforms, and a white-blue-red flag; it was thrown in near Pskov. Then, reinforced to regimental strength, it was readied for a parachute drop on the line of Vologda-Archangel, the idea being to make use of the nest of concentration camps in that area. Throughout 1943, Igor Sakharov managed to prevent his unit from being sent against the partisans. But then he was replaced and the battalion was first disarmed and imprisoned in a camp and then sent off to the Western Front. Then, in the fall of 1943, the Germans decided to send the Russian cannon fodder to the Atlantic Wall, and against the French and Italian Resistance, having lost, forgotten, and not even tried to recall its original purpose. Those among the Vlasov men who had managed to retain some kind of political rationality or hope thereupon lost both.

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11. They were: the 1st, based on “the Kaminsky brigade,” under S. K. Bunyachenko; the 2nd, under Zverev (former military commandant of Kharkov); half the 3rd; segments of the 4th; and Maltsev’s air force detachment. Only four divisions were authorized.

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12. This surrender was an act of double-dealing consistent with the spirit of traditional English diplomacy. The heart of the matter was that the Cossacks were determined to fight to the death, or to cross the ocean, all the way to Paraguay or Indochina if they had to… anything rather than surrender alive. Therefore, the English proposed, first, that the Cossacks give up their arms on the pretext of replacing them with standardized weapons. Then the officers—without the enlisted men—were summoned to a supposed conference on the future of the army in the city of Judenburg in the English occupation zone. But the English had secretly turned the city over to the Soviet armies the night before. Forty busloads of officers, all the way from commanders of companies on up to General Krasnov himself, crossed a high viaduct and drove straight down into a semicircle of Black Marias, next to which stood convoy guards with lists in their hands. The road back was blocked by Soviet tanks. The officers didn’t even have anything with which to shoot themselves or to stab themselves to death, since their weapons had been taken away. They jumped from the viaduct onto the paving stones below. Immediately afterward, and just as treacherously, the English turned over the rank-and-file soldiers by the train-load—pretending that they were on their way to receive new weapons from their commanders.

In their own countries Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious. How could they, in their decline from 1941 to 1945, fail to secure any guarantees whatever of the independence of Eastern Europe? How could they give away broad regions of Saxony and Thuringia in exchange for the preposterous toy of a four-zone Berlin, their own future Achilles’ heel? And what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender? They say it was the price they paid for Stalin’s agreeing to enter the war against Japan. With the atom bomb already in their hands, they paid Stalin for not refusing to occupy Manchuria, for strengthening Mao Tse-tung in China, and for giving Kim II Sung control of half Korea! What bankruptcy of political thought! And when, subsequently, the Russians pushed out Mikolajczyk, when Benes and Masaryk came to their ends, when Berlin was blockaded, and Budapest flamed and fell silent, and Korea went up in smoke, and Britain’s Conservatives fled from Suez, could one really believe that those among them with the most accurate memories did not at least recall that episode of the Cossacks?

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13. This, in fact, is the number of Soviet citizens who were in the Wehrmacht—in pre-Vlasov and Vlasov formations, and in the Cossack, Moslem, Baltic, and Ukrainian units and detachments.

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14. On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will promulgate precisely such laws—just give them the chance to reach out that far.

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15. Does not the prisoner’s dream of the Altai simply continue the old peasant dream about it? The so-called lands of His Majesty’s Cabinet were in the Altai, and because of this the area was closed to colonization much longer than the rest of Siberia. But it was there that the peasants wanted most of all to settle—and where they actually settled. Is it not from this that the enduring legend has arisen?

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16. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam, p. 396, presents the figures. In the 1927 amnesty, 7.3 percent of the prisoners were amnestied. This is a credible figure. Pretty poor for a tenth anniversary. Among the political prisoners, women with children were freed and those who had only a few months left to serve. In the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison Isolator, for example, twelve out of the two hundred prisoners there were released. But, in the middle of it, they regretted even this wretched amnesty and began to block it: they delayed some releases, and some people who were freed were given a “minus” restriction instead of full freedom to go where they pleased.

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17. Perhaps, only in the twentieth century, if one is to believe the stories one hears, has their stagnating well-being led to moral indigestion.

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18. Indeed, the bastards were wrong by only one digit! For more details on the great Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945, see Part III, Chapter 6.

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19. Many years later, this time as a tourist, I saw another, similar park, except that it was even smaller, in the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Leningrad. The other tourists exclaimed over the darkness of the corridors and cells, but I kept thinking to myself that with such a park to walk in, the prisoners of the Trubetskoi bastion were not lost men. We were taken out to walk only in deathly cell-like stone enclosures.

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1. They had met to sentence me on the very day of the amnesty. The work must go on….

Case heard: Accusation of so-and-so (name, year of birth, place of birth)

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2. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam.

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3. Ch-n’s group.

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4. That same collection edited by A. Y. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospita-telnym Uchrezhdeniyam, includes materials indicating that the predetermination of verdicts is an old, old story. In 1924-1929, sentences were determined by joint administrative and economic considerations. Beginning in 1924, because of national unemployment, the courts reduced the number of verdicts which sentenced prisoners to corrective labor while they continued to live at home and increased short-term prison sentences. These cases involved only nonpolitical offenders, of course. As a result, prisons were overcrowded with short-termers serving sentences of up to six months, and not enough use was being made of them in labor colonies. At the beginning of 1929, the People’s Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., in Circular No. 5, condemned short-term sentences and, on November 6, 1929, the eve of the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, when the country was supposedly entering on the construction of socialism, a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars simply forbade all sentences of less than one year!

149

5. In the Republic of South Africa, terror has gone to such lengths in recent years that every suspicious (SDE—Socially Dangerous Element) black can be arrested and held for three months without investigation or trial. Anyone can see immediately the flimsiness of this: why not from three to ten years?

150

6. This is something we hadn’t known, something the newspaper Izvestiya told us in July, 1957.

151

7. Babayev, in fact a nonpolitical, shouted at them: “You can ‘muzzle’ me for three hundred years! But I’ll never lift my hand for you, you benefactors!”

152

8. Thus it was that a real spy (Schultz, in Berlin, in 1948) could get ten years, and someone who had never been a spy, Gunther Waschkau, got twenty-five. Because he was in the wave of 1949.

153

10. Today Lozovsky holds the degree of candidate in medical sciences and lives in Moscow. Everything is going well with him. Chulpenyev drives a trolley bus.

154

11. Viktor Andreyevich Seryegin lives in Moscow today and works in a Consumer Service Combine attached to the Moscow Soviet. He lives well.

155

12. Izvestiya, June 9, 1964. This throws an interesting light on views of legal defense! In 1918, V. I. Lenin demanded that judges who handed down sentences that were too lenient be excluded from the Party.

156

1. This fledgling whose beak had not yet hardened was warmed and encouraged by Trotsky: “Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.” And Zinoviev rejoiced too, not yet foreseeing his own end: “The letters GPU, like the letters VChK, are the most popular in the world.”

157

2. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte.

158

3. Ibid., p. 74.

159

4. Ibid., p. 75.

160

6. M. N. Gernet (editor), Protiv Smertnoi Kazni (Against Capital Punishment), second edition, 1907, pp. 385-423.

161

8. See Part III, Chapter 1.

162

9. Latsis, op. cit., p. 75

163

10. Ibid., p. 70.

164

12. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 36, p. 210.

165

13. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918-1922). Edition 7,000 copies. Prosecution speeches in the most important trials held before the Moscow and the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunals.

166

14. Ibid., p. 4.

167

15. Ibid., pp. 4-5.

168

16. Ibid., p. 7.

169

17. Ibid., p. 44.

170

18. Latsis, op. cit., p. 46.

171

19. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 13. (My italics.)

172

21. Ibid., p. 3.

173

22. Ibid., p. 408.

174

23. Ibid., p. 22. (My italics.)

175

24. Ibid., p. 505.

176

25. Ibid., p. 318.

177

26. Ibid., p. 73. (The italics throughout are mine.)

178

27. Ibid., p. 83.

179

29. Ibid., p. 81.

180

30. Ibid., p. 524.

181

35. Ibid., p. 513. (My italics.)

182

37. In order to temper the reader’s indignation against this leechlike snake, Yakulov, we should point out that by the time of Kosyrev’s trial he had already been arrested and was in custody. They had found a case to take care of him. He was brought in to testify accompanied by convoy, and we are certainly entitled to hope that he was shot soon afterward. (Today we are surprised: How did things reach such a pitch of illegality? Why did no one mount an offensive against it?)

183

38. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 14.

184

39. Oh, how many themes we have here! Oh, where is Shakespeare? Solovyev passes through the walls, flickering shadows in the cell, Godelyuk recants with failing hand. And all we hear about the years of the Revolution in our plays and our films is the street singing of “Hostile Whirlwinds.”

185

40. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 522.

186

41. Ibid.

187

43. Ibid., p. 509.

188

44. Ibid., pp. 505-510. (My italics.)

189

45. Ibid., p. 511.

190

48. But accuser Rrylenko saw no difference whatever between Samarin and Rasputin.

191

49. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 61.

192

51. Firguf, a former guards officer of the Tsar’s household cavalry, who had “suddenly undergone a spiritual conversion, given all his goods to the poor, and entered a monastery, but I do not in fact know whether he actually did distribute his goods to the poor.” Yes, and if one admits the possibility of spiritual conversion, what then remains of class theory?

193

52. But which of us doesn’t remember similar scenes? My first memory is of an event that took place when I was, probably, three or four: The peaked-heads (as they called the Chekists in their high-peaked Budenny caps) invaded a Kislovodsk church, sliced through the dumbstruck crowd of worshipers, and, in their pointed caps, went straight through the altar screen to the altar and stopped the service.

194

53. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 61.

195

54. The Patriarch cited Klyuchevsky: “The gates of the monastery of the Saint will shut and the ikon lamps will be extinguished over his sepulcher only when we shall have lost every vestige of that spiritual and moral strength willed to us by such great builders of the Russian land as Saint Sergius.” Klyuchevsky did not imagine that the loss would occur almost in his own lifetime. The Patriarch asked for an appointment with the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, in the hope of persuading him not to touch the holy monastery and the relics… for after all the church was separate from the state! The answer came back that the Chairman was occupied in discussing important business, and that the appointment could not be arranged for the near future.

Nor for the distant future either.

196

55. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 34.

197

56. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 51, p. 48.

198

57 V. L. Lenin i A. M. Gorky (V. L. Lenin and A. M. Gorky), Moscow, Academy of Sciences Publishing House, 1961, p. 263.

199

58. Ibid.

200

60. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 54.

201

61. Ibid., p. 38.

202

65. Ibid., p. 8.

203

1. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let, p. 381.

204

3. Sobraniye Uzakonenii RSFSR (Collection of Decrees of the R.S.F.S.R.), 1922, No. 4, p. 42.

205

5. Krylenko, op. cit.; p. 433.

206

7. Ibid., p. 435.

207

10. The provincial trials of the SR’s took place even earlier, such as the one in Saratov in 1919.

208

11. Published in Paris in 1922, and in the Soviet Union in samizdat in 1967.

209

12. See the articles entitled “Tserkov i Golod” (“The Church and the Famine”) and “Kak budut izyaty tserkovnye tsennosti” (“How the Church Valuables Will Be Requisitioned”).

210

13. I have taken this material from Ocherki po Istorii Tserkovnoi Smuty (Essays on the History of the Troubles of the Church), by Anatoly Levitin, Part I, samizdat, 1962, and from the stenographic notes on the questioning of Patriarch Tikhon, Trial Record, Vol. V.

211

14. In other words, like the Vyborg appeal, for which the Tsar’s government had imposed sentences of three months’ imprisonment.

212

15. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 189.

213

16. Ibid., Vol. 39, pp. 404-405.

214

18. The fact that their efforts in defending it were very feeble, that they were beset by hesitations, and that they renounced it right away is another matter. For all that, their guilt was no less.

215

19. And it had indeed been a failure, although this did not become clear immediately.

216

20. In the same way, all the local Russian governments, and those in outlying areas, were illegal—those in Archangel, Samara, Ufa or Omsk, the Ukraine, the Don, the Kuban, the Urals or Transcaucasia—inasmuch as they all declared themselves to be governments after the Council of People’s Commissars had declared itself to be the government.

217

21. The title of “prosecutor” had by now been restored to him.

218

22. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 183.

219

23. And what hadn’t those chatterboxes said in the course of a lifetime?

220

24. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 236. (What lingo!)

221

26. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 251.

222

27. Ibid., p. 253.

223

30. Ibid., p. 185.

224

32. Ibid.

225

33. Ibid., p. 325.

226

35. Ibid., p. 238. 38. Ibid., p. 319.

227

36. Ibid., p. 322. 39. Ibid., p. 407.

228

41. Many hypotheses were advanced about his return. Only a little while ago, a certain Ardamatsky, a person obviously connected with the archives and personnel of the Committee for State Security, published a story which, despite being adorned with pretentiously inflated literary gewgaws, is evidently close to the truth. (The magazine Neva, No. 11, 1967.) Having induced certain of Savinkov’s agents to betray him and having deceived others, the GPU used them to set a foolproof trap, convincing Savinkov that inside Russia a large underground organization was languishing for lack of a worthy leader! It would have been impossible to devise a more effective trap! And it would have been impossible for Savinkov, after such a confused and sensational life, merely to spin it out quietly to the end in Nice. He couldn’t bear not trying to pull off one more feat and not returning to Russia and his death.

229

42. And we, silly prisoners of a later Lubyanka, confidently parroted to one another that the steel nets hanging in the Lubyanka stairwells had been installed after Savinkov had committed suicide there. Thus do we succumb to fancy legends to the extent of forgetting that the experience of jailers is, after all, international in character. Such nets existed in American prisons as long ago as the beginning of the century—and how could Soviet technology have been allowed to lag behind?

In 1937, when he was dying in a camp in the Kolyma, the former Chekist Artur Pryubel told one of his fellow prisoners that he had been one of the four who threw Savinkov from a fifth-floor window into the Lubyanka court-yard! (And there is no conflict between that statement and Ardamatsky’s recent account: There was a low sill; it was more like a door to the balcony than a window—they had picked the right room! Only, according to Ardamatsky, the guards were careless; according to Pryubel, they rushed him all together.)

Thus the second riddle, the unusually lenient sentence, was unraveled by the crude third “riddle.”

The story ascribed to Pryubel could not be checked, but I had heard it, and in 1967 I told it to M. P. Yakubovich. He, with his still youthful enthusiasm and shining eyes, exclaimed: “I believe it. Things fit! And I didn’t believe Blyumkin; I thought he was just bragging.” What he had learned was this: At the end of the twenties, Blyumkin had told Yakubovich, after swearing him to secrecy, that he was the one who had written Savinkov’s so-called suicide note, on orders from the GPU. Apparently Blyumkin was allowed to see Savinkov in his cell constantly while he was in prison. He kept him amused in the evenings. (Did Savinkov sense that death was creeping up on him… sly, friendly death, which gives you no chance to guess the form your end will take?) And this had helped Blyumkin acquire Savinkov’s manner of speech and thought, had enabled him to enter into the framework of his last ideas.

And they ask: Why throw him out the window? Wouldn’t it have been easier simply to poison him? Perhaps they showed someone the remains or thought they might need to.

And where, if not here, is the right place to report the fate of Blyumkin, who for all his Chekist omnipotence was fearlessly brought up short by Mandelstam. Ehrenburg began to tell Blyumkin’s story, and suddenly became ashamed and dropped the subject. And there is a story to tell, too. After the 1918 rout of the Left SR’s, Blyumkin, the assassin of the German Ambassador Mirbach, not only went unpunished, was not only spared the fate of all the other Left SR’s, but was protected by Dzerzhinsky, just as Dzerzhinsky had wanted to protect Kosyrev. Superficially he converted to Bolshevism, and was kept on, one gathers, for particularly important assassinations. At one point, close to the thirties, he was secretly sent to Paris to kill Bazhenov, a member of the staff of Stalin’s secretariat who had defected, and one night he succeeded in throwing him off a train. However, his gambler’s blood, or perhaps his admiration of Trotsky, led Blyumkin to the Princes’ Islands in Turkey, where Trotsky was living. He asked Trotsky whether there were any assignments he could carry out for him in the Soviet Union, and Trotsky gave him a package for Radek. Blyumkin delivered it, and his visit to Trotsky would have remained a secret had not the brilliant Radek already been a stool pigeon. Radek brought down Blyumkin, who was thereupon devoured by the maw of the monster his own hands had suckled with its first bloody milk.

230

1. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 54, pp. 265-266.

231

2. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let, p. 437.

232

3. And the members of the tribunal were the old revolutionaries Vasilyev-Yuzhin and Antonov-Saratovsky. The very simple folk sound of their family names inclines one to a favorable reaction. They are easy to remember. And when suddenly, in 1962, obituaries of certain victims of repression appeared in Izvestiya, whose signature was at the bottom? That of the long-lived Antonov-Saratovsky!

233

5. Izvestiya, May 24, 1929.

234

6. And it is quite possible that this failure of his was held against him by the Leader and led to the symbolic destruction of the prosecutor—on the very same guillotine as his victims.

235

7. Protsess Prompartii (The Trial of the Promparty), Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo (Soviet Legislation Publishing House), 1931.

236

11. ibid., p. 365.

237

12. Ibid., p. 204.

238

14. Ibid., p. 204.

239

15. Ibid., p. 425.

240

17. Who drew that arrow for Krylenko on a cigarette pack—was it not drawn by the same hand that thought up our entire defense strategy in 1941?

241

23. Ibid., p. 452.

242

25. Ivanov-Razumnik, Tyurmy i Ssylki (Prisons and Exiles), New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1953.

243

26. Ramzin has been undeservedly neglected in Russian memories. In my view, he fully deserved to become the prototype of a cynical and dazzling traitor. The Bengal fire of betrayal! He wasn’t the only such villain of this epoch, but he was certainly a prominent case.

244

27. Protsess Prompartii, p. 504. And that is how they were talking here in the Soviet Union, in our own country, in 1930, when Mao Tse-tung was still a stripling.

245

29. Ibid., p. 49.

246

30. Ibid., p. 508.

247

31. Ibid., p. 509. For some reason, the main thing about the proletariat is always, believe it or not, sensitivity. Always via the nostrils.

248

32. He was refused rehabilitation. After all, the case in which he was tried had entered the golden tables of our history. After all, one cannot take back even one stone, because the entire building might collapse. Thus it is that M.P.Y. still has his conviction on his record. However, for his consolation, he has been granted a personal pension for his revolutionary activity! What monstrosities exist in our country.

249

33. One was Kuzma A. Gvozdev, a man whose fate was bitter. This was the same Gvozdev who had been chairman of the workers’ group in the War Industry Committee, and whom the Tsarist government, in an excess of stupidity, had arrested in 1916, and the February Revolution had made Minister of Labor. Gvozdev became one of the martyr long-termers of Gulag. I do not know how many years he had been imprisoned before 1930, but from 1930 on he was in prison continuously, and my friends knew him in Spassk Camp, in Kazakhstan, as late as 1952.

250

34. He is not to be confused with Colonel Yakubovich of the General Staff, who, at the same time and the same meetings, represented the War Ministry.

251

35. All the information here comes from Volume 41 of the Granat Encyclopedia, in which either autobiographical or reliable biographical essays on the leaders of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) are collected.

252

36. The only one he defended was Yefim Tseitlin—but not for long.

253

37. See what a wealth of information we are deprived of because we’re protecting Molotov’s noble old age.

254

39. Your own blood, too, is going to flow soon, Klyugin! Caught in the Yezhov gang of gaybisty, Klyugin will have his throat cut by the stool pigeon Gubaidulin.

255

40. Generally speaking, he was wrong just on this one point.

256

41. One little note on eight-year-old Zoya Vlasova. She loved her father intensely. She could no longer go to school. (They teased her: “Your papa is a wrecker!” She would get in a fight: “My papa is good!”) She lived only one year after the trial. Up to then she had never been ill. During that year she did not once smile; she went about with head hung low, and the old women prophesied: “She keeps looking at the earth; she is going to die soon.” She died of inflammation of the brain, and as she was dying she kept calling out: “Where is my papa? Give me my papa!” When we count up the millions of those who perished in the camps, we forget to multiply them by two, by three.

257

1. N. S. Tagantsev, Smertnaya Kazn (Capital Punishment), St. Petersburg, 1913.

258

2. Thirteen people were executed in Schliisselburg from 1884 to 1906. An awesome total—for Switzerland perhaps!

259

3. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte, p. 75.

260

4. Now that we have started to make comparisons, here is another: during the eighty years of the Inquisition’s peak effort (1420 to 1498), in all of Spain ten thousand persons were condemned to be burned to death at the stake—in other words, about ten a month.

261

5. Testimony of B., who brought food to the cells of the prisoners condemned to be shot.

262

6. What isn’t known in our schools is the fact that Saltychikha, by a verdict of her own peers, was imprisoned for eleven years in the subterranean crypt of the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow for the atrocities inflicted on her serfs. (Prugavin, Monastyrskiye Tyurmy [Monastery Prisons], Posrednik Publishers, p. 39.)

263

7. “Osnovy Ugolovnogo Zakonodatelstva SSSR” (“Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation of the U.S.S.R.”), Article 22, in Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR (Bulletin of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.), 1959, No. 1.

264

8. N. Narokov, Mnimyye Velichiny, Roman v 2-kh Chastyakh (Imaginary Values; a Novel in Two Parts), New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1952.

265

9. Strakhovich has all his prison notebooks even now. And his “scientific career” outside the bars only began with them. He was destined later on to head up one of the first projects in the U.S.S.R. for a turbojet engine.

266

10. His stories about the consumer cooperatives are remarkable and deserve to be published.

267

1. Tyurzak=TYURemnoye ZAKlyucheniye=prison confinement. Tyurzak is an official term.

268

2. TON=Tyurma Osobogo Naznacheniya=Special Purpose Prison. TON is likewise an official abbreviation.

269

3. Vera Figner, Zapechatlenny Trud: Vospominaniya v Dvukh Tomakh (Impressed Labor: Memoirs in Two Volumes), Moscow, “Mysl,” 1964.

270

4. According to the account of M. Novorussky, from 1884 to 1906 three prisoners in Schliisselburg committed suicide and five others went insane.

271

5. P. A. Krasikov, who, as we have seen, later condemned the Metropolitan Veniamin to death, read Marx’s Capital in the Peter and Paul Fortress. (But he was there only a year, and then they let him out.)

272

6. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam.

273

7. From 1918 on, they did not hesitate to imprison women SR’s, even when they were pregnant.

274

8. How like Eichmann, is it not?

275

9. In 1925 the stone was overturned, and the names on it were thus buried too. Any of you who clamber about Solovki—seek it out and gaze upon it!

276

10. One of the SR’s in the Sawatyevsky Monastery was Yuri Podbelsky. He collected the medical documents on the Solovetsky massacre—for publication at some future date. But a year later, at the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison, they discovered a false bottom in his suitcase and confiscated the material he’d hidden. And that is how Russian history stumbles and falls.

277

11. M. N. Gernet, Istoriya Tsarskoi Tyurmy (A History of Czarist Prisons), Moscow, Yuridicheskaya Literatura (Legal Literature Publishers), 1960-1963, Vol. V, Ch. 8.

278

13. But they always demanded support for themselves from the SR’s and Social Democrats. On a prisoner transport to Karaganda and the Kolyma in 1936, they addressed as traitors and provocateurs all those who refused to sign their telegram to Kalinin protesting “against sending the vanguard of the Revolution [i.e., themselves] to the Kolyma.” (The story was told by Mako-tinsky.)

279

14. I do not like these “left” and “right” classifications; they are conditional concepts, they are loosely bandied about, and they do not convey the essence.

280

15. This term actually exists! And it has a sky-blue swampy coloration!

281

1. Does this perhaps satisfy those who are astonished and reproachful because people didn’t fight?

282

2. When he got to Moscow, a miracle took place in accordance with the laws of the country of miracles. Officers carried Timofeyev-Ressovsky from the prisoner transport in their arms, and he was driven away in an ordinary automobile: he was off to advance science!

283

3. P. F. Yakubovich (V Mire Otverzhennykh [In the World of the Outcasts], Vol. 1, Moscow, 1964), writing about the nineties of the last century, recounts that in those terrible years they gave out ten-kopecks-a-day mess money per person in Siberian prisoner transports, when the price of a loaf of wheat bread (weighing ten and a half ounces?) was five kopecks; a pot of milk (two quarts?) three kopecks. “The prisoners were simply in clover,” he writes. But then in Irkutsk Province the prices were higher. A pound of meat cost ten kopecks there and the “prisoners were simply famished!” One pound of meat per day per person—it’s not half a herring, is it?

284

4. This, it seems, is what is meant by the phrase “Stalin’s cult of personality”?

285

5. Because of all of this the ordinary criminal mob christened the professional revolutionaries “mangy swells.” (P. F. Yakubovich.)

286

6. I have heard of a few cases in which three seasoned, young, and healthy men stood up against the thieves—not to defend justice in general, but to protect, not those who were being plundered right next to them, but themselves only. In other words: armed neutrality.

287

7. V. I. Ivanov (now from Ukhta) got Article 162 (thievery) nine times and Article 82 (escape) five times, for a total of thirty-seven years in prison—and he “served out” five to six years for all of them.

288

8. “Frayer” is a blatnoi—underworld—word meaning nonthief—in other words, not a Chelovek (“Human being,” with a capital letter). Well, even more simply: the frayera were all nonthief, nonunderworld mankind.

289

9. A. S. Makarenko, Flagi na Bashnyakh (Flags on the Towers).

290

10. A beaver in the blatnoi—underworld—jargon was any rich zek who had “trash”—meaning good clothes—and “bacilli”—meaning fats, sugar, and other goodies.

291

11. Thus it is that weeds get into the harvest of fame. But are they weeds? After all, there are no Pushkin, Gogol, or Tolstoi camps—but there are Gorky camps, and what a nest of them too! Yes, and there is a separate mine “named for Maxim Gorky” (twenty-five miles from Elgen in the Kolyma)! Yes, Aleksei Maximovich Gorky… “with your heart and your name, comrade…” If the enemy does not surrender… You say one reckless little word, and look—you’re not in literature any longer.

292

12. Ahead of him lay another sentence—for twenty-five years—that he was given in camp, and he would not get out of Ozerlag until 1957.

293

13. V. G. Korolenko, Istoriya Moyego Sovremennika (A History of My Contemporary), Moscow, 1955, Vol. III, p. 166.

294

1. “Without the last one!”—a menacing command to be understood literally. It meant: “I will kill the last man” (literally or at least warm his hide with a club). And so all piled out so as not to be last.

295

2. Say there, Bertrand Russell’s “War Crimes Tribunal”! Why don’t you use this bit of material? Or doesn’t it suit you?

296

3. This transit prison with its glorious revolutionary name is little known to Muscovites. There are no excursions to it, and how could there be when it is still in operation? But to get a close look at it, you don’t have to travel any distance at all. It’s a mere stone’s throw from the Novokhoroshevo Highway on the circle line.

297

4. Of all the transit prisons Karabas was worthiest of becoming a museum. But, alas, it no longer exists: in its place there is a factory for reinforced-concrete products.

298

5. Galina Serebryakova! Boris Dyakov! Aldan-Semyonov! Did you ever gulp from a washbasin, ten at a time? And if you had, you would never, of course, have descended to the “animal needs” of Ivan Denisovich, would you? And in the midst of the mob scene at the washbasin you would have continued to think only about your dear Party?

299

6. After all, someday the hidden and all but lost story of our Archipelago will be portrayed in monuments too! And I visualize, for example, one more such project: somewhere on a high point in the Kolyma, a most enormous Stalin, just such a size as he himself dreamed of, with mustaches many feet long and the bared fangs of a camp commandant, one hand holding the reins and the other wielding a knout with which to beat his team of hundreds of people harnessed in fives and all pulling hard. This would also be a fine sight on the edge of the Chukchi Peninsula next to the Bering Strait. (I had written this before I read “The Bas-Relief on the Cliff.” And that means there is something to the idea. They say that on Mogutova Hill at the Zhiguli Gates on the Volga, a mile from the camp, there used to be an enormous oil portrait of Stalin which had been painted on the cliff for the benefit of passing steamers.)

300

7. Since that time I have asked Swedes I have met or travelers going to Sweden how to find his family. Have they heard anything about such a missing person? The only reply I have received is a smile. The name Andersen in Sweden is like Ivanov in Russia—and there is no such billionaire. And it is only now, twenty-two years later, rereading this book for the last time, that I have suddenly realized: of course, they must have forbidden him to give his real name! He must have been warned by Abakumov, of course, that he would be destroyed if he did. And so he traveled through the transit prisons in the guise of a Swedish Ivanov. And it was only through unforbidden, secondary details of his biography that he was able to leave behind in the memories of those he encountered by chance some trace of his ruined life. More likely he still thought it could be saved—which was only human—like millions of other rabbits in this book. He thought he would be imprisoned for a while and that thereupon the indignant West would free him. He did not understand the strength of the East. And he did not understand that such a witness as himself, who had displayed such firmness of will, unheard of in the soft West, could never be released.

Yet perhaps he is still alive even today. (Author’s note, 1972.)

301

8. The rations guaranteed by Gulag when no work is being done.

302

9. “Half-breeds” or “mulattoes” (polutsvetnye in Russian) were prisoners who had grown spiritually close to the thieves and tried to imitate them, but who had nonetheless not been accepted by the thieves’ law.

303

10. And, as P. Yakubovich writes in reference to the so-called “cadgers,” the sale of prison terms took place in the last century too. It is an ancient prison trick.

304

1. In a letter to me in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, November 29, 1963.

305

2. OLP = Otdelny Lagerny Punkt = Separate Camp Site.

306

4. And V. I. Lenin in 1897 boarded the St. Nicholas in the passenger port like a free person.

307

5. V. Shalamov tells about this in detail in his Ocherki prestupnogo mira (Sketches of the Criminal World).

308

6. Decades have passed since then, but how many times Soviet citizens have met with misfortune on the world’s oceans—and in circumstances where it seems that zeks were not being transported—yet because of that same secretiveness disguised as national pride they have refused help! Let the sharks devour us, so long as we don’t have to accept your helping hand! Secretiveness—that is our cancer.

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1. According to the researches of the Social Democrats Nicolaevsky and Dallin, there were from fifteen to twenty million prisoners in the camps.

310

2. Kostya Kiula doesn’t respond, he’s disappeared. I am afraid he is not among the living.

311

3. The task of the Fourth Special Department of the MVD was to solve scientific problems, using prisoners.

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4. In my preprison and prison years I, too, had long ago come to the conclusion that Stalin had set the course of the Soviet state in a fateful direction. But then Stalin died quietly—and did the ship of state change course very noticeably? The personal, individual imprint he left on events consisted of dismal stupidity, petty tyranny, self-glorification. And in all the rest he followed the beaten path exactly as it had been signposted, step by step.