The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Trusties I' 257
''Memoirs of a Trusty," by Dyakov, appeared (Memoirs of Survival),·
complacently confirming their resourcefulness in getting
well fixed and cleverness in surviving at any cost. (And this is
precisely the sort of book that should have appeared before my
own.)
In those few short months when it seemed possible to discuss,
a certain amount of debate flared up about the role of the trusties,
and a certain g~neral question was raised of the moral pOsition
'. of the trusty in camp. But in our country they"do not permit any
information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion
to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably.
suppressed at.the very' beginning-so no ray of light showd fall '
on the nakes! body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one
formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole
decades-until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty
blocks from all this traSh are lost. And so it was that all discussion
of the trusties was dampened down at the very beginning, and
passed out of. the pages of the public press into private letters.
And the distinction between a trusty and a slogger in camp
(though no sharper than that which existed in reality) hid to
be made, and it was very good that it was made right at the very
birth of the camp theme in literature. But in V. Lakshin's censored
articleS there was a certain excessiveness of expression on the
subject of camp labor (seeming to glorify that very thing which
replaced machines and .created us from the apes), and the generally
correct direction of the article and to a certain extent my
own novella as well were met with a counterwave of indignation
-both from former trusties and from their never-imp~ned
intellectual friends: What's going on here ... is slave labor being·
glorified (the cinder-block-laying scene in One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich)?! What's going on here ... since when does
"eam your bread by the sweat of your brow" mean do what the
Gulag chiefs want you to? We trusties are patticularly proud that
we avoided work and didn't drag out our existence at it.
In answei:ing these objections right now, I only regret that they
will not be read for some time. .
In my opinion, it is unworthy of an intellectual to be proud of
the fact that he didn't descend to physical slave labor, you see,
2. Nov, Mir. 1964. No. 1.
258 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO
because he was able to get into office work. In this situation the
Russian intellectuals of the past century would have presumed
to boast only if, at the same time, they could have liberated their
younger brother from slave labor as well. After all, Ivan Denisovich
didn't have that way out-fixing himself up with an office
job! So what should we do about our younger brother? Is it all
right to let our younger brother drag ·out his existence at slave
labor? (Well, why not? After all, we've been letting him do it
long enough' on the collective farms!. We even fixed him up with
it there!) But if we let him do Uris, then maybe, at least once in
a while, for at least an hour or so on occasion, before knocking
off, when the masonry work has gone well, we can let him tal!:e
an interest in his work? We, after all, even in camp, find a certain
enjoyment in sliding the pen along the paper, in drawing a black
line on tracing paper with a drawing pen. How could Ivan Denisovich
get through ten years if all he could do was curse his work
day and night? After all, in that case he would have had to hang
himself on the first handy hook!
And what, then, can one say about such an unlikely story as .
this: Pavel \::hulpenyov, who had worked at logging for seven
years in a row (and at a penalty camp at that), could hardly have
survived and kept working if he had not found meaning and interest
in that logging. Here is how he stood it: The camp chief,
who took an interest in his few permanent workers (a surprising
camp chief), in the first place fed them "belly full" with gruel,
and in the second place permitted only his record-holding shock
workers to work nights in the kitchen. This was their bonus!
After a whole day of logging Chulpenyov went to wash and fill
the food pots, stoke the oven, and clean potatoes until 2 A.M.,
and after that ate his fill and went off to· sleep for three hours
without taking off his pea jacket. Once, also as a bonus, he was
allowed to work for one month in the bread-cutting room. And
he rested up another month by self-mutilation (because he was
a record holder no one suspected him). And that is all. (But, of
course, explanations are required here too. In their work gang
was a woman thief, a veteran bazaar swindler who worked for a
year as their draywoman, and she was living with two trusties
at the same time: the weighing-in checker and the warehouse
manager. As a result, their work gang always overfulfilled its
norm, and, more important, their horse, Gerchik, ate all the