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

In Ploce of PoUticals I 301
that time one may conclude that the pilot was proposing gentler
treatment of the Germans.)8 At a debate-a public argument!
Court-martial: ten yem imprisonment and five of disenfranchisement.
1. F. Lipaicreated a collective farm-in his own local district a
year before the bosses gave orders to create them-a completely
voluntary collective farm! And cOuld GPU Commissioner Ovsyannikov
allow that hostile -sally to go unchallenged? I don't
need your good one. Give me my bad one! The collective farm
was proclaimed to be kulak, and Lipai himself an any of the
kulaks-aIid thoy dragged him through the hummocks .•.•
F. V. Shavirin, a worker, spoke out loud (I) at a Party meeting
about Lenin's testament! Well! Nothing could be worse than
that-he had to be a sworn enemy! Whatever teeth he had managed
to keep through the interrogatioB he lost in his first year in
the Kolyma. _
See what awful criminals were to be encountered among the
58's! And indeed some were really venomous, with a touch of
the underground. For example, -there was Perets Gertsenberg,
an inhabitant of Riga. All of a sudden he moved to the Lithuanian
Socialist Republic and registered himself as being of Polish
origin. And in fact he was a Latvian -Jew. Whafwas particularly
su~artuo about this was the desire to deceive his own native
state. It meant he was counting on our letting him go to Poland
and frQIIl there he would slip off to Israel. Nothing doing, darling,
you didn't want to stay in Riga, so off to Gulag. Betrayal of the
Moti!erland via intention: ten years.
_
And what secretive people there were about too! In -1937
among the workers o~ the "Bolshevik" Factory (Leningrad)
some former pupils of the trade schools were discovered who had
been present, in 1929, at a meeting addressed by Zinoviev. (A
list of those present had been found attached to the min]ltes.)
. .
3. In Ebrenburg's memoirs you will find no trace of such trlvi8l incidents.
Anyway, he might not have knoWn that the man arguing with him had beeil
arrested. He merely offered.a fairly standard Party-line reply at that particular
moment and then forgot about it. Ebrenburg writes that he himself "survived
by 10ttery.B Well, that little lottery had marked numbers. If they were rounding
up your friends, you had to -stop phoning them in time. If the wagon shaft
turned, it was necessary to turn too. Ehrenburg heated up hatred for the Germans
so insanely that Stalin had to pull him up short. If you feel toward the
end of your life that you helped establish a lie, then what is required to justify
yourself is not memoirs but an inunediate bold self-sacrifice.
302 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO
For eight years these people had concealed themselves by SDeak~
ing into "the ranks of the proletariat. Now all of them were arrested
and shot.
Said Marx: "The state cripples itself by turning a cjtizen into
a criminal. '>4 And very touchingly he explained how in every violator
'of the law the state must see a warm-blooded human being
as well; and a soldier: who defends the Fatherland, and a member
of the community, and a father of a family, "whose existence is
sacred," and-most importantly-a citizen. But our jurists have
no time to read Marx, particularly such unthought-out parts as
these. Let Marx read our instructions if he feels like it.
People will exclaim that this whole list is what-monstrous?
Ridiculous. That it is beyond belief? That Europe won't believe
it?
Europe, of course, won't believe it. Not until Europe itself
serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy'
magazines and can't get anything else into her head.
But what about us? Fifty years ago we would not have believed
it either for anything. And one hundred years ago we
would not have believed it. Belinsky, Chernyshevsky-they
would not have believed it. But if we ~g down three or four
spades deep, back to Peter the. Great and, before-why shouldn't
we believe it? What's so bad, about that? It has been going on
since time immemorial:
• The prisop watChman Senka spoke: "Don't. pull my beard!
I'm a peasant who belongs to the state-but does that mean my
beard belongs to the state too?" (Article 58-to be flogged with
cudgels without mercy.)
• The Streltsy junior officer Ivashko Raspopin gestured with
his finger and announced: "That's what you can do with your
sovereign." (58-to be flogged with cudgels Without mercy.)
• The tradesman Blestin, cursing out the Cossacks, said:
"The great prince is stupid to give food' and drink to you Cossacks."
(Article 58-to be flogged with cudgels without mercy.)
• The. knight Ivan Pashkov said: "Th~ Sovereign-Tsar is
higher than Saint Athana"Sius.'~ And the sacristan of the Church
of Saint Athanasius, Nezhdan, said: "Then why does the Tsar
pray_to Athanasius?" This was in Holy Week and both were
4. ~arx and Engels, op. ~it., Vol. I, p. '233.