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

In Place oj Politicals I 305
bourgeois concept! The whole reason they deprived the politicalS
of the right to be held apart from the nonpolitical criminals was
so as to have the criminals on their backs! (This was devised, too,
by people who had come to understand in Tsarist prisons the
strength of possible political unity, of political protest, and its
dangers for the regime.)
Yes, here is Averbakh; Johnny-on-the-spot again, to explain
to us: "The tactic of re-education is based on class differentiation
. . . is based on the strata friendliest to the proletariat"8 (and
who are these friendly prisoners? They are "former workers,"
i.e., thieves, and they are the ones to be sicked on the 58's).
"Re-education is impossible without- kindling political passions"
(and this is a literal quotation!).
And so when our lives were put wholly in the power of the
-thieves, this was no simple caprice on the part of lazy chiefs in
remote camps, it was the exalted Theory!
"The class-differentiated approach to the regimen . . . incessant
administrative _pressure on hostile-class elements. " Yes,
dragging out your endless sentence, in -your tattered padded
jacket, with head bowed-can you even imagine this: incessant
administrative pressure on you?!
And we can even read in that same remarkable book a list
of methods for creating unbearable conditions for the 58's in
camp. All you have to do, it says, is reduce the number of -visits,
parcels, correspondence, the right to complain, the right to move
about within (!)- the camp. And, it says, you have to create separate
brigades of the hostile-class elements and put them in more
difficult situations (I elucidate on my own: this means cheat
them in measuring the work performed)-and then when they
/ fail to fulfill the norm, declare this to be a sally of the class enemy.
(Hence- the Kolyma executions of entire brigades!) And
then it gives frequent creative advice: The kulaks and their supporters
(i.e., the best peasants imprisoned in the camps, tHose
who even in their dreams used to yearn for peasants' work) were
not to be assigned to agricultural work! And it also says: the
highly skilled hostile-class element (in other words, the engineers)
were not to be entrusted with any responsible work "without
a preliminary verification." {But who is there in camp suf-
8. Averbakh. op. cit .• p. 35.
306 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO
ficiently qualified to verify the engineers? EVidently the thieves'
light cavalry from the Cultural and Educational Section, something
like the Chinese Communist Red G.uards.) It was difficult
to act on this advice-on the canals; after all, locks do not design
themselves, the canal doesn't dig itself; so then Averbakh simply
begged: let the specialists spend their first six months in camp at
least on general work. (That's all it took to die!) In that case,
presumably, through not living in a privileged intellectual barracks,
"they will experience the pressure of the collective"; "the
counterrevolutionaries will· see that the masses are against them .
and despise them."
And how convenient it is, having mastered class ideology, to
tum everything that takes place inside out. What if someone
fixes up "former" top peoplt: and intellectuals with trusty jobs?
Then it goes without saying that he "is giving the heaviest work
to inmates from among the working class." What if a former
officer is working in the storeroom, and there isn't enough clothing?
Then it goes without saying that he is "deliberately holding
it back." What if someone says to the shock-work record holders:
"The others are not keeping pace with you~'? Then it goes
without saying that he is a class enemy! What if a thief gets
drunk, or escapes, or steals? Then explain to him that it was not
he who was guilty, that it was the class enemy who made him
drunk, or taught him to escape, or taught him to steal (an intellectual
teaching a thief how to steall-and this was written quite
seriously in 1936!). And if "the hostile element itself is turning
in good work performances," he is "doing this for purposes of
camouflage."
. The circle is closed! Whether you work or whether you d~n't.
Whether you love us or whether you don't. We hate you and will
annihilate you with the hands of the thieves!
And so it is that Pyotr Nikolayevich Ptitsyn (imprisoned as a
58) sighs: "Well, you see the real criminals are incapable of
genuine labor. It is actually the innocent person who sacrifices
himself totally, to the last breath. There is the drama: the enemy
of the people is the friend of the people."
But-nobody needs your sacrifice.
"An innocent person!" That is the main sensation of those
ersatz politicals rounded up and put into camps. In all probability
this was an ·unprecedented event in world prison history:
when millions of prisoners realize that they are right, all of them