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

In Place of Politicals I 309
brigade was not taken out to work, was fed normally, and then
taken off the penalty regimen.
How little was required for struggle and victory-mere!l not
to cliIig to life! A life that was in any case already lost .
.But our 58's were kept constantly mixed with the thieves and
the nonpolitical offenders and were never allowed to be alone together-so
they wouldn't look into one another's eyes and realize:
who we are. And those bright heads, hot tonguC;S, and firm
hearts who might have become prison and camp leaders-had all,
on th~ baSis of special notations in their file'l', been culled' out,
gagged, arid hidden away in special isolators and shot in oellars •
•
However, in ac~ordance with that important phenomenon of life
noted already in the teachings of Taoism, we were bound to expect
that the moment the politicals ceased to exist was also the very
moment when they ap~ed.
I will risk declaring that in the Soviet period not only were
there genuine politicals, but also that:
1. There were more of tnem than In Tsarist times,and
2. They manifested more steadfastness and courage than did
the earlier revolutionaries.
This seems to ,contradict the preceding, but it does not. The
politicals in Tsarist Russia were in a very favorable situation,'
very much in the public eye-producing immediate repercussions
in society and the press. And we have already seen (in Part I,'
Chapter 12) that in Soviet Russia the socialists had things incomparably
more difficult.
And not only socialists were now politicals. The politicals were
splashed in tubfuls into the fifteen-million-criminal ocean, and
they were invisible and inaudible to us. They were mute. They .
were muter than all the rest. Their image was the fish.
The fish, symbol of the early Christians. And the Christians
were their principal contingent. Clumsy, semiliterate, unable to
deliver speeches from the rostrum or compose an underground
procl1Ul1ation (which their faith made unnecessary. anyway), they
went off to camp to face tortures and death--only so as not to
310 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
renounce their faith! They knew very well for what they were
gnivre~ time, and they were unwavering in their convictions! They
were,the only ones, perhaps, to whom the· camp philosophy and
even the camp language did not stick. And were these not politicals?
Well, you'd certainly not call them riffraff .
. And women among them were particularly numerous. The
Tao says: When faith collapses, that is when the true believers
appear. Because of our enlightened scoffing at Orthodox priests,
the squalling of the Komsomol members on Easter night, * and
the whist1~ of the" thieves at the transit prisons, we overlooked
the fact that the sinful Orthodox Church had nonetheless nurtured
daughters worthy of the first centuries of Christianitysisters
of those thrown to the lions in the arenas.
There was a multitude of Christians: prisoner transports and
graveyards, prisoner transports and graveyards. Who will count
those millions? They died unknown, casting only in their immediate
vicinity a light like a candle. They were the best of Russia's
Christians. The worst had all . . . trembled, recanted, and gone
into hiding. "
Is this not more? Was there ever a time when Tsarist Russia
had known that many politicaIs? Tsarist Russia could not even
count them in tens of thousands.
But so cleanly, so unwitnessed was the strangling of our politicaIs,
that it is only rarely that the story of one or another surfaces
for us.
Archpriest Preobrazhensky (the face of a Tolstoi, a gray
beard). Prison, exile, camp, prison, exile, camp (the Big Solitaire).
After being worn down in this way for many, many. years,
"in 1943 he was summoned to the Lubyanka-and on the way
there the thieves stole his tall cylindrical priest's hat. It was
proposed to him that he become a member of the Synod. It would
seem thilt after so many years he might have allowed himself some
respite from prison? But no, he refused: it was not a pure synod,
not a pure church. And-back to camp.
And what about Valentin" Feliksovich Voino-Yasenetsky
(1877-1961), Archbishop Luke, and.author of the famous work
Purulent Surgery? His biography will, of course, be compiled,
and it is not for us to write about him here. This man abounded
in talent. Before the Revolution he had already successfully competed
for entry into the Academy of Arts, but had left it in order