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

In Place of PoUticals I 311
to serve humanity better-as a physician. In the hospitals of
World War I he emerged as an expert eye surgeon, and after the
Revolution he headed a Tashkent clinic, extremely popular in
all Central Asia. A smooth and untroubled career was spread
out before him, like the paths trod by our highly successful contemporaries.
But Voino-Yasenetsky sensed that his service was
insufficient, and he put on the robes of a priest. He hung an icon
in his operating room and delivered his lectures to his students
we8ring clerical robes and with a cross around his neck (1921).
Patriarch Tikhon managed to appoint him Bishop of Tashkent.
In the twenties Voino-Yasenetsky was exiled to the Turukbansky
region, but was then brought back thanks to the exertions of
many, but his chaD:, and his diocese had alread~ been taken. He
had a private practice (the sign on his door reading "Bishop
Luke"), and masses of the sick poured in to see him (the '1eather"
coats," too, in secret), and he gave what he did not need of his
money to the poor.
It is worth noting how they got rid of him: He had been sent
to hiS second exile (in Archangel in 1930) not as a 58, but ''f01"_
inciting to murder." (This was a nonsensical story, according to
which he had brought influence to bear on the wife and motherin-law
of the physiologist Mikhailovsky who committed suicide
-and who,. when already insane, had been engaged in injecting
into corpses solutions which had allegedly stopped the disintegration
of tissue, about which the newspapers had made a big to-do
as a ''triumph of Soviet science" and artificial "resurrection.")
This administrative method compels us to take an even more
informal approach to the question of who the real politicals were.
H not struggle with the regime, then moral or energetic resistance
to it-that is the chief criterion. And" the matter of which "article"
was pasted on didn't mean ~ thing. (Many sons of the liquidated
''kulaks'' were given thieves' articles, but in camp showed themselves
to be genuine politicals.)
In exile in Archangel, Voino-Yasenetsky wOrked out a new
method of healing purulent wounds. He was summoned to Leningrad,
and Kirov himself tried to persuade him to lay asid~ his
priest's robC$ and immediately offered him his own institute. But
the "stubborn bishop would not even consent to have his book
published without an indication, in parentheses, of his clerical
rank. And thus it was that without an institute and without his
312 THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
book he completed his exile in 1933, returned to Tashkent,and
there was sentenced to a third term of exile, in the Krasnoyarsk:
region. From the beginning of the war, he worked in Siberian
hospitals, where he applied his technique of healing purulent
wounds-and this led him to a Stalin Prize. And he only agreed
to accept it dressed in his full bishop's regaIia. 10
And the engineers? How many of them refused to sign stupid,
disgusting confessions of wrecking and were scattered to the
four winds and shot? And how Pyotr Aldmovich (Ioakimovich)
Palchinsky (1875-1929) gleams like a bright star among them!
He was an engineer and scholar with an astonishing breadth of
interests. A graduate (in 1900) of the Mining Institute, an outstanding
authority on mining, he studied and, as can be seen from
the list of his books, reft behind him works on general questions
of economic development, on the fluctuations of industrial prices,
on the exPQrt of coal, on the equipment and operation of Europe's
trading ports, on the economic probleIDS of port management, on
industrial-safety teChniques in Germany, on concentration in the
German and English mining industries, on the economics of
mining, on the reconstruetion and development of the building
materials industry in the U.S.S.R., on the general training of
engineers in higher-education-and, in addition, works on purely
mining subjects, such as descriptions of individual areas and individual
ore deposits (and not all his works are yet known to us
today). Uke Voino-Yasenetsky in medicine, Palchinsky would.
never have come to grief in his own engineering work; but just as
the former could not stop propagating the faith, so he could not
stop meddling in politics. Even as a student in the Mining Institute,
Palchinsky had been listed by the Tsarist gendarmes as a
"leader of the movement" In 1900 he had been the chairman of
a students' assembly. As an engineer in 1905 in Irkutsk he had
already been prominently involved in the revolutionary uprisings,
and in the "case of the Irkutsk Republic" he was sentenced to
hard labor. He escaped and went off to Europe. Having already
before this been in sympathy with the Anarchists, he became
friendly. with Krcipotkin. He used his emigre years to perfect his
knowledge in several engineering areas. and studied European
10. When medical students today ask about his blolP'llphy. they receive the
reply: "There Is no literature on him."