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

The Loyalists I 347
Well, so be it. Ivan Denisovich had no friends among the
trusties. Just tell us one thing: Who laid the bricks, who laid the
bricks in the wall? Was it you, you hard-heads?
C. Attitude toward Labor. It appears th"at on the whole the
orthodox Communists were devoted to work. (Eikhe's deputy,
even in a typhoid delirium, could calm down only when the nurse
assured him that, yes, the telegrams on grain procurements had
already been sent.)· It appears that on the whole they approved
of camp labor also; it was necessary to the building of Communism,
and without it the issuing of gruel to the whole horde
of prisoners would have been undeserved. Therefore they considered
it quite rational that persons refusing to go out to work
should be beaten and imprisoned in the punishment block and
sh9t in wartime. They considered it quite moral to be a work
assigner, a brigadier, any kind of cattle driver or whip cracker.
(And in this regard they disagreed with the so-called "honest
thieves" and were in agreement with the ''bitches.'')
Take, for example, the brigadier of the logging brigade Yelena
Nikitina, a former secretary of the Kiev Komsomol Committee.
Here is what they say about her: She stole from the output of
her own brigade (of 58's) and traded it with the thieves. Lyusya
Dzhaparidze (daughter of a Baku Commissar) bought her way
out of work frOIp Nikitina with chocolate received in a food
parcel. On the other hand, this woman brigadier refused to let the
Anarchist Tatyana Garasyeva leave the woods for three days-­
until she had frostbite.
Take Prokhorov-Pustover, also a Bolshevik, though not a
Party member, who turned in zeks for deliberately failing to fulfill
norms. (He used to report this to the chiefs, and the zeks got
punished.) To the zeks' reproaches that he must realize it was
slave labor, Pustover replied: ''That's a strange philosophy! In
capitalist countries the workers struggle against slave labor; but
we, even if We are slaves, work for a socialist state, not for private
persons. These officials are only temporarily [?] in power. One
blow from the people ... and they will disappear, but the people's
state will remain."
It's ... 'a jungle, the consciousness of an orthodox Communist.
It's impOsSible-to make sense of it.
And the only exception the Goodthinkers make is this reserva-
348 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
tion for th~ves: It" would be wrong to use theni on general
camp work, since it would then be difficult for them to preserve
themselves for the future fertile leadership of the Soviet people.
And anyway it would also be difficult for them to think during
those years in camp, in other words to repeat in turn, oncAlfier
another while. gathered in a circle, that Comrade Stalin, Comrade
Molotov, Comrade Beria, and all the rest of the Party were right.
And therefore, using all their efforts under the protection of
the camp chiefs and with each other's secret help, they tried to
get themselves places as trusties--in jobs where no knowledge or
skills were required (none of them was a specialist), in calm. and
quiet places farther from the main 'hand-to-hand camp struggle.
And so they grabbed liold: Zakharov (Malenkov's teacher)­
as storage room clerk for personal property; the above-mentioned
Zaborsky (Shelest him.self?)-at the clothing-issue desk; -the
notorious Todorsky-in the Medical Section; Konokotin-as a
medical assistant (though he was not a medical assistant' at all);
Serebryakova-as a nurse (though sh~ was no nurse at all). And
vo~oymeS-nadlA was also a trusty.
The camp biography of Dyakov-the biggest . loud-mouth of
all the loyalists-has been depicted by his own, pen and is truly
astonishing. During the five years of his sentence he contrived
to leave the camp compound just once-and then for only half
a day, and during that half-day he worked for half an hour,
cutting branches, and then the jailer said to him: '''You're fagged
out, take a rest!" Half an hour in five years-not everyone gets
away with that! For a certain length of time he malingered on
the pretext of a rupture, and subsequently a fistula resulting from
the rupture-but listen here, not for five years! To receive such
golden jobs as medical statistician, librarian of the Cultural and
Educational Section, and storage room clerk for personal possessions,
and to stay in such jobs for your entire term-a bribe of
fat bacon wasn't enough; most likely you had to sell your soul
to the "godfather" as well. Let the old camp veterans be the judge
of this. And Dyakov was not merely a trusty but an aggressive
trusty; in the first version of his story,l1 before he was pu~licly
shamed for it,12 he elegantly explained why an intelligent person
I J. Zvevia, 1963, No.3.
12. Lakshin in NOlIY Mlr, 1964, No.1.