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

Knock, Knock, Knock . ~.! I 357
got cheaper. Souls were sold for just a pack of tobacco.) And
No.3 works even better: We will take your trusty status away!
We will send you out to general work! We will transfer you to a,
penalty camp! Every one of those steps was a step toward death.
- And the person who could not be coaxed upward by a piece of
bread could still shudder and beg for mercy if he was pushed into
the abyss.
This dots not mejUl that finer, more sldllful work did not- exist
or was 'never needed--..,great ingenuity was sometimes required.
Major Shikin had to gather material against the prisoner
Gertsenberg, a Jew. He had grounds for thinking that Anton, an
inexperienced, seventeen-year-old German lad, could provide the
material he wanted. Shikin called in yo~g Anton and began to
water the Nazi shoots implanted there: how repulsive.the Jewish
nation was and how it had destroyed' Germany. Anton got
steamed up and betrayed Gertsenberg. (And why wouldn't the
Communist Chekist Shikin have become. under altered circumstances,
a dependable interrogator for the Gestapo'])
Or take Aleksandr Fillipovich Stepovoi. Before his arrest he
was a soldier in the MVD armies and ~e bad been arrested under
Article 5&..1::-
He was, lUJtan orthodox. Communist at all, just an ordinary
lad from the working classes. And in camp he came to be
1. This is the only chance I will have to tell the story of his arrest. He was
conscripted as a boy and sent oft· to serve in the MVD armies. First---mto
battle against the Ukrainian partisans, the "Banderlsts."· Having received information
(from informers) as to when the "Banderists" were coming out of
the forest to attend mass, the MVD surrounded the chnrch and took them as
they came out. (On the basis of photographs.) Later they also guarded (in
civilian clothing) people's deputies in Lithuania when the latter went tp election
meetings. ("One of them was very bold and always declined to have a
guard with him!") Later stiD they guarded a bridge in Gorky Province. They
themselves mutinied over poor food and as pupishment were sent to the
Turkish border. But by this time Stepovoi had already been imprisoned. He
used to draw pictures as a hobby, even ou the covers of notebooks in. political
indoctrination courses. On one oCcasion he drew a pig, and then someone Pext
to him asked: "Can you draw stalinT' hI can." And he drew a pictnre of Stalin
on the spot. And he turned in his notebook to be checked by the instructor.
That was already quite enough to warrant his arrest, but beyond that, at target
practice in the presence of a general he had scored seven out of seven buD'&­
eyes at a distance of four hundred yards and got leave to go home. When he
returned to his unit, he reported there were no fruit trees left. All the orchards
had bI!en cut down because of. the tax on them imposed by Zverev. At his
court-martial in. Gorky Province he shouted: "Ob, you scoundrels! ·If I am an
enemy of the people, why don't you try me in front of everyone-what are
you hiding fromT' Then •.•. Burlepolom and Krasnaya Glinka (a cruel strictregimen
camp consisting only of S8's who ~orked on tunneling).
358 I _THE -GULAG ARCH-IPELAGO .
ashamed of his fonner service and carefully concealed it, realizing
that it would be dangerous· for him if it became known. So how
was he to be recruited as an informer? Well, he was to be
recruited with just that: "We will let it be known that you are
a 'Chekist:' " They would even wipe their asses with their ow~
banner-anything in order to recruit! (He insists that he nonetheless
stood up against them.)
Someone else might, as the saying goes; 1?e nothing at all,
but merely want to be a stoolie-someone like that could be had
without any difficulty. For anoPter it might be necessary to cast
the bait several times before he swallowed it. To anyone who
wavered and squirmed on the grounds that it was difficult for
him to gather exact information, they would explain: "Give us
what you- have and we will check it out." "But if I'm not at all
sure?" "What does that mean-that you're a real enemy?" And
in the end they would explain quite honestly: "What we need
is five percent truth and the rest can be your imagination." (The
Dzhida secilrity chiefs.)
But sometimes it did happen that the "godfather''ll would keep
trying and trying without landing his prey either on his third
try or on his fifth. This WIl4 rare, but it happened. TheIl the "godfather"
had his spare noose left: a signature on nondisclosure.
Nowhere--either in the Constitutipn or in the Code----did it ever
say that such signatures exist or that we are obliged to give
them, but .". . we have gPt used to everything. How can we .
refuse this either? We certainly will give all of them. (Yet, at the
same time, if we didn't give them, if, on crossing the threshold,
we were to announce to one and all our conversation with the
"godfather," then indeed the demonic -strength of the Third
Section would be dispelled. It is on our cowardice that their
secrecy and they themselves are founded!) And ilien a liberating
and happy notation is put into the prisoner's camp file: "Not
to be recruited." That is after try "ninety-six" or at least "eightyfour,"
but it is a long time before we learn about it, if we survive
at all. We can make a guess, however, from the fact that all that
scum subsides from us and never clings to us again.
However, most often of all the recruitment succeeds. Crudely
2. The word "!tum" in Dal's dictiolllll')' is given as meaning "one in a state
of spiritual kinship, the godfather of one's child by christening." And so the
transfer of this term to the camp security officer was very precise and quite
in the spirit of the language. But with that touch of irony customary with the
zeks.