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

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The Archipelago Rises from the Sea I 33
made.a splash during the Civil War, but who now, by this particular
historical -method, was writing his name in the chronicle
of all Russia, got more and more worked up by each successful
shout and turn of phrase, and kept formulating and spontaneously
sharpening up still other, new ones.
And so, vainglorious and in full cry (and thinking maliciously
inside himself: You prisoners, where were you hiding when we
~ were fighting against the Bolsheviks? You thought you could sit
the whole thing out in your nooks and crannies'! And now they've
dragged you here! So that's for your shitty neutrality! And rm
friends with the Bolsheviks, we are people of deeds!.), Kurilko
would begin his exercises: .
"Hello, First Quarantine Company! . . . That's bad, it's not
loud enough, once more! Hello, First Quarantine Company! . . .
That's not lOUd enough! . ; . You have got to shout 'Hello' so
. loud that they can hear you over there on Solovki, across the bay!
When two hundred men shout, the walls have got to fall down!
Once again! Hello, First Quarantine Company!"
Making sure that everyone was shouting at the top of his lungs
and was ready to fall in his tracks, exhausted by shouting, Kurilko
began his new exercise-:.the quarantine comP!lDy was to· run
around a post:
"Legs higher! Legs higher!"
He was having hard going himself by now-like a tragedian
before the final murder in the 1ifth act. And in the last hoarse
croak of his half-hour of instruction, as a confession of the essence
of Solovki, he promised those falling and those fallen, already
prostrate on the ground: "rll make you suck the snot from
. And that was just the first training session, intended to break
. the will of the newly arrived prisoners. And in the black, wooden,
rotten, stinking barracks they would be ordered "to sleep on their
sides"-which wasn't so bad either, because that was for those
prisoners whom the squad leaders would squeeze onto the bunks
-for a bribe. And all the rest would stand between the bunks
all night (and anyone guilty of an offense would be set to stand,
furthermore, between the latrine barrel and the wall).
And these were the blessed years of 1923 and 1925, before
the great turning point, before the personality cult, before the
34 I' THE GULAG ARCHIPEL.AGO
distortions, before the violations. (And from 1927 on ther~ was
this in addition-that urki, thieves, would already be lying there
on the bunks and snapping the lice off themselves into the midst
of the standing intellectuals.)
While waiting for'the steamship Gleb Boky,D they worked at
the Kern Transit Camp, and some of them might be compelled to
run around the post hollering incessantly: ."I'm a sponger, I don't
want to work, and I get in the way of others!" And ~ engineer
who fell off the latrine barrel and spilled it on himself was not
allowed in the barracks and was left outside to freeze in all his
sewage. And sometimes the convoy would shout: "No laggards
in the group! The convoy shoots without warning! Forward
march!" And then, sliding the bolts of their rifles into position:
"You trying to bug us?" And in the winter they would chase
theJIl out on the ice on foot, forcing them to drag the boats behind
them· and row across patches of water, and then in open
water they would load them into the steamship'S hold and shove
so many in that before getting to Solovki several of them would
certainly die-without ever seeing the snowy-white monastery
inside the brown walls.
In his very first Solovetsky hours the newcomer might well
-experience the Solovetsky reception bath trick: He has already
undressed, and the first bath attendant dips a swab into a cask
of green soap and swabs the newcomer; the second one boots him
somewhere down below, down an inclined board or a flight of
stairs; down there a third bath attendant lets him, still confused,
have a whole bucketful; and a fourth right off shoves him out into
the dressing room, where his "rags" have already been tossed
down from above however they happen to land. (In this joke one
can foresee all Gulag! Both its tempo and the price of a human
being.)
And that is how the newcomer swallowed the Solovetsky spirit!
A spirit still unknown in the country as a whole, but which repre-
9. Named in honor of the Chairman of the Moscow Troika of the OGPU,
a young man who never finished his studies:
"He was a student, he was a mining student,
But passing marks· just never came."
(This was a "friendly epigram" which appeared in the magazine Solovetskiye
Ostrova, No. I, 1929. The censor was stupid, and he didn't understand what he
had passed.)