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

Hand Over Your Second Skin Too! \379
And so they cooked up a "rebel group" in Ust-Vym: eighteen
persons! They wanted, of course, to disarm the Militarized Guard,
get its weapons away from it (half a dozen old rifles)! What then?
It is hard to picture thegcale of the plan: They wanted to raise
the entire North! To march on Vorkutal On Moscow! To join
up with Mannerheim! And telegrams and reports flew to the top.
A big plot had been neutralized. There was unrest in the camps!
The security staff had to be strengthened.
And what was this? Plots were discovered in every campi More
plots! Still more! Ever larger in scale! And ever broader! Ob,
those perfidious last-Ieggers! They were just feigning that they
could be blown over by the wind-their paper-thin, pellagrastricken
hands were secretly reaching for the machine guns! Oh,
thank you, Security Section! Oh, savior ·of the Motherland-the
Third Section!
And a whole gang sat there in that Third Section in the Dzhida
camps of Buryat-Mongolia: Chief of the Security Operations
Section Sokolov, Interrogator Mironenko; Security Officers Kalashnikov,
Sosikov, Osintsev: We've fallen behind! Everyone else
has plots, and we have fallen behind! We do have a major plot,
of course, but what kind? Well, of course, "the Militarized Guard
is to be disarmed"; yes; of course, "they are going abro8d"-after
all, the border was close and Hitler was far away. With whom
should they begin?
And just as a well-fed pack of hounds tears a sick, skinny, and
mangy rabbit to bits, so did this sky-blue pack hurl itself On the
unfortunate Babich, former Arctic explorer, former hero, now
a last-Iegger covered with ulcers. It was he who at the outset of
the war had nearly turned over the icebreaker Sadko to the Germans--so
all the threads of the plot were obviously in his hands.
It was his scurvy-racked dying body that was to save their wellnourished
ones .
. "Even if you are a bad Soviet citizen, we will still make you
do as we wish, you will kiss our boots!" "You don't remember?
We will remind you!" ''You can't write? We'll help your' "You
want time to think? Into the punishment cell on ten and a half
ounces!" -
And here is what another security man told him: "rm very
sorry. Of course, you will come to understand later on that it
would have been sensible to do as we demand. But it will be too
380 THE GULAG ARCHIP'E LAGO
late, when we can break you like a pencil between our fingers."
(Where do they get this imagery? Do they think it up themselves
or is there a selection of such phrases in Chekist textbooks composed
by some unknown poet?)
And here is the interrogation by Mironenko. Hardly had they
brought Babich in than he was hit by the smell of tasty food.
And Mironenko made him sit quite close to the steaming meat
borscht and cutlets. And as though unaware of that borscht and
those cutlets or even that Babich could see them, he gently cited
dozens of arguments to relieve his conscience and justify not only
the possibility but also the necessity of giving false testimony.
He reminded Bab~ch amiably:
"When you were arrested the first time, in freedom, and tried
to prove your innocence, you did not after all succeed, did you?
No, you didn't succeed! Because your fate had already been
decided before your arrest. That's how it is now. That's liow it
is now. Well, well,.eat the lunch. Go ahead: eat it before it gets
cold .... If you are not stupid, we will get along very well. You
will always be well fed and provided for .... Otherwise ... "
And Babich shuddered! Hunger for life had turned out to be
stronger than the thirst for truth. And he began to write down
everything dictated to him. And he slandered twenty-four people,
of whom he knew only four! And for the entire period of the
interrogation he was fed, but never given enough, so that at the
first sign of resistance they could lean on his hunger again.
Reading the record of his life written before his death sends
shivers down your spine: from what heights and into what depths
can a brave man fall! Can all of us. . . .
And so it was that twenty-four people who knew nothing about
anything were taken to be shot or to get new terms. And before
the trial Babich was sent off to a state farm as a sewage-disposal
worker, and then "gave testimony at the trial, and then was given
a new tenner, with his previous term erased, but he died in camp
before completing his second term.
What about the gang from the Dzhida Third Section? Well,
will someone investigate that gang!? Anyone! Our contemporaries!
Our descendants! ... .
And-you? You thought that in camp at least you could unburden
your soul? That here you could at least complain aloud:
''My sentence is tOQ long! They fed me badly! I have too much