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

392 I THE GULAG A,RCHIPELAGO
Chapter 14
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Changing One's Fate!
o~ defend yo~lf in that savage world was impossible. To go
on strike was suicide. To go on hunger strikes was useless. '
And as for dying, there would always be time.
So what was left for the prisoner? To break out! To go change
one's fate! (The zeks also called escape "the green prosecutor."
It was the only popular prosecutor among them. Like all the
other prosecutors, he, too, left m~y cases in their previouS situa;
tion or in an even worse situation than'before--but sometimes he
freed them outright. He was the green forest. He was the bushes
and the greensward.)
Chekhov used to say that if a prisoner was not a philosopher
who could get along equally well in all possible circumstances
(or let. Us put it this way: who could retire into himself) then he
could not but wish to escape and h,e ought to wish to.
He could not but wish to! That was the imperative of a free
soul. True, the natives of -the Archipelago were far from being
like that. They were much more submissive than that. But even
among them there were always those who thought about escape
or who were just about to. The continual escapes in one or another
place, even those that did not succeed, were a true proof
that the energy of the zeks had not yet been loSt.
Here is a camp compound. (IDustration No. 36.) It is well
guarded; the fence is strong and the inner cordon area is reliable
and the watchtowers ~ set out correctly-every spot is open to
view and open to fire. B,ut all of a sudden you grow sick to death
of the thought that you are condemned to die right here on this
36. Camp compound
bit of fenced-off land. So why not try your luck? Why not burst
out and change your fate? This impulse is particularly strong at
the beginning of your term of imprisonment, in the first year, and
it is not even deliberate. In that first year when, generally speaking,
the prisoner's entire future and whole prison personality are
being decided. ~ater oil this impulse weakens somehow; there is
no longer the conviction that it is more important for you to be
out there, and all the threads binding you to the outer world
weaken, and the cauterizing of the soul is transformed into decay,
and the human being settles into camp harness.
DUring all the years of the camps, there were evidently quite
a few escapes. Here 'are some statistics accidentally come by: In
the month of March, 1930, alone, 1,328 persons escaped from
imprisonment in the R.S.F.S.R. 1 (And how inaudible and soundless
this was in our society.)
With the enQrmous development. of the Archipelago after 1937,
particularly during the war years, when battle-fit infantrymen
were rounded up and sent to the front, it became even more dif"
ficult to provide proper convoy, and not even the evil notion of
self-guarding couId solve all the' problem of the chiefs. Simul-
1. TsGAOR, collection 393. shelf 84. file 4. sheet 68.
391