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

448 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
Chapter 17
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The Kids
The Archipelago had many ugly mugs and many bared fangs.
No matter what side you approached it from, there wasn't one
you could admire. But perhaps the most abominable of all was
that maw that swallowed up the kids, .
The kids were not at all those besprizorniki or waifs in drab
tatters who scurried hither and thither thieving and warming
themselves at asphalt caldrons on the streets, without whom one
could not picture the urban life of the twenties. The waifs were
taken from the streets-not from their families-into the colonies
for juvenile delinquents (there was one attached to the People's
Commissariat of Education as early as 1920; it would be interesting
t~know, too, how things went with juvenile offenders before
the Revolution), into workhouses for juveniles (which existed
frDm 1921 to 1930 and had bars, bolts, and jailers, so111at in the
outworn bourgeois terminology they could have been cl!lled
prisons), and also into the "Labor Communes _of the OGPU"
from 1924 on. They had been orphaned by the Civil War, by its
famine, by social disorganization, the execution of their parents,
or the death of the latter at the front, and at that time justice
really did try to return these children to the mainstream of life,
removing them from their street apprenticeship as thieves. Factory
apprenticeship began in the labor communes. And this was
a privileged situation in the context of those years of unemployment,
and many of the lads there learned with a will. From 1930
on, for sentenced juveniles, Factory Apprenticeship Schools of a
special type yvere created, under the People's Commissariat of
447
Justice. The young offenders had to work from four to six hours
a day, for which they received wages on the basis of the All­
Union Code of Labor Laws, and for the rest of their day they
studied and played. And perhaps things might have been set to
rights on this path.
But where did the young offenders come from? They came
from Article 12 of the Criminal Code of 1926, which permitted
children from the age of twelve to be sentenced for theft, assault,
mutilation, and murder (Article 58 offenses were also included
under this)leading), but they had to be given moderate sentences,
not "the whole works" like adults. Here was the first crawl hole
into the Archipelago for the future "kids"-but it was not yet a
wide gate.
We are not going to omit one interesting statistic: In 1927 -
prisoners aged sixteen (they didn't count the younger ones) to
twenty-four represented 48 percent of all prisoners. 1
What this amounts to is that nearly half the entire Archipelago
in 1927 consisted of youths whom the October Revolution had
caught between the ages of six and fourteen. Ten years after the
victorious Revolution these same girls and boys turned· up in
prison and constituted half· the prison population! This jibes
poorly with the struggle against the vestiges of bourgeois consciousness.
which we inherited from the old society, but figures
are figures. They demonstrate 'that the Archipelago never was
short of young people.
But the question of how young was decided in 1935. In that
year the Great Evildoer once more left his thumbprint on ~story's
submissive clay. Among such deeds as the destruction of
Leningrad and the destruction of his own Party, he did not overlook
the children-the children whom he loved so well, whose
Best Friend he was, and with whom he therefore had his photograph
taken. Seeing no other way to bridle those insidious
mischiefmakers, those washerwomen's brats, who were overrunning
the country in thicker and thicker swarms and growing more
and more brazen in their violations of socialist legality, he invented
a gift for them: These children, from twelve years of age
(by this time his beloved daughte~ was approaching that borderline,
and he could see that age tangibly before his eyes ), should
1. Vyg)tinsky, op. cit .• p. 333.