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

42 I THE GULAG ARCHIPE-LAGO
5. The bell tower
6. Door under the bell tower arch
How had it happened that the hares had not been exterminated?
They would explain it to the newcomer this way: The little
beasts and birds are not afraid here, because there is a GPU
order in effect: "Save ammunition! Not a single shot is to be
fired, except at-a prisonerf'
So all the scares were just a joke! But a shout comes in broad
daylight in the kremlin yard where prisoners are crowded as thick
as on Nevsky Prospekt: "Make way! Make way!" And three
foppish young men with the faces of junkies (the lead man
drives back the crowd 'of prisoners not with a club -but with a
riding crop) drag along swiftly by the shoulders a prisoner with
limp anns and legs dressed only.in his underwear. His face is
horrible-flowing like liquid! They drag him off beneath the bell
tower (Illustrations Nos. 5 and 6: right there beneath the arch
and through that low door-it is set into the bell tower found a-
. tions). They squeeze him through that little door and shoot him
in the back of the head-steep stairs lead down inside, and he
tumbles down them, and they can pile up as many as seven or
eight men in there, and then send men to drag out the corpses
and detail women (mothers and wives of men who have emigrated
to Constantinople and religious believers who refuse to recant
their faith and to allow their children to be torn from it) to wash
down the steps.14
But why like this? Couldn't they have done it at nightquietly?
But why do it quietly? In th~t case a bullet would be
wasted. In th~. daytime crowd _the bullet had an educational
function. It, so to speak, s~ruck down ten with one shot.
They shot them in a different way too-right at the Onufriyev
cemetery, behind the wOlllt}n's barracks (the former gue~t house
, for women pilgrims). And in fact that road past the women's
barracks was christened f!xecution road. In winter one could see
a man being led barefoot along it, in only his underwear, through
the snow (no, it was not for torture! it was just so his footgear
and clothes should not go to waste), his hands bound behind
his back with wire,15 and the condemned man would bear himself
14. And right now, there on the stones over which they dragged them, in
that part of the courtyard secluded from the Solovetsky wind, cheerful tourists,
who have come to seethe notorious -islands, sock a volleyball hours at a time.
They do not know. Well, and if -they did know? They would go on socking
anyway.
15. A Solovetsky method which, strangely, was repeated with the corpses
at Katyn Forest. Someone remembered-a matter perhaps of tradition? Or
was it personal experience?