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

The Dogs' Service I 545
did not have to steal from themselves, but the camp keepers had
their heads occupied with one thing-how to steal something
from their own enterprise.
I am sparing with ex'amples so as not to encumber the exposition.
The sullen hunchback Nevezhin never left our camp at the
Kaluga Gates with empty hands, but used to walk out, just like
that, in his long officer's greatcoat, carrying either a pail of linseed
oil, or windowpanes, or putty, and all of it in quantities a thousand
times exceeding the needs of any single family. And a
paunchy captain, the chief of Camp 15 on Kotelnichesky Embankment,
used to come each week in his passenger car for linseed
oil and putty. (In postwar Moscow these were gold!) And
, all this had previously been stolen for them from the construction
zone and taken into the camp compound-by those same zeks
who had received ten years for a sheaf of straw or a packet of
nails! But we Russians had long since been reformed, and 'become
accustomed to how things were in our Motherland; and to us
this only seemed funny. But here is how it was with the German
POW's in the Rostov Camp! At night the chief of camp sent them
to steal construction materials for him; he and the other chiefs
were building houses for themselves. What could these submissive
Germans make out of all this--when they knew that this same
camp chief had had them court-martialed for ,taking a pot of
potatoes and sentenced to ten or twenty-five years? The Germans
figured it out: They went to the woman interpreter S. and supplied
her with a document justifying their act, a declaration that
on a certain date they were going to be compelled to go and ste~l.
(And what they were building was railroad facilities, and becauSe
of the constant stealing of cement these were being built almost
entirely of sand.)
Pay a visit nowadays to the home of the chief of the mine
administration in Ekibastuz, D. M. Matveyev. (He is now in
the mine administration because of the curtailment of, Gulag, but
he was, chief of the Ekibastuz Camp from 1952 on.) His home is
filled with paintings, carvings, and other things made for him
for free, by the hands of natives.
Lasciviousness. This was not true of each and every one of
them, of course, and it was closely tied to individual physiology.
But the situation of camp chief and the absoluteness of his rights
allowed harem inc~ations full sway. The chief of the Burepolom
546 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
, '
Camp, Grinberg, had each comely young woman brought to
him immediately on ,arrival. (And what othe~ choice did she
have except death?) In Kochmes the camp chief Podlesny enjoyed
nighttime roundups'in the women's barracks (of the same
sort we have already seen in Khovrino). He himself personally
pulled the blankets off the women, allegedly searching for hidden
men. In the presence of ,his beautiful wife he simpltaneously
bedded three zek mistresses. (And one day, having shot one of
them out of jealousy, he shot himself.) Filimonov, the chief of
the Cultural and Educational Department of all Dmitlag, was
removed "for moral corruption" and senno be reformed (in the
very same position) to BAMlag. There he continued his heavy
drinking and fornication on a formidable scale, and he promoted
his mistress from the nonpolitical offenders . . .' to be the chief
of the Cultural and Educational Section. (His son, incidentally,
joined up with some bandits and very soon afterward was himself
imprisoned for banditry.)
Malice, cruelty. There was no curb, either practical or moral,
to restrain these traits. Unlimited power in the hands of limited
people always leads to cruelty. (And we cite here all this
similarity in vices to those of the serf owners not merely for
eloquent argument,.. This similarity, alas, demonstrates that the
nature of our compatriots has not changed in the slightest in two
hundred years; give as much power as that and there will be all
the same vices!)
Tatyana Merkulova, a woman-beast, at the women's logging
Gamp No. 13 of Unzhlag, rode on her horse among her female
slaves like a savage plantation owner. Major Gromov, according
to the recollections of Pronman, was actually ill on any day he
had not imprisoned several prisoners in the punishment block.
Captain Medvedev (Camp No.3 of UstVymIag) stood in the
watchtower himself for several hours each day and jotted down
the names,of the men who had gone into the women's barracks
in order to follow up by imprisoning-them. He loved always to
have a full isolator. If the cells of the 'isolator were not packed
full, he felt something laCking in his life. In the evening he loved'
to line up the zeks and read them such statements as "You have
lost the game! There is never going to be any return to freedom
for any of you, and don't dare to hope there will be." In that
very same UstVymIag the chief of 'Camp ¥inakov (a former