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

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea I s~
anything from the good earth while possessing thousands of
unoccupied hands!
Only the free people there had milk, sour cream, and fresh
meat, yes, and the excellent cabbage of Father Methodius. And
for prisoners there was rotten cod, salted or dried; a thin gruel
with pearl barley or millet grits and without potatoes. And there
was never either cabbage soup or borscht. And as a result there
was scurvy, and even "the office workers' companies" all had
boils, and as for those on general work, their situation can be
imagined. Prisoner transports returned "on aU fours" from distant
work parties-they actually crawled from the wharf on hands
and knees.
The prisoners were allowed to use up nine rubles a month out
of money orders from hom~d there was a prison commissary
in the Chapel of German (Illustration No, 7). And one parcel
a month could be received, which was opened and inspGCted in
. the ISCh, and if you didn't bribe them, they would announce that
much of what had been sent you was prohibited-grits,.for example.
In the Nikolskaya Church and in the Uspensky Cathedral
the bunks rose-four tiers high. Nor was the 13th Company any
less crowded in the block attached to the Preobrazhensky Cathedral
(Illustration No.9). Imagine the crowded mass of prisoners
at that entrance. (Illustration No.8): 3,500 stampeding back
to quarters on returning frOin wox:k. It took an hour's wait in line
to get hot water at the boilers. On Saturdays the evening roll calls
dragged out till very, very late at night (like the former religious
services). They were very particular about hygiene, of course:
prisoners were forced to have heads clipped and beards shaved
off (also all priests----one after another). In addition, they cut
all the flaps off long clothing (particularly cassocks, of course),
for they were a principal point of infection. (The Cheldsts had
greatcoats which reached right down to the ground.) True, in the
winter the ill and the aged sitting there in underwear and sacks
could not make it to the baths from the company bunks. They
were done in by the lice. (They hid the corpses under the bunks
so as to get the extra rations----even though that was not very
advantageous for the living: the lice crawled from the cold corpses
onto the warm living survivors.) In the kremlin there was a bad
Medical SectiOl\ with a bad hospital, and in the remoter parts of
Solovki there was no medicine at all.
52 I THE· GULAG ARC.HIPELAGO
(The sole exception was .the Golgotha-Crucifixion Monastery
on Anzer, a penalty work party, where they cured patients ... by
murdering them. There in the Golgotha Church prisoners lay .
dying from lack of food and from cruelty, enfeebled priests next
to syphilitics, and aged invalids next to young .thieves~ At the
request of the dying, and in order to ease his own problem, the
Golgotha doctor gave terminal cases strychnine; and in the winter
the bearded corpses in their underwear were kept in the church
for a long time. Then they were put in the vestibule, stacked
standing up since that way they took up less space. And when
they carried them out, they gave them a shove and let them roll
on down Golg9tha Hill.1S)
At one time-in 1928-a typhus epidemic broke out in Kem.
And 60 ·percent of those there died, but the typhus crossed to
Bolshoi SOlovetsky Island as well, and hundreds of typhus patients
lay about in the unheated "theatrical" fiall all at the same time.
And hundreds likewise left there ·for the cemetery. (So as not to
confuse the count, the work assigners wrote the last name of every
prisoner on his wrist, and some of those who recovered switched
terms with shorter-term cadavers by rewriting the corpses' names
on their own hands.) And when many thousands of the Central
Asian "Basmachi" rebels were herded here in 1929, they brought
wIth them an epidemic characterized by black spots on the body,
and all who fell ill with it died. It could not, of course, be the
plague or smallpox, as Solovki people imagined it was, because
. those two diseases had already been totally wiped out in the
Soviet Republic. And so they called the illness "Asiatic typhus."
They didn't know ~ow to cure it, and here is how they got rid of
it: If one pri~oner in a cell caught it, they jlist locked the cell and
let no one out, and passed them food only through the door-till
they all died. .
What a scientific discovery it would be for us to establish that
18. This is an unusual name for a church and monastery, not encountered
anywhere else. According to legend (a manuscript of the eighteenth century
in the Slate Public Library, dSolovetsky Paterik" r'The Lives of the Solovetsky
Fathers"]), on June 18, 1712, the monk-priest Job during an all-night prayer
vigil at the foot of this hill saw a vision of the Mother of God "in all the glory
of heaven"-and she said to him: ''This 11i11 from henceforth shall be called
Golgotha, and on it shall be built a church and a I!lonastery of the Crucifi,gon.
And it will be whitened by the sufferings of count1ess multitudes." That is what
they named it, and they built it there, but fQr more than two hundred years
the prophecy was an empty one; and it did not seem likely that it would ever
come true. But after the Solovetsky camp one cOuld no longer say this.