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

The Dogs' Service
I SSS
And they could vent their malice and display cruelty-they encountered·
no barriers. And when you start beating with im- •
punity-once you've started you don't want to stop. Tyranny.
incites you and you feel yourself to be so ferocious that you are
afraid even of yourself. The jailers willingly copied their officers
in their conduct, and in character traits too-:-but they didn't
have that gold on their shoulder boards and their greatcoats were
dirtyish, and they went everywhere on foot, and they were not
allowed prisoner-servants, and they dug in their own gardens,
and looked after their own farm apimals. Well, of course, they
did manage to haul off a zek to their places for half a day now
and then.-to chop wood, to wash floors-this they could do,
but not on a lavish scale. And not using the working zeks either,
but those resting. (Tabaterov-in Berezniki in 1930-had only
-just lain down after a twelve-hour night shift when the jailer
awakened him and sent him to his house to work. And just try
not to go! ... ) The jailers had no patrimonial estates,· the camp
for them, after all, was not a patrimonial estate, but their service,
and therefore they did not have either that arrogance or that
despotic scope. And there were obstacles in the way of thieverytoo.
This was an injustice; even without thievery the chiefs had
plenty of money-and they could steal much too, and the
custodial staff had much less--and were allowed to steal less
too. No one was going to give yo~ a full bag from the storeroom
-hardly even a small pouch. (Right now I can see before my
eyes, as if it were today, the big-faced, flaxen-haired Sergeant
Kisilyov; he came into the bookkeeping office in 1945 and
ordered: "Don't issue one ounce of fats and oils to the zek
kitchen! Only to the free employees!" There were not enough
fats. And this was their whole advantage-fats according to the
norm .... ) In order to have something sewn for them in the camp
'tailor shop, they had to have the camp chiefs permission and
wait their tum. Well, at work you could make the zek do a small
task for you-solder, cook, hammer, or sharpen something. Anything
larger than a stool you'd not always manage to carry out.
This limitation on thievery deeply affronted the jailers, especially
their wives, and because of this there was much bitterness against
the chiefs, because of this iife seemed very unjust, and within
the jailer's breast there stirred not so much sensitive heart strings
as a sense of unfulfillment, an emptiness echoing a human groan. _
And sometimes the lower-ranking jailers were capable of talking
556 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
sympathetically with the zeks. Not so often, but IW~ alfthilt rarely
• either. In any case, among both prison ana camp j~lers it was
possible to find human beings. Every prisoner encountered more
than one in his career. In an officer it was virtually impossible.
This, properly speaking, was the universal law of the inverse
ratio between social position and humaneness.
The real jailers were those who had served in camp fifteen
and twenty-five years. Whoever had once settled down in those
desr~ca distant places . . . would never be able to clamber out
again. Once they had memorized the statute and daily routine,
there was lWthing else in their whole lives that they had to read
or know, and all they did was to listen to the radio, the Moscow
program No. 1. And it was their corps that constituted for us
the vacantly expressionless, unwavering face of Gulag, inaccessible
to any thought.
Only during the war years was the composition of the jailers'
staff distorted and muddied. The military authorities in their
haste disregarded the sanctity of the custodial service, and took
some of them away to the front, and in place of them began to
send soldiers from army units released from hospitals-but
even from these they selected the stupidest and. cruelest. And
old men turned up as well, mobilized straight here from home.
And among these gray-mustached fellows were many goodhearted,
unprejudiced people-they spoke gently, searched perfunctorily,
confiscated nothing, and even joked. They never registered
complaints nor reported people to be sent to the punishment
cell. But after the war they were soon demobilized and
there weren't any more of them.
There were unusual individuals among the jailers (in wartime
too) like the student Senin, about whom I have already written,
and one other Jewish jailer in our camp at Kaluga Gates---elderly,
with a very civilian appearance, very calm, not faultfinding,
and no one suffered misfortune from ,him. He was so
mild in his bearing that on one occasion I was bold enough to
ask: "Tell me, what is your civilian profession?" He took not
the slightest offense, looked at me with calm eyes, and quietly
replied: "Merchant." During the war before coming to our camp
he had served in Podolsk, where, as he related, thirteen or fourteen
people had died every day of the war from starvation. (And
, that alone makes twenty thousand deaths!) He evidently lasted