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

Campside I 569
And so in general you could not call the relations between the
zeks and the ''volnyashki'' hostile. Instead, they were frieQ,dly.
And these lost,' half-drunken, ruined people were more sensitive
to the grief of others, were capable of paying heed to the grief
of a prisoner and the injustice of his arrest. The eyes of an unprejudiced
human being were open to what the eyes of the
officers, jailers; and guards were closed to because of their
position.
The relations· between the zeks and the foremen and the head
foremen were more complex. As "commanders of production"
they were put there to squeeze the prisoners and drive them. But
they were answerable for the course of the work, and the work
couldn't always be carried out in a condition of direct hostility
between them and the zeks. Not everything can be got by hunger
and the stick. Some things require willing agreement, both by
inclination and by imagination: And the .only foremen who were
successful' were those who reached an understanding with the
brigadiers and with the best of the skilled craftsmen among the
prisoners. And the foremen themselves were not just drunks and
not simply enfeebled and poisoned by the constant employment
of slave labor; they were itlso illiterate, and either knew nothing
,of their line of work or else knew it 'Very badly, and because of
this were even more dependent on the brigadiers.
And how interestingly Russian fates sometimes intertwined
there! A carpenters' foreman, Fyodor Ivanovich Muravlyov,
came to us in his cups before a holiday and bared his soul to the
brigadier of painters, Sinebryukhov, an outstanding master of
his trade, a serious, steadfast fellow who was serving out his
tenth year:
"What? You're serving time, you kulak's son? Your father
kept plowing away at the land and accumulated coWs and figured
ing the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and
bread cost 140 rubles on the open markei. And that meant that in the course of
one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above
his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day
for the whole family! Bot at the same time he did ' .•• live. With frank and
open impUdence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and
seek "the second star)'." And tile person who paid our plasterer insane money
for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particolar
way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on' paper.
The old ways-tenacious, ftexible-never died oot, as a result of either curses
or persecotion by the prosecotors.
570 I THE GULAG. ARCHIPELAGO
he would take it all o{f to the kingdom of heaven. And where is
he now? He died in exile? And they imp~ned you too? No,
my father was smarter than that; from his earliest years he drank
down everything and our hut wItS empty, and he didn't even give
his chickens to the collective farm because he didn't have any or
anything else-and right off they made him a brigadier. And I
take after him-drinking vodka, and I know no grief."
And as it turned out he was right: Sinebryukhov, after serving
out his sentence, would be sent off to exile, and Muravlyov . . .
would become the chairman of the trade union committee on
construction.
True, the construction superintendent, Buslov, could not wait
. to get rid of this chairman of the local trade union committee and
foreman. (It was impossible to get rid of him; it was the personnel
department that hired, not the construction superintendent,
and the personnel department would often select loafers
and dolts out of a feeling of kinship.) The construction superintendent
answered for all the materials and wage fund out of
his own pocket, but Muravlyov, out of illiteracy, or else because
he was a simpleton (and he was not at all a malicious character,
and because of this the brigadiers used to carry him), would
squander that wage fund, sign unexamined work vouchers
(which the brigadiers would fill in themselves), and accept badly
done work, which would then have to be broken up and done
over again. And Buslov would have been glad to replace that kind
of foreman with a zek engineer who was working there with a
pick, but because of vigilance the personnel department did not
permit this.
"Well, now, tell mC?: what length 'beams do you have at the
moment on the site?"
Muravlyov sighed deeply. "For the time being I hesitate to tell
you exactly."
And the drunker Muravlyov got, the more impudently he used
to speak to the construction superintendent. And at that point
the construction superintendent decided to besiege him with
paper work. Despite the time'it cost, he began to put all his
orders in writing (keeping carbons in a file). These orders were
not ex~uted, of course, and a fearsome case was being built up.
But the chairman of the local union was not at a loss. He got
himself a half-sheet of wrinkled notebook paper, and took half
an hour to scrawl out with difficulty, clumsily: