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

· Campside I S7S
and from which the drunkards, howling out songs, belching and
stumbling, wandered around through the whole settlement. And
among the very same mud puddles and mass of squshy mud
was the second spiritual center-the Club, its floor covered with
hulls of spat-out sunflower seeds, scuffed by boots, with a flyblown
wall newspaper fiom the. previous year, with the constantly
grumbling loudspeaker over the door, with ~e good old mother
curses at the dances, and the knife fights after the film show. The
style and tone of the local places was "Don't be out late," and if
you took a girl to a dance, the safest thing to do was to put a
hbrseshoe in your ·mitten. (Yes, and some of the girls there were
such that even a gang of seven youths would flee from them.)
This club was a knife in the officers' hearts. Naturally, it was
quite impossible for officers to go to dances in a shed like that
among people of that kind. The enlisted men of the guard went
there when they were on leave passes. But the trouble was that
the young, childless officers' wives were drawn there too, even
Without their husbands. And they would end up daficing·with the
enlisted men! Rank-and-file soldiers embraced the officers' wives!
So how could you expect faultless obedience from them on dUty
the next day! After all, this was equality, apd no army can stand
up under those conditions! Unable to prevent their wives from
going to the dances, the officers managed to get the dances
declared out of bounds to enlisted men. (Let some dirty "volnyashki"
embrace their wives!) But what this did was to..introduce
a crack in the symmetry of the political indoctrination of
tb,e enlisted men: that we are all happy and equal citizens of the
Soviet State, and that our enemies are, you see, behind barbed
wire.
Many such complex tensions were hidden in campside, and
many contradictions among its eight categories. Mingling in
everyday life with the repressed and semirepressed, honest Soviet
citizens would not neglect to reproach them and put them in their
place, especially when it was a matter of a room in a new barracks.
And the jailers, as wearers of the MVD uniform, claimed
to be on a higher plane than the ordinary free people. And then
there were invariably women in everyone's bad books, because
all the single guys would have been lost without them. And there
were also women who had plans for getting a.permanent man.
That kind would go to the camp gatehouse when they knew there
would be a release-and they would grab complete strangers by
576 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
the sleeve: "Come to' my place! I have a place, and I will keep
you warm. I will buy you a suit! Well, where are you going?
After all, they'll just jug you again."
And there was also a security surveillance over the whole
settlement. The settlement had its own "godfather." And its own
stoolies, and they would flex their muscles: just who was taking
letters from the zeks to be mailed outside, and who was selling
camp clothing behind the comer of the barracks.
And then, too, of course, there was less sense of the presence
of the Law among the inhabitants of campside than anywhere
else in the Soviet Union, or that their barracks. room was a castle.
Some had "unclean" passports, and others had no passports at
all, and others had been imprisoned in camp themselves, and
others were members of families. And thus all these independent
unconvoyed citizens were even more obedient than the prisoners
to the command of a man with a rifle, even more meek in the
face of the man with a revolver. When they saw one, they did
not throw back their proud heads and declare: "You don't have
the right!" They would shrink and bow their heads-and slink
past.
And this sense of the unlimited power of the bayonet and the
uniform hovered so confidently over the expanses of the Archipelago
and campside, so communicated itself to everyone who
entered the region, that the free woman (P--china) who flew
to Krasnoyarsk with her little girl to visit her husband in camp
allowed herself to be searched and patted all over at the first
demand of the MVD officials in the plane, and allowed her child
to be completely undressed. (Since then the little girl has wept
every time she has seen the Skyblues.)
But if someone now says that there is nothing sadder than these
camp environs and that campside is a sewer, we will reply: That
depends on the individual.
A Yakut named Kolodeznikov got three years in 1932 for
rustling reindeer, and, under our perspicacious relocation policy,
was sent from his native Kolyma to serve his time near Leningrad.
He served out his time and was in Leningrad itself, and he
brought his family some bright-colored dress materials, yet for
many years after complained to his fellow tribesmen and to the
zeks who had been sent from Leningrad: "Oh, it's boring where
you come from! It's awful!"