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

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea
I S'J
postponed till summer?) "The task seemed insuperable-400,OOO
cubic yards of excavations .... " (North of the Arctic Circle! In .
the middle of winter! And they called it earth? It was harder than
any granite!) " ... performed solely by hand-with pick, crowbar
and spade." (And did they at least have mittens?) ''The work was
delayed by the need for a multitude of bridges. WOrk went on for
twenty-four hours.a day in three shifts, and the Arctic night was
sliced by the light of incandescent kerosene lanterns as clearings
were cut through the pine woods and stumps were dug out, in the
midst of snowstorms which covered the roadbed deeper than the
height of a man. "!Ill
Now go back and read that over. Then ,close your eyes and
picture the scene: Ypu are a helpless city dweller, a person who
sighs and pines like a character in Chekhov. And the~e you are in
that icy hell! Or you are a Turkmenian in your embroidered skullruoy~ac
"tyubeteika"-out there in that night blizzard! Digging
out stumps!
This was in those best and brightest twenties, before any "personality
cult," when the white, yellow,. black, and brown races
of the Earth looked upon our country as the torchbearer of n-eedom:
23 This was during those selfsame years when they used to
sing amusing ditties about Solovki from the nation's vaudeville
stages.
And so, imperceptibly-via. work parties-the former CODcept
of the Special Purpose Camp, totally isolated on its
islands, di~olved. And the Archipelago, born and come to maturity
on Solovki, began its malignant advance through the nation.
A problem arose: The territory of this country had to be spread
out iii front of the Archipelago-but without allowing the Archipelago
to conquer it, to distract ~t, to take it ~ver or assimilate it
to itself. Every little island and every little hillock of the Archipelago
had to be encircled by a hostile, stormy Soviet seascape.
It was permissible for the two worlds to interlock in separate strata
-but not to intermingle!
And this Nogtev ~port which evoked a ''whisper of astonish-
22. G. Fridnian, ''Skazochnaya Byl" ("A Fairy Tale"), Solovetskiye Ostrova,
1930, No.4, pp. 4~. .
23. Oh, Bertrand Russelll Ob, Hewlett 1ohnsonl Where, oh where, was
your flaming ClJIISclence a. that time?
58 I THE GULAG ARCHIPE'LAGO
ment" was, after all, articulated so as to initiate a resolution, a
resolution by the workers of Kem, which would then appear in
the ~ewspapers and be posted in the villages:
... the intensifying class struggle inside the U.S.S.R .... and the
danger of war which is increasing as never before 24 • • " require of
the organs of the OGPU and USLON even greater solidarity with the
workers, vigilance~ . ." .
. . . by organ!zation of public opinion ... a struggle is to be waged
against free persons' rubbing elbows ' with prisoners ... against concealment
of escapees .. ". against purchase of stolen and government
property from prisoners ... and against all kinds of malicious rumors
which are being disseminated by class enemies about USLON.
And just what were those '!malicious rumors"? That people
were imprisoned in camp, and without cause! '
And one more point: ". . . it is the duty of every person to
inform ...."20
'
Disgusting free people! They were making friends with zeks.
They were concealing escapees. This was a terrible danger. If an
end was not put to it, there would be no Archipelago. And the
country would be a goner, and the Revolution would be ,a goner.
And, therefore, to combat "malicious" rumors, honest progressive
rumors were spread: that the camps were populated by murderers
and rapists! That every escapee was a dangerous bandit!
Lock your doors! Be frightened! Save your children! Catch them,
turn them in, help the work of the OGPU! And if you knew of
, someone who did not help thus-inform!
Now, with the spread of the Archipelago, escapes multiplied.
There was the hopelessness of the logging and road-building work
parties-yet at the same time there was a whole continent beneath
the feet- of the escapees. So there was hope in spite of all. However,
escape plans had excited the Solovki prisonerS even at a
time when SLON was still dn a totally isolated island. The
innocents believed in the end of their three-year term, but those
who were foresighted had already grasped the truth that they
would never see freedom in either three or twenty-three years.
And that meant freedom lay only in escape.
But how could they escape from Solovki? For half a year the
24 .. In our country thtngs are always increasing or intensifying as never be-.
fore. They never ever get weaker. '
25. Solovetskiye OSlrovo, 1930, No. 2-3. p. 60.