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

Or Corruption? I 627
by it out in freedom, and we strained our ears to hear from the
old camp veterans "how to live in camp."
But we ought to have known how to live (and how to die)
without any camp.
And perhaps, Variam Tikhonovich Shalamov, as a general
rule friendship between people does arise in need and misfortune,
even in extreme misfortune' too-but not between such
withered and nasty people. as we were, given our decades of
upbringing? .
H corruption was so inevitable, then why did Olga Lvovna
Sliozberg not abandon her freezing friend on the forest trail, but -
stay behind for nearly certain death together with her-and
save her? Wasn't that an extreme of misfortune?
And if corruption was so inevitable, then where did Vasily
Mefodyevich Yakovenko spring from? He servCd out two terms,
had only just been released, was living as a free employee 'in
Vorkuta, and was' just beginning to crawl around without an
escort and acquire his first tiny nest. It was 1949. In Vorkuta
they began to rearrest former zeks and give them new sentences.
An arrest psychosis! There was'panic among the free employees!
How could they hold on to their freedom? How could they be
less noticeable? But Y. D. Grodzensky, a friend of Yakovenko
from the same Vorkuta camp, was arrested . .During the interrogation
he was lQsing strength and was close to death. There was
no one to bring him food parcels. And Yakovenko fearlessly
brought him food parcels! If you want to, you dogs, rake me in
tool
Why was this inan not corrupted!
And do not all those who survived remember one or another'
person who reached out a hand to him in camp and saved him
at a difficult moment?
Yes, the camps were calculated and intended to corrupt. But
this didn't mean that they succeeded in crushing everyone.
Just as in nature the process of oxidation never occurs without
an acompan~ng reduction (one substance oxidizes while at the
same time another reduces), so in camp, too (and everywhere
in life), there is no corruption without aScent. They exist alongside
one another.·
In the next part I hope still to show how in other camps, in
the· Special Camps, a different environment was created after a
628 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
certain time: the process of corruption was greatly hampered and
the process of ascent became attractive even to the camp
careerists •
•
Well, and what about correction? How did things go. with
correction, after all? ("Correction" is a social and state concept
and does not coincide with ascent.) All the systems of justice in
the world, not just our own, dream that criminals will not merely
serve out their term but will also become ~orected in the process,
in other words behave so as not to return to the defendant's bench
in court, particularly fpr the same offense.s .
. Dostoyevskyexclaims: "Whom did hard labor ever correct?"
The ideal of correction existed in -Russian legislation after the
great reform. (The whole of Chekhov's Sakhalin grew out of
. that ideal.) But was it ever successfully implemented?
P. Yakubovich thought about this a gteat deal and wrote:
The terrorist regimen of hard labor "corrects" only those who
have not become depraved-but they would not commit a second
crime even without it. Yet this regimen only depraves a corrupt
person, compelling him to be sly and hypocritical, and to do his
. utmost not to leave any clues behind.
What can one say about our Corrective Labor Camps?
Students of penology (Gefiingniskunde) always believed that a
prisoner must not be driven to total despair, that he must always
be left hope and a way out. The reader has already seen that our
Corrective Labor Camps drove prisoners only and precisely to
total despair. .
Chekhov spoke truly: "Soul-searching-that is what's truly
needed for correctiOIi." But it was soul-searching that the managers
of our camps feared most of all. The common barracks,
brigades, work collectives, were all specially designed to disperse
and dismember that dangerous soul-searching.
t~hW sort of correction could there be in our camps! All they
could do was damage: instill the thieves' morality, instill the
5. Nonetheless, they never strove to "correct" the 58's--in other· words to
avoid imprisoning them a second time. We have already cited the fr!Ulk statements
of the I!enologists on this subject. They wanted to exterminate the 58's
through labor. And the fact that we survived was due to .... our own initiative.