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

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea' I 59
sea was frozen over, but not solidly, and 'in places there was open
water, and the snowstorms raged, and the frost bit hard, and
things were enveloped in mists and darkness. And in the spring
and for a large part of the summer there were the long white
nights with clear visibility over long distances for the patrOlling
cutters. And it was only when the nights began to lengthen, in
the late summer and the autumn, that the time was right. Not for
prisoners in the·kremlin, of course, but for those who were out
in work parties, where a prisoner might have freedom of move-·
ment and time to build a boat or a raft near the shore~d to
cast off at night (even just riding off on a log for that matter) .
and strike out at random, hoping above all to encounter a foreign
lihip. The bustle among the guards and the embarkation of the
cutters would reveal to the islanders the fact of an escape-and
there would be a tremor of rejoicing among the prisoners, as if
they were themselves escaping. They would ask in a whisper:
Had he been caught yet? Had he been found yet? Many must
have drowned without ever getttng anywhere. One or another of
them reached the Karelian shore perhaps--and if he did was more
silent than the grave ..
And there was a famous escape from. Kem to England. This
particular daredevil (his name is 'unknown to us-that's the
breadth of our horizon!) knew Engl~h and concealed it. He
managed to get assigned to loading timber in Kern, and he told
his story to the Englishmen. The convoY discovered he was missing
and delayed the ship' for nearly a whole week and searched
it several times without finding the fugitive. (What happened was .
that whenever a search party started from the shore, they lowered
him Qverboard on the opposite side on the ahchor chain, where he
clung under water with a breathing pipe held in his teeth.) An
enormous fine had to be paid for delaying the ship, so they finally
. decided to take a chance and let the ship go, thinking that perhaps
the prisoner had drowned.
Then a book came out in England, even it would seem, in
more than one printing. Evidently An Island Hell by S. A. Malsagoff.28*
.
TJlis book astounded Europe (and no doubt they accused its
fugitive author of exaggerating, for, after all, the friends of the
26. And is this -another book you have not read, Sir Bertrand Russell?
60 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
New Society could not permit themselves to believe this slanderous
volume) because it contradicted what was already well
known; the newspaper Rote Fahne had described Solovki as a
paradise. (And we hope that the paper's correspondent spent time
in the Archipelago later on.) And it also contradicted those
albums about Solovki disseminated by Soviet diplomatic missions
in Europe: fine-quality paper and true-to-life photographs of the
cozy monks' cells. (Nadezhda Surovtseva, our Communist in
Austria, received this album from the Soviet Mission in-Vienna
and indignantly denounced the slander about Solovki current in
Europe. And at the very same time the sister of her future husband
was, in fact, imprisoned at Solovki, and she herself was predestined
to be walking single file in the Yaroslavl Isolator in two
years' time.)
Slander or not, the breach had been a misfortune! And so a
commission of VTsIK, under the chairmanship of the "conscience
of the Party," Comrade Solts (Illustration No. 10), was sent off
to find out what was going on tb.ere on those Solovetsky Islands
(for, of course, they didn't have the least idea!). But in fact the
commission merely rode along the Murmansk Railroad, and they
didn't do much of anything even there. And they thought it right
to send to the islands-no, to implore to go there!-none less
than the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, who had recently
returned to live in t~e proletarian Fatherland. His testimony
would be the very best refutation of that repulsive foreign forgery.
The rumor reached Solovki before Gorky himself-and the
prisoners' hearts beat faster and the guards hustled and bustled.
One has to know prisoners in order to imagine their anticipation!
The falcon, the stormy petrel, was about to swoop down upon the
nest of injustice, violence, and secrecy. The leading Russian
writer! He will give them hell! He will show them! He, the father,
will defend! They awaited Gorky almost like a universal amnesty. -
The chiefs were alarmed too: as best they could, they hid the
monstrosities and polished things up for show. Transports of
prisoners were sent from the kremlin to distant work parties so
that fewer would remain there; many patients were discharged
from the Medical Section and the whole thing was cleaned up.
And they set up a "boulevard" of fir trees without roots, which
were simply pushed down into the ground. (They only had to
last a few days before withering.) It led to the Children's Colony,