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

Our Muzzled Freedom I 635
destroyed in the ·twenties). These feelings were the natural defense
of. any family· and every person, particularly because no
one could ever quit work or leave, and every little detail was
kept in sight and within earshot for years. The secretiveness of
the Soviet person is by no means superfluous, but is absolutely
necessary, even though to a foreigner it may at times seem superhuman.
The former Tsarist officer K.U. survived and was never
arrested only because when he got married he did not tell his
wife about his past. His brother, N.U., was arrested-and the
wife of the arrested man, taking advantage of the fact that they
lived in different cities at the time of his arrest, hid his arrest
from her own father and mother-so they would not blurt it
out. She preferred telling them and everyone else that her husband
had abandoned her, and then playing that role a long time!
Now these were the secrets of one family which I was told thirty
years later. And what urban family did not have such secrets?
. In 1949 the father of a girl who was a fellow student of V.L's
was arrested. In these cases everyone would shun such a student,
and that was considered natural. But V.L did. not shun·her, and
openly expressed sympathy with the girl, and tried to . find ways
to help her out. Frightened by such unusual conduct, the girl
rejected V J.'s help and participation, and lied to him, saying she
did not believe in the innocence of her arrested father, and that
he had evidently. concealed his crime from his family all his life.
(And it was only during the times of Khrushchev that their
tongues were loosened: the girl told him she had decided he was
either a police informer or else a member of an· anti-Soviet
organization out to rope in the dissatisfied.)
This universal mutual mistrust had the effect of deepening
the mass-grave pit of slavery. The moment someone began to
,-speak up frankly, everyone stepped back and shunned him: "A
provocation!" And therefore anyone who burst out with a sincere
protest was predestined to loneliness and alienation.
4. Universal Ignorance. Hiding things from each qAl~, and
not trusting each other, we ourselves helped imp~JWmt that
absolute secrecy, absolute misinformation, among us which was
the cause of causes of everything that took place-:-including both
the millions of arrests and the inass approval of them also. Informing
one another of nothing, neither shouting nor groaning,
636 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAG.O
and learning nothing from one another, we were completely in
the hands of the newspapers and the official orators. Every day
they pushed in our faces some new piece of incitement, like a
photognj.ph of a railroad wreck (sabotage) somewhere three
thousand miles away. And what we really needed to learn about,
which was what had happened on our apartment landing that
day, we had no way of finding out.
How could you become a citizen, knowing nothing about
life around you? Only when. you yourself were caught in the
trap would you find out-too late.
5. Squealing was developed to a mind-boggling extent. Hundreds
of thousands of Security officers in their offitlial offices, in
the innocent rooms of official buildings, and in prearranged
apartments, sparing neither paper nor. their unoccupied tinIe,
tirelessly recruited and summoned stool pigeons to give reports,
and this in such enormous numbers as they could never have
found necessary for collecting information. They even. recruited
obvi!)usly useless and unsuitable people who would most certainly
not· agree to report to them-for example, a religious believer,
the wife of the Baptist minister Nikitin, who had died in camp.
Nonetheless, she was kept standing for several hours while being
questioned, then was arrested, and then transferred to worse
work ather factory. One of the purposes of such extensive recruitment·
was, evidently, to make each subject feel the breath
of the stool pigeons on his own skin. So that in every group of
people, in every office, in every apartment, either there would be
an informer or else the people there would be afraid there was.
I will give my own su~rficial speculative estimate: Out of
every four to five city dwellers there would most certainly be·
one who at least once in his life had received a propo~al to become
an informer. And it might even have been more widespread
than that. Quite recently I carried out my own spot check,
both among groups of ex-prisoners and among groups of those
who· have always been free. I asked which out of the group they
had tllied to recruit and when and how. And it turned out that
out Qf several people at a table all had ~ived such proposals
at OIie tinIe or another! .
Nadezhda Mandelstam correCtly concludes: Beyond the purpose
of weakening ties between people, there was another purpose
as well. Any person who had let himself· be recruited would,