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

The Archipelago Metastasizes ~ 83
writers speak only with condescemionof engineers as a class, as
of a foul, low breed. On page 125 the book accuses a significant
segment of the Russian. prerevolutionary engineering profession
of swindling. And this is not an individual accusation, not at all.
(Are we to understand that engineers were even engaged in
wrecking Tsarism?) And this was written by people of whom
not one was capable of extracting even the simplest square root
(which eVClt GCrtaiD horses do ill circuses).
The authOfS repeat to us all the nightmare rumors of those
years as historical gospel truth: that workers were poisoned with
arsenic in factory dining rooms; that it is not just a piece of
stupid carelessness if milk from the cow on '8 state farm went
sour, but an enemy's stratagem to compel the country to swell
up from starvation (and that's exactly how they write). In indefinite
and faceless terms they write about that sinister collective
kulak who went to work in a factory and threw a bolt into
the lathe. Well, after all, they are oracles of the human heart, and
it is evidently easier for them to imagine this: a person has ~anaged
by some miracle to avoid exile to the tundra, has escaped
to the city, and by some still greater miracle has managed to get
work in a factory when he is already. dying of hunger, and at
this point, instead of feeding his family, he throws a bolt into the
lathe! .
Then, on the other side, the authors cannot and do not wish
to restrain their admiration for the leaders of the canal wor~,
those employers whom they stubbornly call Chekists, although
it is already the thirties, thereby forcing us to use the name too.
They admired not only their minds, their wills, their organization,
but also them-in the highest human sense, as surprising
beings. Indicative was the episode with Yakov Rappoport. (See
lllustration No. 12: he does not look to be stupid.) This student
at Dorpat University, who failed to complete the course there,
was evacuated to Voronezh, where he became the Deputy·Chairman
of the Provincial Cheka in his new homet.nd, and then
Deputy Chief of Construction at Belomorstroi. In the words
of the authors, Rappoport, while on ail inspection tour of the
construction site, was disatisfi~ with the way the workers were
pushing their wheelbarrows along, and he posed an annihilating
question to the engineer in charge: Do you remember what the
cosine of 45 degrees is equal to? And the engineer was crushed
84 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
and put to ,shame by Rappoport's erudition,!8 and immediately
made corrections in his instructions aimed at wrecking, and the ,
movement of the wheelbarrows immediately moved onto a high
technological level. And with such anecdotes as these the authors
not only enrich their exposition artistically but also 'lift us
onto scientific heights! -
And the higher the post occupied by the employer, the greater
the worship with which he is described by the authors. Unrestrained
praises are lavished on the Chief of Gulag, Matvei Berman*
(Illustration No. 13).14 Much enthusiastic praise is also
lavished on Lazar Kogan (Illustration No. '14), a former Anarchist
who in 1918 went over to the side of the victorious
Bolsheviks, and who proved his loyalty in the post 'of Chief of
the Special Branch of the Ninth Army, then as Deputy Chief of
the Armies of the OGPU, and was one of the organizers of Gulag
and then became Chief of Construction of the Belomor Canal.
And it is even more the case that the authors caD. only endorse
COIIJ!llde Kogan's words about the iron commissar: "Comrade
YagQ.da is our chief, our constant leader." That is what more
than anything doomed this book! The glorification of Genrikh
Yagoda was tom out, together with his'portrait, from even that
one copy of the book which survived for us, and we had to
search a long time in order to find this portrait of him (Ilustra~
tion No. 15).
This same tone permeated the camp leaflets even more strongly.
Here, for example: "The honored guests, Comrades Kaganovich,
Yagoda, and Berman, arrived at Lock No.3. (Their portraits
hung in every barracks.) People worked more quickly. Up above
they smiled-and their smile .was transmitted to hundreds of
people down in the excavation. "l~ And in officially inspired songs:
Yagoda,in person leads and teaches us,
Keen is his eye, and his hand is strong.
13. And Rappoport got the meaning of the cosine all wrong. (Belomorsko- <
Baltiisky Kanal, op. cit., p._ 10.)
14. M. Berman-M .. Bormann; once again there is only a one- or two-letter
difference. Remember Eichmans and Eichmann. ,
'
IS. Y. Kuzemko. 3-i Shlyuz (The Third Lock), KVO Dmitlag Publishers.
1935. "Not to be distributed beyond the boundaries of the camp." Because of
the rarity of this edition. we can recommend another combination: "Kaganovich.
Yagoda and Khrushchev inspect camps on the Belomor Canal," in D. D.
Runes, Despotism, New YOfk, 1963, p. 262. , ,