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

122 I' THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
Chapter 4
•
The Archipelago Hardens
And the clock of history was striking.
In 1934, at the January Plenum of the Central Committee and
. Cen~al Control Commission of the Soviet Communist Party,
the Great Leader (having already in mind, no doubt, how many
he would soon have to do tlWay with) declared that the withering
away of the state (which had been awaited virtually from 1920
on) would arrive via, believe it or not, the ID;aximum intensification
of state pow.er! , .
This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to
every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, ever the loyal apprentice,
immediately pieted it up: "And this means the maximum
strengthening of. corrective-labor institutions."l
Enf.rY into socialism via the m8.ximum strengthening of prison!
And this was not some satirical magazine cracking Ii joke ·either,
but was said by the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union! And
thus it was that the iron grip of the Ye.zhov terror was prepared
even without Yezhov.
After -all, the Second Five-Year Plan-and who remembers
this? (for no one in our country ever remembers anything, for
memory is the Russians' weak spot, especially memory of the
bad)-the Second Five-Year Plan included among its glisteniJ;lg
(and to this very day unfulfilled) goals the following: "the up"
rooting of the vestiges of capitalism from people's consciousness."
This meant that this process of uprooting had to be finished by
1. Vyshinsky, op. cit., Preface.
1938. Judge for yourself: by what means were these vestiges to
be so swiftly uprooted?
"Soviet places of confinement on the threshold of the Second
Five-Year Plan not only are not losing but are even gaining in
significance." (Not one year had passed since Kogan's prediction
that camps would soon cease to exist at all. But Kogan did not
know about the January Plenum!) ~In the epoch of entrance
into socialism the role of corrective-labor institutions as weapons
of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as organs of repression, as
means of compulsion and education [compulsion'is already in
the first place!] must grow still further and be strengthened."2
(For otherwise what was to h~pen to the cominand corps of the
NKVD? Was it just supposed to disappear?)
So who is going to reproach our Progressive Doctrine with having
fallen behind practice? All this was printed in black on white,
but we still didn't know how to read. The year 1937 was publicly
predicted and provided with a foundation.
And the hairy hantl tossed out all the frills and gewgaws too.
Labor collectives? Prohibited! What nonsense was that-selfgovernment
in camp! You couldn't think up anything better than
the brigade anyway~ What's all this about political indoctrination
periods? Forget it! The prisoners are sent there to work and they
don't have to understand anything. At Ukhta they had proclaimed
the "liquidation of the last mUltiple bunk"? This was a political
mistake-were the prisoners to be put to bed on cots with springs?
Cram them on the bunks twice as thickly! Time of! sentences?
Abolish that before anything! What do you want-that the court's
work should go for nothing? And what about those who already
have credits toward time of!' sentence? Consider them canceled!
(1937.) They are still permitting visits in some camps? Forbid
them everywhere. Some prison or other permitted a priest's body
to be turned over for burial outside prison? You must be insane!
You are providing an opportunity for anti-Soviet demonstrations.
There must be an exemplary punishment for this! And make it
clear: the corpses of deceased prisoners belong to Gulag, and
the location of graves is top-secret. Professional and technical
courses for prisoners? Dissolve them! They should have done
their studying in freedom. And what about VTsIK-what VTsIK
2. Ibid., p', 449. One of the authors, Apeter, was the new Chief of Gulag.
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