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

What the Archipelago Stands On I 151
But there are some who will object that nonetheless there are
really not so many similarities between serfs and prisoners. There
. are more differences.
And we agree with that: there are more differences. But what
is surprising is that all the differences are to the credit of serfdom!
All the differences are to the discredit of the Gulag Archipelago!
The serfs did not work longer than from sunrise to sunset.
The zeks started work in darkness and ended in darkness (and
they didn't always end either). For the serfs'Sundays were sacred;
and the twelve sacred Orthodox holidays as well, and local saints'
days; and a certain number of the twelve days of Christmas (they
went about in'mummers' costumes). The prisoner was fearful
on the eve of every Sunday: he didn't know whether they would
get it off. And he never got holidays at all (just as the Volga
didn't get any days off, remember?); those firsts of May and
those sevenths of November involved more miseries, with searches
and special regimen, than the holida~ were worth (and a certain
number were put into punishment blocks every year precisely
on those very days). For the serfs Christmas and Easter
were genuine holidays; and as for a body search either after
work or in the morning or at night ("Stand next to your cots!"),
the serfs knew not of these! The serfs lived in permanent huts,
regarding them as their own, and when at night they lay down
on top of their stoves, or on their sleeping platform between
ceiling and stovo-their ''polaty''-or else on a bench, they knew:
This is my own place, I have slept here forever and ever, and I
always will. The prisoner did not know what barracks he would
be in on the morrow (and even when he returned from work he
could not be certain that he would sleep in that place that night) .
He did not have his "own" sleeping shelf or his "own" multiple
bunk. He went wherever they drove him. .
The serf on "barshchina," or forced labor, had his own horse,
his own wooden plow, ax, scythe, spindle, chests, dishes, and
clothes. Even the household serfs, as Herzen writes" always had
some clothes of their own which they could leave to their neare'St
and dearest and which were almost never taken away by the
4. A. I. Herzen, Pismo SIMomy Tovarishchll (ullf'r 10 all Old Comrad,,).
Academy Edition of Collected Works. Vol. XX, p. 585.
152 I THE GUL.AG ARCHIPELAGO
estate owner. In spring the zek was forced to turn in his winter
clothing and in the autumn to turn in his summer clothing. At
inventories they emptied his bag and took away for the government
every. extra piece l>f clothing. He was not permitted to
have even a small penknife, or a bowl, and as Jar as livestock
was concerned, only lice. One way or another a serf would cast
his line and catch a fish. The zek caught fish only with a spoon
and only in his gruel. The serf had a little cow named Brownie
or at least a goat and chickens. The zek's lips never touched milk,
and he'd never see hen's eggs for whole decades, and probably
he'd not recognize them if he did.
Old Russi" which experienced Asiatic slavery for seven whole
centuries, did not for the most part- know famine. "In Russia
no one has ever died of starvation," said the proverb. And a
proverb is not made up out.of lies and nonsense. The serfs were
slaves, but they had full bellies. G Th~ Archipe1ago lived for
~edaced in the grip of cruel famine. The zeks would scuffle over
a herring tail from the garbage pail. For Christmas and Easter
even the thinnest ~rf peasant broke his fast with fat bacon. But
even the best worker in camp could get fat bacon only in parcels
from home.
The serfs lived in families. The sale or exchange ·of a serf
away from his family was a universally recognized and proclaimed'
barbarism. Popular Russian literature waxed indignant
over this. Hundreds of serfs, perhaps. thousands (but this is unlikely),
were torn from their families. But not millions. The
zek was separated from his family on the first" day of his arrest
and, in 50 percent of all cases--forever. If a sQn was arrested
with his father (as we heard from Vitkovsky) or a wife together
with her husband, the greatest care was taken to see that
they did not meet at the same c~p. And if by some chance they
5. There is testimony on this for all the Russian centuries. In the seventeenth,
Yurl Krizhanich wrote that the peasants and artisans of Muscovy lived
more bountifully than those of the West, that the poorest inhabitants in Russia
ate good bread, fish. meat. Even in the Time of Troubles ''the long-preserved
granaries had not been exhausted, there were stacks standing in the fields;
threshing floors were filled full with specially stacked sheaves and stooks
and haystacks-for from four to ten years" (Avraami Palitsyn). In the eigh"
teenth century, Fonvizin, comparing· the standard of living of the· Russian
peasants with that of the peasants of Languedoc, Provence. wrote: "I find,
objeCtively judging things, that the state of our pea·ants is incomparably happier."
In the nineteenth century, Pushkin wrote of the serf village:
''The.evidence of abundance and work is everywhere."
:,