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

What the Archipelago Stands On I 167
that there should have been a shortage of timber because of the
fictitious inflation of quantities at every stage of its movement.
However, the fact was that the expediter at the landing "bourse"
managed to add so much fictitious timber to deliveries in the
course of the summer season that by fall the timber-rafting office
had surpluses. waiting in the water! They had no, been touched.
And they must not be left in the river for the winter, because
if they were, it would be neces~aiy in the spring to call in a plane
to bomb them loose. And therefore this surplus timber which no
one needed was allowed in late autumn to float downstream into
the White Sea!
Is that miraculous? Strange and wonderful? But it didn't just
happen in one place. At the lumber yards in Unzhlag there was
always surplus lumber left over which hadn't been loaded into
railroad cars, and which was no longer listed as belonging to
anyone anywhere! And for years after some lumber yard had
been total~y shut down people would subsequently journey to
it fmm nearby camps for ownerless dry firewood, and bum in
their stoves the stripped pit props which had taken so much
suffering to produce.
And all this was a matter of attempting·to survive, not to enrich
oneself, and certainly not to plunder the state.
The state cannot be so excessively fierce-and force its subjects
into deceit.
. And here is what the prisoners used to say: "Without 'tukhta'
and ammonal, never could we have built the canal!"
So all that is what the Archipelago stands on.
Chapter 6
•
"They've Brought the
Fascists!"
"They've brought the Fascists! They've brought the Fascists!"
the young zek lads and girls shouted excitedly, running through
the camp when our two trucks, each loaded with thirty Fascists,
entered the perimeter of the smaIl rectangle. of the Novy
IyerusaIim* Camp.
We had just experienced one of the supreme hours of our life
-the one hour's drive from Moscow's Krasnaya Presnya
Prison-what is called a short-distance prisoner transport.
Though we had spent the ride with our knees hunched up in
the rear of the trucks, nonetheless all the air, the speed, the colors
were ours. Oh, -forgotten brightness of the world! The streetcars
were red, the· trolley-buses sky-blue, the crowd in white and
many-colored. Do they themselves see these colors as they crowd
onto-the buses? And on top of this today, for some reason, alI
the buildings and the lampposts· were decorated with banners
and streamers, some sort of unexpected holiday-August 14,
coinciding with the holiday of our liberation from prison. (On
this day the capitulation of Japan had been announced, ending
the seven-day war.) On the Volokolamsk Highway a whirlwind'
of scents of new-mown hay and of the early evening freshness
af the meadows swirled around our shaven heads. This meadow
breeze-who could breathe it in more greedily than prisoners?
'. Real genuine green blinded our eyes, grown used to gray and
more gray. I turned up on the transport with Gammerov and
J68
p