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Roy Medvedev

Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago: Part Two

We print here the first English translation of a discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, I1 by the distinguished Russian historian and intellectual . Elsewhere in this issue, Peter Reddaway analyzes the exchanges of opinion going on among the Russian . believe that the issues raised by people like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Medvedev-including their differences of outlookare among the most important political matters of our time. - EDS.

tions, the way died and were killed, The second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s and the unceremonious way they were bur- Gulag Archipelago has now appeared. Where ied-all these things find their place in Sol- the first volume consisted in a detailed investi- zhenitsyn’s book. The author describes the gation of everything that preceded the arrival various types of hard labor and the starvation of millions of Soviet people in Stalin’s con- diet imposed on the zeks; he studies not only centration camps-the system of arrests, the the world of the camps but also the world various forms of confinement, interrogation immediately surrounding them, the world of with torture, judicial and extrajudicial perse- “campside”; and he surveys the peculiarities cution, transports and transit pris- of psychology and behavior found among the ons-the second volume gets down to the prisoners and their jail keepers (or “camp study of the primary and fundamental part of keepers,” in Solzhenitsyn’s terminology). the Gulag empire, the corrective or, as Sol- Like the first volume, which came out in zhenitsyn rightly calls them, the “destructive” December 1973, this volume deserves the labor camps. Here nothing escapes the au- highest estimation, especially because it is a thor’s attention: the origin and history of the conscientious investigation, artistically pre- camps, the economics of forced labor, the ad- sented and based on authentic fact. True, the ministrative structure, the categories of pris- second volume did not have the moral shock oners and everyday life of the inmates, the effect of the first, did not stun and shake the position of women and juveniles, the relations reader so. Perhaps because it was the second between ordinary zeks and the trusties,’ be- volume; or perhaps, for me, this impression tween criminals and politicals, the camp has to do with the fact that I have read dozens guards, the convoy guards, the “information” and dozens of memoirs by former camp in- service and the recruiting of stool pigeons, the mates (most of them, of course, never pub- system of punishments and “incentives,” the lished) and have recorded hundreds of ac- functioning of the hospitals and medical sta- counts and pieces of testimony about camp ‘Zek: In camp slang, abbreviation of the Russian word for life. It is also significant that, while the basic “prisoner,” zaklyuchenny . facts are reliable (and there are noticeably

155 fewer petty factual inaccuracies in the second Alas, we can have little hope that memorials volume of Gulag Archipelago than in the will be erected even where the largest concen- first), many of the author’s judgments and tration carnps stood, or that the camp barracks, opinions are too one-sided and categorical and compounds, towers, and mines will be restored his general observations are by no means al- in museum form, or that some sort of markings ways well-grounded. This is particularly true will be placed at the countless camp cem- of the way he obviously lays his colors on too eteries, where there are probably more Soviet thickly in depicting the world of “the free” in people buried than fell in the war against Nazi his chapter “ Our Muzzled Freedom. ” Germany. There is little hope that an eternal But, of course, none of the shortcomings of flame will bum here or that the names of those the second volume overshadow the artistic and who died and were killed will be chiseled in social significance of this book, which has no marble. It is quite possible that books will equal in all our literature on the camps. remain the only monuments to these people. Several years ago I heard of a certain occur- One such book, , will rence from a former “son of Gulag” who had easily outlive those who wish to suppress it gone to visit Vorkuta as a free citizen (many and will stand as an unforgettable tribute for such veterans of the camps feel the lurge to those to whom its author dedicated it, all those visit the places where their years had been who perished in the camps, “all those who did spent working behind barbed wire; Solzhen- not live to tell it.” itsyn too writes about this). It was an occur- rence common in those parts. A foundation pit Camp Myths for a new school in Vorkuta had been started.’ IN OUR COUNTRY, where there is no freedom No sooner had the thin topmost layer of soil of the press or freedom of information, where been removed than the teeth of the excavating most information circulates by certain secret machines revealed a huge deposit of human channels, a multitude of rumors inevitably bones. This was not of course the site of a arise and dozens of different myths have public primitive human settlement, and no archeolo- currency and are accepted by many as unques- gists came there. It was one of those giant tionable truths. Under the conditions existing mass graves that grew near the northern in the camps such legends, rumors, and camps-great pits, already dug in the autumn, myths-often far removed from reality-were into which thousands of corpses were thrown all the more likely to find fertile ground. Na- during the winter-prisoners who died or were talya Reshetovskaya has recently contended shot-to be covered over later on, with the that Solzhenitsyn’s book is essentially based arrival of the brief northern summer. Construc- on this camp f~lklore.~That is certainly not tion of the school was temporarily halted, not so. Of course Solzhenitsyn, through no fault of for the purpose, naturally, of setting up a mon- his own, had no chance to check documentary ument to the unknown convicts; the freshly evidence in order to verify much of the infor- bared bones of these zeks were carted off by night and buried somewhere outside the city 3Natalya Restetovskaya (born 1920): Solzhenitsyn’s first limits, and this new cemetery was not marked wife; they married in 1940, were separated by the war, in any noticeable way. At the original site of then by his imprisonment in 1945; she divorced him in the mass grave, school construction was re- 1950 while he was in the camps. After his release and rehabilitation (195657). they remarried in the late 1950s. sumed and completed. before he won fame with Ivan Denisovich. In the late 1960s they separated again, and he established a relation- *Vorkura: One of the largest complexes of the ship with his present wife, Natalya Svetlova. The author- Stalin era, mainly set up for mining the coal of the Pech- ities, to harass him further, long supported Reshetovskaya ora River basin in the arctic northeast of European . in her refusal to agree to a divorce. They were finally The town of the same name, center of the region, was divorced by the time he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. built by prisoner labor in 1931-32 and is now a city of Reshetovskaya’s memoirs were published outside the So- nearly 100,OOO. The Vorkuta camps were apparently dis- viet Union (English edition, Sanya: My Life wirh mantled after major strikes by prisoners in 1953. Solzhenitsyn, New York, 1975).

156 ROY MEDVEDEV mation he obtained from fellow inmates and Now Solzhenitsyn himself writes that the first from subsequent correspondents and inform- juveniles came to Solovki only in mid-March ants. However, both his own camp experience 1929. How could the newly arrived inhabitants and his intuition as an investigator and an artist of the children’s colony, isolated from the enable him in most cases to distinguish sharply adult prisoners, find out everything that had enough between truth and invention in the ac- gone on at Solovki for years before? But if this counts he has recorded. If some legends do particular anecdote related by Solzhenitsyn crop up in the pages of Gulag Archipelago, seems dubious, no such doubts arise over his rare as they may be, this happens for the most own story of the many illegal and arbitrary part when the topic is the distant past or the actions committed at Solovki, a narrative that lives and “affairs” of those high up in the can be confirmed by other accounts and other “organs,” for example, Minister of State Se- witnesses. curity Abak~mov.~ I think that among such myths we must Where the Camps Came From include Solzhenitsyn’s story of the 14-year-old SOLZHENITSYN DATES the existence of concen- boy who on June 20, 1929, during Gorky’s tration camps for political opponents in our visit to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp country from 1918. This is not slander, QS asked to speak with Gorky in private and then some of his detractors contend. Solzhenitsyn spent an hour and a half telling the famous quotes Lenin’s telegram to Yevgeniya Bosh, writer about all the illegalities committed in president of the Penza Province Executive that camp.5 According to Solzhenitsyn’s ac- Committee, advising “lock up all the doubtful count, Gorky, after talking with the boy, left ones in a concentration camp outside the the room in tears. But not only did he do city.” (Lenin, Polynoye Sobraniye Sochineniy nothing for the prisoners at Solovki; he even [Collected works], 5th Russian ed., vol. 50, praised the Solovetsky agents many pp. 14344). Other official documents may be times thereafter-while the truth-loving lad cited to the same effect. Thus, a special reso- was shot the same night by those Chekists.6 lution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Re- 1918, ‘Viktor Semyonovich Abakrrmov (1 894-1954): Minister of public (RSFSR) of September 5, says in state security under Stalin and Beria, 1946-52: tried and part, “It is necessary to secure the Soviet Re- executed after Win’s death. public against its class enemies by isolating 5Marim Gorky (1868-1936): Prominent Russian writer them in concentration camps” (Yezhenedelnik who had close ties with Lenin and other before the 1917 revolution. Critical of Soviet regime in its early ChK [Weekly Bulletin of the Cheka], no. 1, years; often interceded with Lenin in behalf of threatened September 22, 1918, p. 11). In February 1919 cultural and intellectual figures. After living in Western Grigory Sokolnikov, a member of the Central Europe, 1921-28, he returned to the U.S.S.R. and was highly favored by the Stalin regime. Died under mysteri- Committee of the Russian ous circumstances, allegedly poisoned, on the eve of the (Bolsheviks) and of the Military first great show trial. Council of the Southern Front, objecting to 6Solovki, Soloversky; Cheka , Chekisr: Solovki is slang for Central Committee directives on “de-Cossack- the Solovetsky camp, on the Solovetsky Islands; see the description of the camp in Gulag Archipelago, vol. 11, ization,” the mass shooting of who chap. 2. gave aid to Krasnov or served in the White The Cheka was the first Soviet state-security organiza- Army,’ proposed that instead of being shot tion (1917-22). The acronym derives from the Russian initials Ch. and K., the official name being Chrezvychay- naya Kommissiya, or Extraordinary Commission. The state-security organs (secret police) were frequently re- named, and at various times known by such initials as 7Pyorr Nikolayevich Krasnov (1869-1947): General of GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB, and now KGB. the czarist army; tiied to suppress the October 1917 revo- But over the years Chekisr, originally meaning member of lution in Petrograd; led rebellion against Soviet rule in the Cheka, has stayed on as an informal term for any Don Cossack region in 1918-19; resigned and went into Soviet secret police agent, regardless of the official initials exile in Germany, many of his forces joining Gen. A. I. at the time. Denikin’s White army.

SOLZHENITSYN’S GULAG: PART TWO 157 they be employed in socially useful labor in numerous concentration camps set up on tem- the coal-mining districts, for building railroads tory held by the White armies and foreign and digging shale and peat. For this purpose interventionist forces were usually far more Sokolnikov requested by telegram that ‘‘work savage than those in the RSFSR. In Stalin’s begin immediately on the construction of facil- time, on tne other hand, the terror of the ities for concentration camps” (Central Party camps was directed against people who were Archives, collection 17, shelf 4, file 53, sheet unarmed and defenseless, and were not hostile 54). The concentration camps of civil war toward the sole existing, and firmly estab- times were quite primitive structures, and the lished, power in the land. For Solzhenitsyn regimen enforced in them bore very little re- this distinction seems not to exist. semblance to that of the camps of the 1930s. Sometimes the people in them were put to The 1937 Wave work. In other cases, in districts near the battle SOLZHENITSYN does not hide his distaste for fronts, an area outside a city would simply be the government, party, and economic leaders, fenced off, the ‘‘socially dangerous elements” top commanders of the , leading would be detained there but would not work, cadres of the Young Communist League and and their relatives and friends would bring the trade unions, and especially the high-rank- them food and hand it to them through the ing personnel of the NKVD and the Prosecu- fences. Toward the end of 1920 most of those tor General’s Office,’O who themselves be- confined in concentration camps were peasants came the object of brutal repression in 1937 arrested for “speculation,” as can be seen and ’38. Even in the first volume of Gulag from documents of the Cheka. With the end of Archipelago Solzhenitsyn wrote: the civil war many of these camps were dis- mantled and their inmates sent home. At the If you study in detail the whole history of the beginning of NEP,8 the camps for political arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal prisoners were apparently abolished nearly revulsion you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly re- everywhere, with the exception of the Solovet- pulsive defendants-nausea at their spiritual sky Special Purpose Camp and several “politi- baseness after their former pride and implaca- cal isolat~rs”~-ofwhich Solzhenitsyn writes. bility. Space does not allow us to explore here the question of which elements in the early history All these people, during the civil war or during of these political camps were dictated by the collectivization and industrialization, so stem necessities of those years and which con- Solzhenitsyn asserts, were pitiless toward their stituted plainly excessive and unnecessary political opponents and therefore deserved no cruelty. But it would be wrong to place the pity when their own “system” turned against camps of the civil war period and those of them. Stalin’s time on the same plane and ignore the In the second volume, we find the same fact that in 1918-20 the Soviet Republic was attitude on the author’s part toward the ‘‘ 1937 fighting a war on several fronts against for- wave. ” With obvious satisfaction Solzhenitsyn eign-backed White governments and that the cites the names of dozens of major Communist party figures shot on Stalin’s orders in 8NEP: The , introduced in 1921, 1937-38. These people deserved their fate, he under which peasants were allowed to trade on the market suggests; they got what they had made ready and were taxed a certain amount of,grain or other produce instead of having it requisitioned by the state. Grain requi- for, or given to, others. sitioning had been the policy under “war

during the 1918-20 civil war. The NEP ended with the ~ ~~ beginning of forced collectivization and industrialization in ‘ONKVD: Narcdnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or 1929-30. People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, official name Q“Poliricalisolators”: Separate Soviet prisons for holding of the Soviet state-security organization (193446). made political oppositionists of the non-Communist left or dissi- especially notorious by its role in the of dent Communists. 1936-38.

158 ROY MEDVEDEV And though [he writes], when the young Tukh- would seem, from today’s vantage point, that achevsky returned victoriously from suppress- we could speak of the historical and political ing the devastated Tambov peasants, there was guilt of the entire active party membership for no Mariya Spiridonova waiting at the station to the events of the 1920s and 1930s. But we put a bullet through his head, it was done sixteen cannot simply lump all these people together years later by the Georgian priest who never indiscriminately as criminals who got what graduated. they deserved. The fate of the majority of the But we can in no way share these sentiments revolutionary Bolsheviks remains one of the and opinions of Solzhenitsyn’s. most awesome tragedies in the history of our First, one cannot ignore the fact that the country, and we cannot in any way condone leaders who perished in the 1930s were not all Solzhenitsyn in his mocking suggestion that in the same kind of people, either in their per- the obituaries published in our country the sonal characters or in the degree of responsi- words “perished tragically during the period of bility they had for the crimes of the preceding the cult” should be replaced by the words years. There were people who had already “perished comically.” The best Russian degenerated greatly, who had been so caught writers never indulged in mockery of the dead. up in Stalin’s system that they carried out the Let us recall Pushkin, who wrote these lines: most savage and inhuman orders without Riego did transgress against Spain’s king. thinking of the country or the people, but only There I agree. But for that he was hanged. of themselves and their power. These people Is it seemly, tell me now, for us not only carried out orders but “demonstrated To hotly curse the hangman’s fallen victim?12 initiative” on their own, helping Stalin and the NKVD organs to “expose” and annihilate Earlier, in reading the first volume of Gulag “enemies of the people.” But there were quite Archipelago, I was unpleasantly surprised by a few who acted in error, who were simulta- Solzhenitsyn’s words that he had somehow neously victims and instruments of another been “consoled”-when describing the trials cult-the cult of party discipline. Among them at which People’s Commissar of Justice Kry- were many honest, self-sacrificing, and cour- lenko appeared as the accuser-‘‘consoled’’ by ageous people who, too late, came to under- the thought of the degradation to which Kry- stand a great deal. There were quite a few who lenko was reduced in before he thought about what was happening in the coun- was shot, the same Krylenko who had con- try and were tormented by it, but who believed demned others to similar degradati~n.’~It in the party and the party’s propaganda. It “Pushkin; Riego: Aleksandr S. Pushkin (1799-1937), “Tukhachevsky, Tambov, Spiridonova: Mikhail Nikolaye- Russia’s foremost classical poet. These four lines are from vich Tukhachevsky (1893-1937). one of the group of top his 1825 poem “Na Vorontsova,” written in response to a Red Army leaders shot on Stalin’s orders in the 1937 remark made by Count Vorontsov, a courtier of the czar. purge. Came to prominence as a Red general in the civil Colonel Rafael del Riego y Nuiiez (1785-1823) was the war. Active in the suppression of an anti-Bolshevik peas- leader of a constitutionalist rebellion in 1820 against Ferdi- ant rebellion in Tambov province in 1921-22, which was nand VI, king of Spain. Czar Alexander I urged the Holy led by members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party Alliance to intervene in Ferdinand’s behalf, and in No- (SRs): Tambov province, in the Volga region of European vember 1823 troops of the Holy Alliance defeated Riego’s Russia, was the center of SR influence from before the forces, and Riego was captured and executed. When word 1905-06 revolution. During that revolution the SR terror- of this reached Czar Alexander’s court, Count Vorontsov ist Mariya Aleksandrovna Spiridonova (1884-1941) was heard to remark, “What happy news, Your Majesty; shot the czarist official in charge of suppressing a Tambov one scoundrel less in t95 world.” peasant rebellion. Spiridonova was sent to hard labor for l3Kry1enko; Buryrka: Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko many years. In 1917 she emerged as a leader of the Left (1885-1938), active Bolshevik from 1904. First people’s SR party, which joined the Bolsheviks in the first Soviet commissar of war in 1917-18; chief state prosecutor for government but began to oppose them in 1918, led a important political trials, 1918-31. Made commissar of number of revolts and assassinated Bolshevik leaders. justice of the Russian Republic in 1931, and of the Spiridonova was arrested in late 1918, imprisoned for a U.S.S.R. in 1936. Arrested in 1937 and shot without trial. time, and after being amnestied, quit politics. Arrested by Butyrka-an old prison in Moscow that held political pris- the NKVD in 1937, she died in the camps. oners under the czars (built under in

SOLZHENITSYN’S GULAG: PART TWO 159 seems to me that the author’s attitude here is and Zakovsky, who during “interrogation” quite far removed from the simple standard of had his testicles crushed. l6 Solzhenitsyn him- human decency, not to mention the Christian self in the first volume wrote about this meth- virtues of ‘‘ understanding mi ldne s s ’ ’ and od of torture as the worst kind, one that cannot ‘ ‘uncategorical judgments, ’ ’ which Solzhenit- be endured. In reading Shalamov’s story I did syn proclaims at the end of the second volume. not feel any gratification. It is quite likely that Solzhenitsyn’s position seems wrong to us this Nikonov fully deserved to be tried and not only because the government and party shot for his crimes. But even he did not de- leaders destroyed were most often replaced by serve such cruel torture and abuse. It is a people who, it is common knowledge, were profoundly mistaken notion of morality to even worse. Thus, in Yezhov’s and Beria’s think that Stalin’s reprisals against the main times one could with reason regret the passing cadres of the Communist party and Soviet of such Chekists as Latsis and Peters. The government represented, even in an extremely brutality of Latsis and Peters,14 sometimes distorted form, the triumph of some sort of justified and sometimes not, was at any rate historical justice. No, the death of these people never self-seeking, sadistic, or aimed at curry- was the prologue to a reign of injustice still ing favor. Those pen apparently could not more terrible, affecting not only the party but have gone down the road of crime as far as our entire people. Yezhov, Beria, Zakovsky,15 and their kind. Solzhenitsyn is prepared, oddly enough, to It must be said, simply, that no one de- regard the entire Soviet people, and served the dreadful fate that befell the leaders non-Russians alike, as having deserved the un- arrested in 1937-38. It is impossible to take happy fate they suffered in the 1920s, 1930s, satisfaction in the thought of their degradation and 1940s. Even in the first volume, having in and torment, even knowing that many of them mind not just the party but the most ordinary deserved death. people of our land, he exclaimed: “We spent One of Shalamov’s Stories tells the ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, fate of a deputy head of the Leningrad and then we hurried to submit. We submitted NKVD, Nikonov, an accomplice of Yezhov with pleasure! ... We purely and simply

‘6Varlum Tikhonovich Shalamov (born 1907): Soviet writer; survivor of 17 years in the Kolyma camp complex the 18th century). Under Stalin it was one of three main in the Soviet Far East. His Kolymu Stories circulate in prisons where “politicals” were held for interrogation and manuscript in the U.S.S.R.; published in a French edition: sentencing. Rkcits de Kolymu (Paris, 1969). One of these stones, “Latsis and Peters: Prominent Cheka officials of the civil “Lend-Lease Comes to a Soviet Camp,” appeared in the war period, both Latvians. Martyn Ivanovich Latsis Summer 1974 Dissent. (1888-1938 or 1941, real name Yan Fridrikhovich Sud- rabs), transferred to economic work in 1921; arrested in the Great Purge. Yakov Khristoforovich Peters (18861938), deputy chief of GPU, 1925-30. 15Yezhov, Beria, zokovsky: Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (1895-1939 or 1940), minor party official promoted by Stalin in early 1930s; made people’s commissar of internal affairs in September 1936, to preside over the Great Purge of 193638, which is often called the Yezhovshchinu (“the HAVE YOU MOVED? time of Yezhov”) because of his role. Replaced by Beria 0 in December 1938; arrested and shot. Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, (1899-1953); chief of state Send both old and new address to security in Transcaucasia, 1921-31; head of Transcau- DISSENT: 509 Fifth Avenue casian party organization after that. Replaced Yezhov as New York. New York 10017 commissar of internal affairs; remained chief of Soviet 0 security until his execution shortly after Stalin’s death. Allow three weeks Leonid M. Zakovsky: A deputy commissar of the NKVD, 193&38; supervised Leningrad and Moscow tor change fo become eflectivr purges in 1937-38; liquidated soon after Beria replaced Yezhov as head of NKVD.

160 ROY MEDVEDEV deserved everything that happened afterward” members fell off rapidly. And there were very (Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis). Many similar pro- few of them in the camps. For the majority of nouncements can be found in the second vol- Communists, however, condemnation of Stalin ume as well. The error and injustice of this and the NKVD organs did not mean the repu- view seems too obvious to spend any time diation of socialist and communist convictions. refuting it. Solzhenitsyn plainly sins against the truth when, in describing the fate of the Commu- nists in the camps, he declares that they never objected to “the dominance of the thieves in The Communist Captives of Gulag the kitchens and among the trusties” and that “all the orthodox Communists soon [got] APPARENTLY the majority of those shot in .. . 1937-38 were Communists. In addition, how- themselves well fixed up.” The author of ever, hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file Gulag Archipelago even raises the following members and middle-level cadres of the party hypothesis: “Yes, and were there not perhaps and youth organizations were arrested and sent some written or at least oral directives: to to the camps along with other prisoners. Sol- make things easier for the Communists?” zhenitsyn devotes one of the chapters of his No, Aleksandr Isayevich, no such directives second volume to their fate and discusses the ever existed, and you knew it well when, in .Communists at some length in other chapters your novel One Day in the Life of Ivan of this volume. Touching very briefly on those Denisovich, you told of the fate of the Com- for whom “Communist convictions were in- munist Buinovsky, thrown into the cold pun- ward and not constantly on the tips of their ishment block for no reason.” From the fate tongues,” who did not make a great show of enjoyed in the camps by Boris Dyakov and their “party attitude” and did not separate Galina Serebryakova,18 you cannot draw coi- themselves from the other prisoners, Solzhen- clusions about the position and conduct of the itsyn directs his attention mainly to those “or- bulk of the Communists who found themselves thodox Communists” and “loyalists” (the in Stalin’s camps. In many respects their cir- chapter on the Communists is entitled “The cumstances were even worse than those of Loyalists”) who sought to justify Stalin and prisoners in other categories and quite a few of his terror while they were in the camps, who them died in the camps-in fact it is likely would sing the [party-song] lines “I know no they died in greater numbers than other prison- other country/ Where a person breathes so ers. On this point there are of course no reli- freely” while en route iq prisoner transports, and who considered virtually every other zek to have been justly condemed and only them- “Buinovsky: In Solzhenitsyn’s story, the idealistic and defiant ex-naval commander, sent to the camps as a “spy” selves to be suffering by accident. Solzhenit- because an Allied officer he had met during wartime ser- syn finds a number of occasions for making vice had mailed him a gift. (Modeled after Boris Burkov- fun of such ‘‘loyalists’’ and “orthodox Com- sky, a fellow inmate of the author’s.) “Boris Dyakov (born 1902) and Galinu Serebryakov (born munists.” Sometimes his irony is fully de- 1905): Both are Soviet writers and former camp inmates served. It is true that among the Communists (Solzhenitsyn dismisses them as trusties). In the post- arrested in 1937-38 there were quite a few Stalin era both became prominent on the conversative side in Soviet literary disputes. Dyakov, author of standard who continued to believe not only in Stalin but socialist-realist production novels, wrote memoirs of the even in Yezhov, and who held themselves camps that were published in a Soviet magazine in early aloof from, or were even hostile toward, the 1963 and reissued as a book in 1966. These Memoirs of Survival (Povesr o perezhirom) were praised by conserva- other prisoners. But insight came rather quick- tives, who counterposed them to Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan ly, although for understandable reasons it was Denisovich because Dyakov stressed faith in the party not always complete, and after several months despite the cruelties in the camps. Serebryakova’s mem- oirs, entitled Sandstorm, were published in a soviet news- of “interrogation” the number of the “loyal- paper in 1964, but did not come out in book form in the ists’’ and “orthodox” among arrested party U.S.S.R.

SOLZHENITSYN’S GULAG: PART TWO 161 able statistics. However, we know from the God saved and elevated the human spirit in the materials of party conferences, held after the camps, while faith in the future triumph of 22d Soviet Communist Party Congre~s,’~that social justice, in a better way of organizing of the party members arrested in Moscow in society, failed to prevent spiritual corruption 193639 only about 6 percent returned there in and virtually led one straight into the ranks of 1955-57. The remaining 94 percent were re- stool pigeons-all this has an unproved and habilitated posthumously. And throughout the arbitrary sound. A regrettable state of embit- U.S.S.R.,out of a million party members ar- terment leads the author to that very “intoler- rested in the latter half of the 1930s, not more ance and infallibility” of judgment of which than 60-80,oOO returned after 15 to 18 years he accuses . imprisonment. The suffering they endured left Solzhenitsyn does not even consider it pos- a deep mark on these people, and very few sible for nonreligious people to distinguish be- were left among them who in any way re- tween good and bad. sembled those Solzhenitsyn now writes of with Equating with , he na- such sarcasm. turally cannot understand that there are people for whom the tragedy they or their countrymen Socialism, Revolution, or Religion? experienced can only become a further incen- tive to struggle for social justice and for a IN PART FOUR of this book, on “The Soul and better life for humanity on this earth, for the Barbed Wire,” Solzhenitsyn specifically dis- elimination of all forms of oppression of one cusses his spiritual rebirth in the camps, his person by another, including pseudosocialist return to the belief in God instilled in him as forms of such oppression. Solzhenitsyn does an adolescent but abandoned by him as a not understand that socialist convictions can be young man in favor of Marxism. Although the basis for a genuinely humanist set of values with reservations, the author, surprisingly and a profoundly humane morality. And if up enough, even expresses gratitude for the ex- to now the problems of ethics and morals have perience of the camps, for it was precisely the not yet found satisfactory treatment in Marxist- suffering he underwent in them that helped Leninist theory, this by no means implies that him return to the fold of Christianity. ‘‘Bless scientific socialism is incapable by its very you, prison!” the author writes in emphatic nature of establishing moral values. type at the close of his chapter “The Ascent.” Summing up the thinking he did in camp, In this part of his book Solzhenitsyn expres- Solzhenitsyn writes: ses some profound though very bitter thoughts. But much of what is written here strikes a false Since then I have come to understand the truth of note (at least to my ears). All these extremely all the religions of the world: They struggle with impassioned outcries against Marxism, “the the evil inside a human being (inside every hu- infallible and intolerant -doctrine,” which de- man being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to mands only results, only matter and not spirit, constrict it within each person. all these arguments about how only faith in And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those curriers of evil con- temporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, lsThe 22d Congress of the Communist party of the to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And U.S.S.R.,held Oct. 17-31, 1961, publicly revived and they then take to themselves as their heritage the extended the de-Stalinization campaign that had subsided a year or so after Krushchev’s secret speech at the 1956 20th actual evil itself, magnified still more. Congress. The 22d Congress set off a new series of off- cia1 investigations and revelations about the Stalin era that This juxtaposition seems to me neither ac- were only brought to a halt in the latter half of the 1960s, curate nor just. For it is necessary to fight under Brezhnev and Kosygin. A notable event during the 22d Congress was the removal of Stalin’s remains from against evil not only within each person, but the Lenin mausoleum. also against the carriers of evil contemporary

162 ROY MEDVEDEV with us, and against unjust social institutions. century the Russian Church was still burning This struggle goes on in various forms. Well heretics alive. Incidentally, one may find in and good if it takes the form of peaceful com- Stalin’s behavior and criminal actions not only petition between ideologies and is realized the pragmatic attitude held by many revolu- through reforms and gradual changes for the tionaries toward violence and the use of ex- better. But there still will be times when revo- treme measures but also the dogmatism, casu- lutionary forms of struggle must be resorted to, istry, intolerance, and other qualities that are and although these may be accompanied by undoubtedly, to some extent, the result of his many sacrifices and disappointments, they by five years in an Orthodox school and three in no means necessarily lead to the magnification an Orthodox seminary. of evil in the world. It is not socialist doctrine Terrible are the crimes Solzhenitsyn so viv- alone that can be distorted and turned against idly depicts in his book, and we are all as one individuals and against all of humanity; so can with him in the condemnation of those crimes. the tenets of any religion. History offers more But I continue to believe that only the victory than a few examples of this, including the of a genuinely socialist society, of genuinely history of the Russian Orthodox Church, socialist human and moral relations, can pro- which has its own peculiar traditions of ob- vide humanity with a firm guarantee that such scurantism. It is well known that in the 16th crimes will never be repeated.

Translated by GEORGESAUNDERS 0

Old Debates, Living Issues

It’s hard to suppose that anyone who has lived Trotskyists said, “a degenerated workers state”? through the experience of radical sectarianism That there was no realistic sense in which the would ever wish to go back to it, or would care to Russian party dictatorship could be called a appraise it with anything but a complicated irony. “workers’ state,” any sensible person living in Yet there are moments when it seems that some Russia must surely know-and Plyushch is clearly elements in that past had their value. Thus the a man of sharp intelligence. distinguished Russian physicist , What is so interesting in his sociological charac- speaking after his release from a Soviet mental terizations is that, in his own way, he returns to the hospital and discussing the role of the Russian terms of debate that one could hear in the tiny oppositionists, said last February that in his world of the anti-Stalinist left several decades writings ago-terms of debate liberals unconcerned with I proved that Stalinism is a Thermidorian Bonapartist theory, professors disdainful of left-wing cate- degeneration of the , that state gories, and other wise people looked down upon. had been built in the , property Yet those debates, whatever their faults and belongs to a state which is alienated from all classes, excesses, really did touch on significant political property does not belong to the people. The bureau- issues, and it is of some political interest that the cracy is the servant of the abstract capitalist-the state. Russian dissidents, struggling to define the tyranny [Quoted in , February 4, 19761 under which they suffer, should turn-on their A few of our readers may remember left-wing own? through word of discussions in the West that discussions of several decades ago as to the “class has reached them?-to these terms and theories. It nature’’ of Stalinism. Was the Russian dictatorship makes one feel a bit mose hopeful about the possi- “bureaucratic collectivism” as some of us said, or bility of connecting the thoughts of the past with “,” or was it still, as orthodox the struggles of the future. 0

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