Solzhenitzyn's Inferno
Friedberg, Maurice
"Solzhenitzyn's Inferno" In Chekhov's Seagull a character announces that in a well-made play a gun hanging on a wall must discharge before the performance is over. So it was with the overall work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn....
...All that is left is a canal that is too shallow for navigation and a railroad rusting somewhere in the sub-Arctic which (as another Russian writer recently reported) was also built on Stalin's orders at enormous human cost and expense and which leads, quite literally, from nowhere to nowhere...
...Most of the time, the author's function is that of a historian, of an eyewitness and a collector of other prisoners' testimonies...
...And yet, as Solzhenitsyn demonstrates in a few poignant pages, the sweat of millions and the lives of thousands of prisoners were often simply wasted...
...Still, for all that, the camps left no mighty pyramids testifying to the Pharaoh's grandeur...
...He need not have...
...It merely destroyed them...
...No provisions at all were required for the laborers' families...
...The Gulag Archipelago is a mammoth of a book, over twelve hundred pages in all, only half of that available in English so far...
...Even though both Russian volumes are subtitled "an experiment in literary investigation," Solzhenitsyn the artist remains very much in the background, and his presence is only unobtrusively felt in the quasi-literary manner of presentation of the material...
...There is, however, another Soviet literary work that extols the "joys" of convict labor building the White Sea-Baltic canal...
...It did not "remake" men...
...exiled by Stalin in 1944 on charges of collaboration with Germans...
...Solzhenitsyn miraculously obtained a surviving copy...
...The dates "1918-1956" emphasize that the jails and camps are an integral part of the Soviet State, that they came into existence immediately after its establishment in November 1917, and survived even after Stalin's death in March 1953...
...Doctor's Case—The arrest of leading Kremlin physicians, most of them Jews, in 1952 on trumped-up charges of plotting against the lives of Soviet leaders...
...It does, as expected, take us into the center of the hell of the vast empire of Soviet concentration camps, and since its reality is more frightening than anything artistic imagination could contrive, Solzhenitsyn wisely eschews all temptation to broadly display his skills as a novelist...
...The waterway, it turned out, was much too shallow for modern ships and was hardly being used at all...
...Now it is all here...
...it founded most of the kibbutzim...
...True, the labor is not very productive, but it does offer some advantages: it is cheap and mobile, and does not require even such simple amenities as half-decent housing or acceptable food...
...2) Esperantists, "a harmful group which Stalin undertook to smoke out during the years when Hitler was doing the same thing...
...There are a few hair-raising incidents (e.g., in 1929, about a hundred prisoners were burned alive for nonfulfillment of production quotas) but not very many...
...In 1934, thirty-six Soviet writers, including such celebrities as Maxim Gorky and Alexei Tolstoy, jointly wrote a book glorifying the "enthusiastic" work of the builders of the canal...
...Among themwere priests who refused to violate the secrecy of the confessional, for the Organs had very quickly discovered how useful it was to learn the content of confessions—the only use they found for religion...
...Thousands of names of victims and henchmen overload one's memory, hundreds of outrages stagger the imagination, scores of ironic twists of fate (jailer turns inmate...
...One need only open the book at random to discover the bewildering variety of categories of citizens who were at any one time judged sufficiently dangerous to warrant their incarceration in camps...
...3) "Illegal philosophical circles...
...Hehalutz—Zionist movement that prepared young Jews for settling in the Holy Land...
...And then comes the first reasoned sensation...
...The grim day in question, readers are told, was not a bad day at all...
...Some consideration was also shown former Soviet policemen now themselves in jail...
...Nikolai Pogodin's play The Aristocrats, a gay comedy filled with happy laughter, is to this day reprinted in the USSR and performed on the Soviet stage...
...4)"Teachers who disagreed with the advanced laboratory-team system of instruction...
...A similar effect may be achieved by glancing through any one of the pages in the glossary that appears at the end of the English translation of the first volume...
...7)"Believers, who this time were unwilling to work on Sundays...
...Industrial Academy—A Moscow school that served as a training ground of industrial managers in late 1920s and early 1930s...
...And there were collective farmers sent up for sabotage because they refused to work on religious feast days...
...The White Sea-Baltic canal that was built by Soviet convicts in the early 1930s was the only project of the kind to receive wide publicity...
...Political doctrine resulted in preferential treatment for common criminals who were encouraged to assert their rule over class enemies, the "politicals...
...A novel describing a research institute manned by convict scientists and technicians was named after the outermost, relatively humane and benign circle in Dante's Inferno...
...Only occasionally does the writer's ordinarily controlled outrage spill over into a heavily sarcastic aside...
...Thus, on page 638, we find among others the following: "Crimean Tatars—Exiled by Stalin to Central Asia in 1944 on charges of collaborating with the Germans...
...And although the account breaks off in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's famous attack on Stalin, Solzhenitsyn makes no suggestion that the archipelago of prisons has receded into the past...
...In 1956, after his own release from prison, Solzhenitsyn visited the White Sea-Baltic canal...
...Gradually, however, the avalanche of facts begins to settle in one's mind and even to assume some shape...
...Millions were destroyed physically, millions more were maimed morally for life by being forced to become accomplices in the crime—as active informers or just passive bystanders...
...The Gulag Archipelago is, in essence, an account of a war that the Soviet regime has been waging on its people for well over half a century...
...there were no unusual horrors, no illness, in fact Ivan Denisovich succeeded in obtaining an extra ration of bread...
...exiled by Stalin in 1943 on charges of collaboration with German forces...
...Reading the two heavy volumes of The Gulag Archipelago is a painful and dizzying experience...
...Prisoners—women and men alike—were beaten and starved and tortured with labor beyond their strength and the women were also systematically raped...
...It was hailed as a noble experiment in the rehabilitation of criminals by means of useful labor...
...a Stalinist ends up in a Soviet camp on the same bunk with a Nazi) ultimately deaden thesenses...
...5)"Employees of the Political Red Cross...
...The dates reveal that the vast territory of prisons, camps, and ostensibly "free" settlements that are all part of a land ruled over by the secret police was not, as Soviet authorities would have us believe, a temporary aberration of the system that came into existence under Stalin and promptly disappeared after the dictator's death...
...in camp conditions, these children were soon transformed into vicious animals, ready and eager to kill for a piece of bread...
...acronym for Hilfswillige...
...His first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, though set in a Soviet prison camp, ends on an ironically soothing note...
...The evil of Soviet camps was essentially futile...
...Kalmyks—Ethnic group of Northern Caucasus...
...there was no need for schools, services, and so forth...
...Not only the inmates, either: frequently their jailers as well, for the system devoured its most faithful servants...
...In fact, the Pharaoh's embalmed corpse was thrown out of the Moscow mausoleum where Lenin alone now reposes...
...Ample evidence is available of its continued existence, and new accounts continue to reach the West with depressing frequency, including much documentation on that newly fashionable institution, the psychiatric prison for inmates whose -illness" is their disagreement with government policies...
...Perhaps the most important feature of The Gulag Archipelago may be discerned from the dates that appear below the two words of the title page: 1918-1956...
...Consequently, the Gorky-Tolstoy volume was itself destroyed...
...Much of what is found in the two large volumes has long been known to specialists and to others in the West who wanted to know...
...Dashnak—Anti-Bolshevik group in Armenia after 1917 Revolution...
...Clearly, readers were to expect more...
...To pick a random page, 59 of volume one, we learn that among those imprisoned in the mid-1930s were: 1) Schutzbiindlers, "who lost the class battles in Vienna and had come to the Fatherland of the world proletariat for refuge...
...Unfortunately, the book was equally generous in heaping praise on the jailers, who were soon to be arrested themselves as enemies of the Party during the mass purges of 1937-38...
...The monstrosities of concentration camp existence are all here: the starving prisoners, the dying, the dead...
...Convict labor, Solzhenitsyn points out, has over the years become an important factor in the running of the Soviet economy...
...There are the children condemned to hell for the alleged sins of their fathers, already killed or still languishing in other camps...
...Hiwi—German designation for Russian volunteers in German armed forces during World War II...
...6) "Mountain tribes of the North Caucasus who were arrested for their 1935 revolt...
...Ingush—Ethnic group of Northern Caucasus...
...There have been, over the years, survivors' accounts and several scholarly studies of the Soviet system of periodic purges and the network of concentration camps, most recently Robert Conquest's magisterial The Great Terror...
...8) "And, always, there were those who refused to become NKVD informers...
...Similarly, in the partly autobiographical novel Cancer Ward (which Solzhenitsyn had hoped, as it turned out in vain, to have published in the USSR) the ending is relatively happy: the central character escapes for a time the clutches of death and is on his way to the relative luxury of exile in a distant village in Central Asia...
...one suspects that Solzhenitsyn chose not to cite a large number of them for aesthetic reasons...
...It was in The First Circle that the premonition of more dreadful accounts grew stronger...
...There is grim irony in pages describing occasional evenings of "entertainment" for the inmates: camp administrators had become convinced that songs and music are conducive to increased labor productivity...
...Soizhenitsyn's unique contribution is merging, as it were, the two types of accounts, grounding the individual eyewitness stories in a context of historical perspective and injectingdramatic immediacy and human concreteness into the understandably somewhat abstract treatises of scholars...
...slave is miraculously raised to glory...
Vol. 8 • February 1975 • No. 5
