Dune humor.
Category: Reading
My friend Timmy sent us a Yule card this year. I couldn’t help but notice the stamp, an Ayn Rand stamp!
Who knew there was one? I don’t know where he got it, but he had to add extra stamps to make the right amount.
Inspired by “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson, and the movie of the same name:
The latest from XKCD.com:
I am starting a new venture, which I think could become an excellent career, as a professional proofreader and copyeditor. It’s something I can do from anywhere in the world, and I’m good at it. I’m working on a couple of novels right now, for two of my writer friends. It’s really challenging, but fun. I’m pretty excited about it. Towards that end, I re-tooled my domain as a business site. I need to put more content in the entries, but it’s a good start:
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment In Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, copyright 1976
For an introduction to this series, click here:
http://kimkiminy.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-gulag-archipelago/
Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
“Curious officers could now inspect the secrets of the service yard – see where the electric power had come from, and what ‘secret weapons’ there were.
“The victorious generals descended from the towers and went off to breakfast. Without knowing any of them, I feel confident that their appetite that June morning left nothing to be desired and that they drank deeply. An alcoholic hum would not in the least disturb the ideological harmony in their heads. And what they had for hearts was something installed with a screwdriver.
“The number of those killed or wounded was about six hundred, according to the stories, but according to figures given by the Kengir Division’s Production Planning Section, which became known some months later, it was more than seven hundred. When they had crammed the camp hospital with wounded, they began taking them into town. (The free workers were informed that the troops had fired only blanks, and that prisoners had been killing each other.)
“It was tempting to make the survivors dig the graves, but to prevent the story from spreading too far, this was done by troops. They buried three hundred in a corner of the camp, and the rest somewhere out on the steppe.
“All day on June 25, the prisoners lay face down on the steppe in the sun (for days on end the heat had been unmerciful), while in the camp there was endless searching and breaking open and shaking out. Later bread and water were brought out onto the steppe. The officers had lists ready. They called the roll, put a tick by those who were still alive, gave them their bread ration, and consulting their lists, at once divided the prisoners into groups.
“The members of the Commission and other suspects were locked up in the camp jail, which no longer needed for sightseers. More than a thousand people were selected for dispatch either to closed prisons or to Kolyma (as always, these lists were drawn up partly by guesswork, so that many who had not been involved at all found their way into them).
“May this picture of the pacification bring peace to the souls of those on whom the last chapters have grated. Hands off, keep away! No one will have to take refuge in the ‘safe deposit,’ and the punitive squads will never face retribution!
“On June 26, the prisoners were made to spend the whole day taking down the barricades and bricking in the gaps.
“On June 27, they were marched out to work. Those trains in the sidings would wait no longer for working hands!
“The tanks which had crushed Kengir traveled under their own power to Rudnik and crawled around for the zeks to see. And draw their conclusions…
“The trial of the rebel leaders took place in autumn, 1955, in camera, of course, and indeed we know nothing much about it. …Kuznetsov, they say, was very sure of himself, and tried to prove that he had behaved impeccably and could have done no better. We do not know what sentences were passed. Sluchenkov, Mikhail Keller, and Knopkus were probably shot. I say probably because they certainly would have been shot earlier – but perhaps 1955 softened their fate?
“Back in Kengir all was made ready for a life of honest toil. The bosses did not fail to create teams of shock workers from among yesterday’s rebels. The ‘self-financing’ system flourished. Food stalls were busy, rubbishy films were shown. Warders and officers again sneaked into the service yard to have things made privately – a fishing reel, a money box – or to get the clasp mended on a lady’s handbag. The rebel shoemakers and tailors (Lithuanians and Western Ukrainians) made light, elegant boots for the bosses, and dresses for their wives. As of old, the zeks at the separating plant were ordered to strip lead from the cables and bring it back to the camp to be melted down for shot, so that the comrade officers could go hunting antelopes.
“By now disarray had spread throughout the Archipelago and reached Kengir. Bars were not put back at the windows, huts were no longer locked. The two-thirds’ parole system was introduced, and there was even a quite unprecedented re-registration of 58’s – the half-dead were released.
“The grass on graves is usually very thick and green.
“In 1956 the camp area itself was liquidated. Local residents, exiles who had stayed on in Kengir, discovered where they were buried – and brought steppe tulips to put on their graves.
“Whenever you pass the Dolgoruky monument, remember that it was unveiled during the Kengir revolt – and so has come to be in some sense a memorial to Kengir.”
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This will be the last installment of this series. I want to thank everyone who stuck with it: as you know, the rewards were great. I’m simply burned out on this project. I’ve hand-typed 149 pages in 11-point font with narrow margins. I did want to bring the entire story of the Kengir revolt to you.
The final, seventh book is relatively short, and deals with exile. Seems it sucked even harder than hard labor camp. At least there, they were guaranteed a food ration. In exile, no one will hire you, no money is given from the State, and one cannot leave the area. It was not unusual for exiles to commit a crime in order to get themselves back into camp.
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment In Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, copyright 1976
For an introduction to this series, click here:
http://kimkiminy.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-gulag-archipelago/
Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
“In the early dawn of Friday, June 25, parachutes carrying flares opened out in the sky, more flares soared from the watchtowers, and the observers on the rooftops were picked off by snipers’ bullets before they could let out a squeak! Then cannon fire was heard! Airplanes skimmed over the camp, spreading panic. Tanks, the famous T-34’s had taken up position under cover of the tractor noise and now moved on the gaps from all sides. (One of them, however, fell into a ditch.) Some of the thanks dragged concatenations of barbed wire on trestles so that they could divide up the camp grounds immediately. Behind others ran helmeted assault troops with Tommy guns. (Both Tommy-gunners and tank crews had been given vodka first. However special troops may be, it is easier to destroy unarmed and sleeping people with drink inside you.) Operator with walkie-talkies came in with the advancing troops. The generals went up into the towers with the snipers, and from there, in the daylight shed by the flares (and the light from a tower set on fire by the zeks with their incendiary bombs), gave their orders: ‘Take hut number so-and-so!… That’s where Kuznetsov is!’ They did not hide in observation posts, as they usually do, because no bullets threatened them.
“From a distance, from their building sites, free workers watched the operation.
“The camp woke up – frightened out its wits. Some stayed where they were in their huts, lying on the floor as their one chance of survival, and because resistance seemed senseless. Others tried to make them get up and join the resistance. Yet others ran straight into the line of fire, either to fight or to seek a quicker death.
“The Third Camp Division fought – the division which had started it all. (It consisted mainly of 58’s with a large majority of Banderists.) They hurled stones at the Tommy-gunners and warders, and probably sulfur bombs at the tanks… Nobody thought of the powdered glass. One hut counterattacked twice, with shouts of ‘Hurrah!’
“The tanks crushed everyone in their way. (Alla Presman, from Kiev, was run over – the tracks passed over her abdomen.) Tanks rode up onto the porches of huts and crushed people there (including two Estonian women). In one of the tanks sat Nagibina, the camp doctor, drunk. She was there not to help but to watch – it was interesting. The tanks grazed the sides of huts and crushed those who were clinging to them to escape the caterpillar tracks. Semyon Rak and his girl threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms and ended it that way. Tanks nosed into the thin board walls of the huts and even fired blank shells into them. Faina Epstein remembers the corner of a hut collapsing, as if in a nightmare, and a tank passing obliquely over the wreckage and over living bodies; women tried to jump and fling themselves out of the way: behind the tank came a lorry, and the half-naked women were tossed onto it.
“The cannon shots were blank, but the Tommy guns were shooting live rounds, and the bayonets were cold steel. Women tried to shield men with their own bodies – and they, too, were bayoneted! Security Officer Belyaev shot two dozen people with his own hand that morning; when the battle was over he was seen putting knives into the hands of corpses for the photographer to take pictures of dead gangsters. Suprun, a member of the Commission, and a grandmother, died from a wound in her lung. Some prisoners hid in the latrines, and were riddled with bullets there.
“Kuznetsov was arrested in the bathhouse, his command post, and made to kneel. Sluchenkov was lifted high in the air with his hands tied behind his back and dashed to the ground (a favorite trick with the thieves).
“Then the sound of shooting died away. There were shouts of ‘Come out of your huts; we won’t shoot.’ Nor did they – they merely beat prisoners with their gun butts.
“As a group of prisoners were taken, they were marched through the gaps onto the steppe and between files of Kengir convoy troops outside. They were searched and made to lie flat on their faces with their arms stretched straight out. As they lay there thus crucified, MVD fliers and warders walked among them to identify and pull out those whom they had spotted earlier from the air or from the watchtowers. (So busy were they wit all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme – a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.)”
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment In Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, copyright 1976
For an introduction to this series, click here:
http://kimkiminy.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-gulag-archipelago/
Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
“One day the outside radio broadcast an ‘order of the day to Gulag’: for refusal to work, for sabotage, for this, that, and the other, the Kengir Camp Division of Steplag was to be disbanded and all prisoners sent to Magadan. (Clearly, the planet was getting too small for Gulag. And those who had been sent to Magadan previously – what were they there for?) One last chance to go back to work…
“Once more their last chance ran out, and things were as before.
“All was as it had been, and the dreamlike existence of these eight thousand men, suspended in midair, was rendered all the more startlingly improbable and strange by the regularity of the camp routine; fresh linen from the laundry; haircuts; clothes and shoes repaired. There were even conciliation courts for disputes. Even… even a release procedure!
“Yes. The outside radio sometimes summoned prisoners due for release: these were either foreigners from some country which had earned the right to gather in its citizens, or else people whose sentence was (or was said to be?) nearing its end. Perhaps this was the administration’s way of picking up ‘tongues’ without the use of warders’ ropes and hooks? The Commission sat on it, but had no means of verification, and let them all go.
“Why did it drag on so long? What can the bosses have been waiting for? For the food to run out? They knew it would last a long time. Were they considering opinion in the settlement? They had no need to. Were they carefully working out their plan of repression? They could have been quicker about it. (True, it was learned later that they had sent for a ‘special purposes’ – meaning punitive – regiment from somewhere around Karaganda. It’s a job not everyone can do.) Were they having to seek approval for the operation up top? How high up? There is no knowing on what date and at what level the decision was taken.
“On several occasions the main gate of the service yard suddenly opened – perhaps to test the readiness of the defenders? The duty picket sounded the alarm, and the platoons poured out to meet the enemy. But no one entered the camp grounds.
“The only field intelligence service the defenders had were the observers on the hut roofs. Their anticipations were based entirely on what the fence permitted them to see from the rooftops.
“In the middle of June several tractors appeared in the settlement. They were working, shifting something perhaps, around the boundary fence. They began working even at night. These nocturnal tractor operations were baffling. Just in case, the prisoners started digging ditches opposite the gaps, as an additional defense. (They were all photographed or sketched form an observation plane.)
“The unfriendly roar made the night seem blacker.
“Then suddenly the skeptics were put to shame! And the defeatists! And all who had said that there would be no mercy, and that there was no point in begging. The orthodox alone could feel triumphant. On June 22 the outside radio announced that the prisoners’ demands had been accepted! A member of the Presidium of the Central Committee was on his way!
“The rosy spot turned into a rosy sun, a rosy sky! It is, then, possible to get through to them! There is, then, justice in our country! They will give a little, and we will give a little. If it comes to it, we can walk about with number patches, and the bars on the windows needn’t bother us, we aren’t thinking of climbing out. You say they’re tricking us again? Well, they aren’t asking us to report for work beforehand!
“Just as a touch of a stick will draw off the charge from an electroscope so that the agitated gold leaf sinks gratefully to rest, so did the radio announcement reduce the brooding tension of that last week.
“Even the loathsome tractors, after working for a while on the evening of June 24, stopped their noise.
“Prisoners could sleep peacefully on the fortieth night of the revolt. He would probably arrive tomorrow; perhaps he had come already… Those short June nights are too short to have your sleep out, and you are fast asleep at dawn. It was like that summer thirteen years before.”
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment In Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, copyright 1976
For an introduction to this series, click here:
http://kimkiminy.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-gulag-archipelago/
Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
“In the rebel wall newspaper, next to a drawing of a woman showing a child a pair of handcuffs in a glass case – ‘like the ones they kept your father in’ – appeared a cartoon of the ‘Last Renegade’ (a black cat running through one of the holes in the wall).
“Cartoonists can always laugh, but the people in the camp had little to laugh about. The second, third, fourth, fifth week went by. …Something which, according to the laws of Gulag, could not last an hour had lasted for an incredibly, indeed an agonizingly long time – half of May and almost the whole of June. At first people were intoxicated with the joy of victory, with freedom, meetings, and schemes, then they believed the rumors that Rudnik had risen; perhaps Churbay-Nura, Spassk – all Steplag would follow. In no time at all Karaganda would rise! The whole Archipelago would erupt and fall in ash over the face of the land! But Rudnik put its hands behind its back, lowered its head, and reported as before for its eleven-hour shifts, contracting silicosis, with never a thought for Kengir, or even for itself.
“No one supported the island of Kengir. It was impossible by now to take off into the wilderness: the garrison was being steadily reinforced; troops were under canvas out on the steppe. The whole camp had been encircled with a double barbed-wire fence outside the walls. There was only one rosy spot on the horizon: the lord and master (they were expecting Malenkov) was coming to dispense justice. He would come, kind man, and exclaim, and throw up his hands: ‘However could they live in such conditions? And why did you treat them like this? Put the murderers on trial! Shoot Chechev and Belyaev! Sack the rest…’ But it was too tiny a spot, and too rosy.
“They could not hope for pardon. All they could do was live out their last few days of freedom, and submit to Steplag‘s vengeance.
“There are always hearts which cannot stand the strain. Some were already mortally crushed, and were in an agony of suspense for the crushing proper to begin. Some quietly calculated that they were not really involved, and need not be if they went on being careful. Some were newly married (what is more, with a proper religious ceremony – a Western Ukrainian girl, for instance, will not marry without one, and thanks to Gulag’s thoughtfulness, there were priests of all religions there). For these newlyweds the bitter and the sweet succeeded each other with a rapidity which ordinary people never experience in their slow lives. They observed each day as their last, and retribution delayed was a gift from heaven each morning.
“The believers… prayed, and leaving the outcome of the Kengir revolt in God’s hands, were as always the calmest of people. Services for all religions were held in the mess hall according to a fixed timetable. The Jehovah’s Witnesses felt free to observe their rules strictly and refused to build fortifications or stand guard. They sat for hours on end with their heads together, saying nothing. (They were made to wash dishes.) A prophet, genuine or sham, went around the camp putting crosses on bunks and foretelling the end of the world. Conveniently for him, a severe cold spell set in, of the sort that a shift in the wind sometimes brings to Kazakhstan even in summer. The old women he had gathered together sat, not very warmly dressed, on the cold ground shivering and stretching out their hands to heaven. Where else could they turn?
“Some knew that they were fatally compromised and that the few days before the troops arrived were all that was left of life. The theme of all their thoughts and actions must be how to hold out longer. These people were not the unhappiest. (The unhappiest were those who were not involved and who prayed for the end.)
“But when all these people gathered at meetings to decide whether to surrender of to hold on, they found themselves again in that heated climate where their personal opinions dissolved, and ceased to exist even for themselves. Or else they feared ridicule even more than the death that awaited them.
“’Comrades,’ the majestic Kuznetsov said confidently, as though he knew many secrets, and all to the advantage of the prisoners, ‘we have defensive firepower, and the enemy will suffer fifty percent of our own losses.’
“He also said: ‘Even our destruction will not be in vain.’
“(In this he was absolutely right. The social temperature had its effect on him, too.)
“And when they voted for or against holding out, the majority were for.
“Then Sluchenkov gave an ominous warning. ‘Just remember, if anyone remains in our ranks now and wants to surrender later, we shall settle accounts with him five minutes before he gets there!’”
