The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts – Final Installment! (Whew)

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.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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 – Excerpts

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 – Excerpts

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 – Excerpts

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!’”

The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts

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

“There was one attack during the daytime. Tommy-gunners were moved up to one of the gaps, opposite the balcony of the Steplag Administration Building, which was packed with important personages sheltering under broad army epaulets or the narrow ones of the Public Prosecutor’s department, and holding cameras or even movie cameras. The soldiers were in no hurry. They merely advanced just far enough into the breach for the alarm to be given, whereupon the rebel platoons responsible for the defense of the breach rushed out to man the barricade – brandishing their pikes and holding stones and mud bricks – and then, from the balcony, movie cameras whirred and pocket camera clicked (taking acre to keep the Tommy-gunners out of the picture). Disciplinary officers, prosecutors, Party officials, and all the rest of them – Party members to a man, of course – laughed at the bizarre spectacle of the impassioned savages with pikes. Well-fed and shameless, these grand personages mocked their starved and cheated fellow citizens from the balcony, and found it all very funny. (These photographs must still exist somewhere, gummed to reports on the punitive operation. Perhaps somebody will not be swift enough to destroy them before posterity sees them.)

“Then warders, too, stole up to the gaps and tried to slip nooses with hooks over the prisoners, as though they were hunting wild animals or the abominable snowman, hoping to drag out a talker.

“But what they mainly counted on now were deserters, rebels with cold feet. The radio blared away. Come to your senses! Leave the camp through the gaps in the wall! At those points we shall not fire! Those who come over will not be tried for mutiny!

“The Commission’s response, delivered over the camp radio, was this: Anybody who wants to run away can go right ahead, through the main gate if he likes; we are holding no one back!

“One who did so was… a member of the Commission itself, for Major Makeyev, who walked up to the main guardhouse as though he has business there. (As though, not because they would have detained him, nor because they had the means of shooting him in the back – but because it is almost impossible to play the traitor with your comrades looking on and howling their contempt! Even ten years later he was so ashamed that in his memoirs, which were probably designed to serve as an apologia, he writes that he chanced to put his head out of the gate, where the other side pounced on him and tied his hands…) For three weeks he had kept up a pretense; now at last he could give free reign to his defeatism, and his anger with the rebels for wanting the freedom which he, Makeyev, did not want. Now, working off his debts to the bosses, he broadcast an appeal to surrender, and reviled those who favored holding out longer. Here are some sentences from his own written account of this broadcast: ‘Somebody has decided that freedom can be won with the help of sabers and pikes. They want to expose to bullets people who won’t take their bits of iron… We have been promised a review of our cases. The generals are patiently negotiating with us, but Sluchenkov regards this as a sign of weakness on their part. The Commission is a screen for gangster debauchery… Conduct the negotiations in a manner worthy of political prisoners, and do not (!!) prepare for senseless resistance.’

“The holes in the wall gaped for weeks; the wall had not remained whole so long while the revolt was on. And in all those weeks only about a dozen men fled from the camp.

“Why? Surely the rest did not believe in victory. Were they not appalled by the thought of the punishment ahead? They were. Did they not want to save themselves for their families’ sake? They did! They were torn, and thousands of them perhaps had secretly considered this possibility. The invitation to the former juveniles had a firm legal base. But the social temperature on this plot of land had risen so high that if souls were not transmuted, they were purged of dross, and the sordid laws saying that ‘we only live once,’ that being determines consciousness, and that every man’s a coward when his neck is at stake, ceased to apply for that short time in that circumscribed place. The laws of survival and of reason told people that they must all surrender together or flee individually, but they did not surrender and they did not flee! They rose to that spiritual plane from which executioners are told: ‘The devil take you for his own! Torture us! Savage us!’

“And the operation, so beautifully planned, to make the prisoners scatter like rats through the gaps in the wall till only the most stubborn were left, who would then be crushed – this operation collapsed because its inventors had the mentality of rats themselves.”

The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts

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

“There were Chechen exiles in the settlement, but it is unlikely that they made the other kites. You cannot accuse the Chechens of ever having served oppression. They understood perfectly the meaning of the Kengir revolt, and on one occasion brought a bakery van up to the gates. Needless to say, the soldiers drove them away.

“(There is more than one side to the Chechens. People among whom they live – I speak from my experience in Kazakhstan – find them hard to get along with; they are rough and arrogant, and they do not conceal their dislike of Russians. But the men of Kengir only had to display independence and courage – and they immediately won the good will of the Chechens! When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.)

“In the meantime the Technical Department was getting its notorious ‘secret’ weapon ready. Let me describe it. Aluminum corner brackets for cattle troughs, produced in the workshops and awaiting dispatch, were packed with a mixture of sulfur scraped from matches and a little calcium carbide (every box of matches had been carried off to the room with the 100,000 volt door). When the sulfur was lit and the brackets thrown, they hissed and burst into little pieces.

“But neither these star-crossed geniuses nor the field staff in the bathhouse were to choose the hour, place, and form of the decisive battle. Some two weeks after the beginning of the revolt, on one of those dark nights without a glimmer of light anywhere, thuds were heard at several places around the camp wall. This time is was not escaping prisoners or rebels battering it down; the wall was being demolished by the convoy troops themselves! There was commotion in the camp, as prisoners charged around with pikes and sabers, unable to make out what was happening and expecting an attack. But the troops did not take the offensive.

“In the morning it turned out that the enemy without had made about a dozen breaches in the wall in addition to those already there and the barricaded gateway. (Machine-gun posts had been set up on the other side of the gaps, to prevent the zeks from pouring out through them.) This was of course the preliminary for an assault through the breaches, and the camp was a seething anthill as it prepared to defend itself. The rebel staff decided to pull down the inner walls and the mud-brick outhouses and to erect a second circular wall of their own, specially reinforced with stacks of brick where it faced the gaps, to give protection against machine-gun bullets.

“How things have changed! The troops were demolishing the boundary wall, the prisoners were rebuilding it, and the thieves were helping with a clear conscience, not feeling that they were contravening their code.

“Additional defense posts now had to be established opposite the gaps, and every platoon assigned to a gap, which it must run to defend should the alarm be raised at night. Bangs on the buffer of a railroad car, and the usual whistles, were the agreed-upon alarm signals.

“The zeks quite seriously prepared to advance against machine guns with pikes. Those who shied at the idea to begin with soon got used to it.”

The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts

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

“(Perhaps it will help the reader to place the events at Kengir chronologically if we recall what was happening outside during the days of the mutiny. The Geneva Conference on Indochina was in session. The Stalin Peace Prize was conferred on Pierre Cot. Another progressive French man, the writer Sartre, arrived in Moscow to join in the life of our progressive society. The third centenary of the reunification of Russia and the Ukraine was loudly and lavishly celebrated. [The Ukrainians at Kengir declared it a day of mourning.] On May 31 there was a solemn parade on Red Square. The Ukrainian S.S.R. and the Russian S.F.S R. were awarded the Order of Lenin. On June 6 a monument to Yuri Dolgoruky was unveiled in Moscow. A Trade Union Congress opened on June 8 [but nothing was said there about Kengir]. On the tenth a new state loan was launched. The twentieth was Air Force Day, and there was a splendid parade at Tushino. These months of 1954 were also marked by a powerful offensive on the literary front, as people call it: Surkov, Kochetov, and Yermilov came out with very tough admonitory articles. Kochetov even asked: ‘What sort of times are we living in?’ And nobody answered: ‘A time of prison camp risings!’ Many incorrect plays and books were abused during this period. And in Guatemala the imperialistic United States met with the rebuff it deserved.)”

The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts

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

“The Technical Department, however, gave as good as it got. Two portable film projectors were found in the service yard. Their amplifiers were used for loudspeakers, less powerful, of course, than those of the other side. They were fed from the secret hydroelectric station! (The fact that the camp had electricity and radio greatly surprised and troubled the bosses. They were afraid that the rebels might rig up a transmitter and start broadcasting news about their rising to foreign countries. Rumors to this effect were also put around inside the camp.)

“The camp soon had its own announcers (Slava Yarimovskaya is one we know of). Programs included the latest news, and news features (there was also a daily wall newspaper, with cartoons). ‘Crocodile Tears’ was the name of a program ridiculing the anxiety of the MVD men about the fate of women whom they themselves had previously beaten up. Then there were programs for the escort troops. Apart from this, prisoners would approach the towers at night and shout to the soldiers through megaphones.

“But there was not enough power to put on programs for the only potential sympathizers to be found in Kengir – the free inhabitants of the settlement, many of them exiles. It was they whom the settlement authorities were trying to fool, not by radio but, in some place which the prisoners could not reach, with rumors that bloodthirsty gangsters and insatiable prostitutes (this version went down well with the women) were ruling the roost inside the camp; that over there innocent people were being tortured and burned alive in furnaces. (In that case, it was hard to see why the authorities did not intervene!…)

“How could the prisoners call out through the walls, to the workers one, or two, or three kilometers away: ‘Brothers! We want only justice! They were murdering us for no crime of ours, they were treating us worse than dogs! Here are our demands’?

“The thoughts of the Technical Department, since they had no chance to outstrip modern science, moved backward instead to the science of past ages. Using cigarette paper (there was everything you could think of in the service yard; we have talked about that already: for many years it provided the Dzhezkazgan officers with their own Moscow tailor’s shop, and a workshop for every imaginable article of consumer goods), they pasted together an enormous air balloon, following the example of the Montgolfier brothers. A bundle of leaflets was attached to the balloon, and slung underneath it was a brazier containing glowing coals, which sent a current of warm air into the dome of the balloon through an opening at its base. To the huge delight of the assembled crowd (if prisoners ever do feel happy they are like children), the marvelous aeronautical structure rose and was airborne. But alas! The speed of the wind was greater than the speed of its ascent, and as it was flying over the boundary fence the brazier caught on the barbed wire. The balloon, denied its current of warm air, fell and burned to ashes, together with the leaflets.

“After this failure they started inflating balloons with smoke. With a following wind they flew quite well, exhibiting inscriptions in large letters to the settlement:

‘Save the women and old men from being beaten!’

‘We demand to see a member of the Presidium.’

“The guards started shooting at these balloons.

“Then some Chechen prisoners came to the Technical Department and offered to make kites. (They are experts.) They succeeded in sticking some kites together and paying out the string until they were over the settlement. There was a percussive device on the frame of each kite. When the kite was in a convenient position, the device scattered a bundle of leaflets, also attached to the kite. The kite fliers sat on the roof of a hut waiting to see what would happen next. If the leaflets fell close to the camp, warders ran to collect them; if they fell farther away, motorcyclists and horsemen dashed after them. Whatever happened, they tried to prevent the free citizens from reading an independent version of the truth. (The leaflets ended by requesting any citizen of Kengir who found one to deliver it to the Central Committee.)

“The kites were also shot at, but holing was less damaging to them than to the balloons. The enemy soon discovered that sending up counter-kites to tangle strings with them was cheaper than keeping a crowd of warders on the run.

“A war of kites in the second half of the twentieth century! And all to silence a word of truth.”

The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts

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

“This incident apart, the jailhouse – a particularly gloomy old place, built in the thirties – was put on display to a wide public: it had windowless solitary-confinement cells, with nothing but a tiny skylight; legless beds, mere wooden boards on the cement floor, where it was still colder and damper than elsewhere in the cold cell; and beside each bed, which means down on the floor, a rough earthenware bowl like a dog dish.

“To this place the Agitation Department organized sightseeing trips for their fellow prisoners who had never been inside and perhaps never would be. They also took there visiting generals (who were not greatly impressed). They even asked that sightseers from among the free inhabitants of the settlement be sent along: with the prisoners absent, they could in any case do nothing at the work sites. The generals actually sent such a party – not, of course, ordinary workingmen, but hand-picked personnel who found nothing to excite indignation.

“In reply, the authorities offered to arrange a prisoners’ outing to Rudnik (Divisions 1 and 2 of Steplag), since according to camp rumors a revolt had broken out there, too. (Incidentally, for their own good reasons both slaves and slavemasters shunned the word ‘revolt,’ or still worse, ‘rising,’ replacing them with the bashful euphemism ‘horseplay.’) The delegates went, and saw for themselves that all was as it had been, that prisoners were going to work.

“Their hopes largely depended on strikes like their own spreading. Now the delegates returned with cause for despondency.

“(The authorities, in fact, had taken them there only just in time. Rudnik was of course worked up. Prisoners had heard from free workers all sorts of facts and fantasies about the Kengor revolt. In the same month [June] it so happened that many appeals for judicial review were turned down simultaneously. Then some half-crazy lad was wounded in the prohibited area. And there, too, a strike started, the gates between Camp Divisions were knocked down, and prisoners poured out onto the central road. Machine guns appeared on the towers. Somebody hung up a placard with anti-Soviet slogans on it, and the rallying cry ‘Freedom or death!’ But this was taken down and replaced by one with legitimate demands and an undertaking to make up for losses caused by the stoppage once the demands were satisfied. Lorries came to fetch flour from the storerooms; the prisoners wouldn’t let them have it. The strike lasted for something like a week, but we have no precise information about it: this is all at third hand, and probably exaggerated.)

“There were weeks when the whole war became a war of propaganda. The outside radio was never silent: through several loudspeakers set up at intervals around the camp it interlarded appeals to the prisoners with information and misinformation, and with a couple of trite and boring records that frayed everybody’s nerves.

Through the meadow goes a maiden,

She whose braided hair I love.

“(Still, to be thought worthy even of that not very high honor – having records played to them – they had to rebel. Even rubbish like that wasn’t played for men on their knees.) These records also served, in the spirit of the times, as a jamming device – drowning the broadcasts from the camps intended for the escort troops.

“On the outside radio they sometimes tried to blacken the whole movement, asserting that it had been started with the sole aim of rape and plunder. (In the camp itself the zeks had just laughed, but the free inhabitants of the settlement had also listened, willy-nilly, to the loudspeakers. Of course, the slavemasters could not rise to any other explanation – an admission that this rabble was capable of seeking justice was far beyond the reach of their minds.) At other times they tried telling filthy stories about members of the Commission. (They even said that one of the ‘old ones,’ when he was being transported by barge to the Kolyma, had made a hole below the water line and sunk the boat with three hundred zeks in it. The emphasis was on the fact that it was the poor zeks he had drowned, practically all of them 58’s, too, and not the escort troops; how he had survived h8imself was not clear.) Or else they would taunt Kuznetsov, telling them that his discharge had arrived, but was now cancelled. Then the appeals would begin again. Work! Work! Why should the Motherland keep you for nothing? By not going to work you are doing enormous damage to the state! (This was supposed to pierce the hearts of men doomed to eternal katorga!) Whole trainloads of coal are standing in the siding, there’s nobody to unload it! (Let them stand there – the zeks laughed – you’ll give way all the sooner! Yet it didn’t occur even to them that the golden epaulets could unload it themselves if it troubled them so much.)”

The Gulag Archipelago – Excerpts

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

“Sluchenkov’s reply to threats that troops would be used to put down the revolt was ‘Send them in! Send as many Tommy-gunners as you like! We’ll throw ground glass in their eyes and take their guns from them! We’ll trounce your Kengir troops. Your bowlegged officers we’ll chase all the way to Karaganda – we’ll ride into Karaganda on your backs! And once there, we’re among friends!’

“There is other evidence about him which seems reliable. ‘Anybody who runs away will get this in the chest!’ – flourishing a hunting knife in the air. ‘Anybody who doesn’t turn out to defend the camp will get the knife,’ he announced in one hut. The inevitable logic of any military authority and any war situation.

“The newborn camp government, like all governments through the ages, was incapable of existing without a security service, and Sluchenkov headed this (occupying the security officer’s room in the women’s camp). Since there could be no victory over the outside forces, Sluchenkov realized that this post meant certain execution. In the course of the revolt he told people in the camp that the bosses had secretly urged him to provoke a racial bloodbath (the golden epaulets were banking heavily on this) and so provide a plausible excuse for troops to enter the camp. In return the bosses promised Sluchenkov his life. He rejected their proposal. (What approaches were made to others? They haven’t told us.) Moreover, when a rumor went around camp that a Jewish pogrom was imminent, Sluchenkov gave warning that the rumor-mongers would be publicly flogged. The rumor died down.

“A clash between Sluchenkov and the loyalists seemed inevitable. And it happened. It should be said that all these years, in all the Special Camps, orthodox Soviet citizens, without even consulting each other, unanimously condemned the massacre of the stoolies, or any attempt by prisoners to fight for their rights. We need not put this down to sordid motives (though quite a few of the orthodox were compromised by their work for the godfather) since we can fully explain it by their theoretical views. They accepted all forms of repression and extermination, even wholesale, provided they came from above – as a manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even impulsive and uncoordinated actions of the same kind but from below were regarded as banditry, and what is more, in its ‘Banderist’ form (among the loyalists you would never get one to admit the right of the Ukraine to secede, because to do so was bourgeois nationalism). The refusal of the katorzhane to be slave laborers, their indignation about window bars and shootings, depressed and frightened the docile camp Communists.

“In Kengir as elsewhere, there was a nest of loyalists. There was also a malingerer who spent years in the hospital pretending that ‘his leg kept going around.’ Intellectual methods of struggle such as this were deemed permissible. In the Commission itself Makeyev was an obvious example. All of them were reproachful from the beginning: ‘You shouldn’t have started it’; when the passages under the walls were blocked off, they said that they shouldn’t have tunneled; it was all a stunt thought up by the Banderist scum, and the thing to do now was to back down quickly. (Anyway, the sixteen killed were not from their camp, and it was simply silly to shed tears over the Evangelist.) All their bile and bigotry is blurted out in Makeyev’s notes. Everything and everybody in sight is bad, and there are dangers on every hand; it’s either a new sentence from the bosses, or a knife in the back from the Banderists. ‘They want to frighten us all with their bits of iron and drive us to our deaths.’ Makeyev angrily calls the Kengir revolt a ‘bloody game,’ a ‘false trump,’ ‘amateur dramatics’ on the part of the Banderists, and more often than any of these, ‘the wedding party.’ The hopes and aims of the leaders, as he sees them, were fornication, evasion of work, and putting off the day of reckoning. (That there was a reckoning to be paid, he tacitly assumes to be just.)

“This very accurately expresses the attitude of the loyalists in the fifties to the freedom movement in the camps. Whereas Makeyev was very cautious, and was indeed among the leaders of the revolt, Talalayevsky poured out such complaints quite openly, and Sluchenkov’s internal security service locked him in a cell in the Kengir jailhouse for agitation hostile to the rebels.

“Yes, this really happened. The rebels who had liberated the jail now set up one of their own. The old, old ironical story. True, only four men were put inside for various reasons (usually for dealings with the bosses), and none of them was shot (instead, they were presented with the best of alibis for the authorities).”