Gulag archipelago main characters. Essay on the topic of artistic analysis of the novel "Gulag Archipelago"

But unlike the author of the novel The Master and Margarita, Solzhenitsyn, a realist among realists, there is no need to resort to any kind of artistic “mysticism” - to recreate the “black magic” by means of fantasy and the grotesque, which turns people against their will this way, then so, to portray Woland with his retinue, to trace all the “royal things” together with the readers, to present the novel version of the “Gospel according to Pilate”. The very life of the Gulag, in all realistic nakedness, in the smallest naturalistic details, is much more fantastic and more terrible than any book "diaboliad", any, the most sophisticated decadent fantasy. Solzhenitsyn seems to be making fun of the traditional dreams of intellectuals, their white-and-pink liberalism, who are unable to imagine to what extent human dignity can be trampled on, a person can be destroyed by reducing him to a crowd of "prisoners", break his will, dissolve thoughts and feelings in elementary physiological needs. an organism that is on the verge of earthly existence. “If Chekhov’s intellectuals, who were always guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years, would have been answered that there would be a torture investigation in Russia, they would squeeze the skull with an iron ring, lower a person into a bath with acids, torture naked and tied with ants, bedbugs, to drive a ramrod heated on a primus stove into the anus (“secret brand”), slowly crush the genital parts with a boot, and in the form of the easiest way - to torture for a week with insomnia, thirst and beat into bloody meat - not a single Chekhov play would have reached the end , all the heroes would go to the lunatic asylum.” And, addressing directly to those who pretended that nothing was happening, and if it did, then somewhere aside, in the distance, and if nearby, then on the principle of “maybe they will bypass me”, the author of “Archipelago” throws on behalf of millions of the Gulag population: “While you were enjoying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, studying the influence of Heidegger on Sartre and collecting reproductions of Picasso, traveling by compartment cars to the resort or completing the construction of dachas near Moscow, - and the funnels continuously darted through the streets and the KGB men knocked and rang at the doors .” “Organs never ate bread in vain”; “we have never had empty prisons, but either full or excessively overcrowded”; “There was a cold-bloodedly conceived consistency and unflagging perseverance in knocking out millions and settling in the Gulag.” Summarizing in his research thousands of real destinies, hundreds of personal testimonies and memories, an innumerable number of facts, Solzhenitsyn comes to powerful generalizations - both social, and psychological, and moral and philosophical. For example, the author of The Archipelago recreates the psychology of an arithmetic mean inhabitant of a totalitarian state who has entered - against his will - into a zone of mortal risk. Behind the threshold - the Great Terror, and irresistible flows to the Gulag have already rushed: “arrest epidemics” have begun. Solzhenitsyn makes every reader imagine himself a "native" of the Archipelago - a suspect, arrested, interrogated, tortured. Inmates of prisons and camps. Anyone willy-nilly imbued with the unnatural, perverted psychology of a person disfigured by terror, even with one shadow of terror hanging over him, fear; gets used to the role of a real and potential prisoner.

The jurist Ida Averbakh (sister of Rapp's general secretary and critic Leopold Averbakh) did not lag behind her teacher and ideological inspirer. In her programmatic book "From Crime to Labor", edited by Vyshinsky, she wrote about the Soviet correctional labor policy - "the transformation of the most vile human material ("raw materials" - do you remember? "Insects - remember? - A.S.) into full-fledged active conscious builders of socialism" "(6, 73). The main idea that wandered from one “scientific” work to another, from one political agitation to another: criminals are the most “socially close” social elements to the working masses: from the proletariat, it’s a stone’s throw to the lumpen proletariat, and there it’s very close” thieves". The author of The Gulag Archipelago does not restrain his sarcasm: “Join my weak pen in the chanting of this tribe! They were sung like pirates, like filibusters, like vagabonds, like runaway convicts. that they have a sensitive heart, they rob the rich and share with the poor. Oh, sublime associates of Karl Moor! Oh, the rebellious romantic Chelkash! Oh, Benya Krik, Odessa tramps and their Odessa troubadours! But not all world literature sang the thieves? We will not reproach Francois Villon, but neither Hugo nor Balzac passed this path, and Pushkin praised the thieves in the gypsies (And what about Byron?) But they never sang them so widely, so unanimously, so consistently, as in Soviet literature. (But those were lofty theoretical foundations, not only Gorky and Makarenko.)”. And Solzhenitsyn confirms that “there is always a sanctifying lofty theory for everything. It is by no means the lightweight writers themselves who have determined that the thieves are our allies in building communism. "It is time to recall Lenin's famous slogan "Steal the loot!" , and the "communist" attitude to property ("everything is our common"), and the very "criminal origins" of the Bolshevik Party. The theorists of Soviet communism did not delve into the theoretical jungle of books in search of optimal models of a new society: a thieves' world crowded into a single "labor army" in a concentration camp, plus systematic violence and intimidation, plus a "ration scale plus agitation" that stimulates the re-educational process - that's all what it takes to build a classless society. “When this harmonious theory descended onto the camp land, it turned out this: the most inveterate, hardened blatniks were given unaccountable power on the islands of the Archipelago, on camp sites and camp sites - power over the population of their country, over peasants, philistines and intelligentsia, the power that they they never had in history, never in any state, which they could not even think of in freedom - and now they gave them all other people as slaves. What kind of bandit would refuse such power?.". "No," says Solzhenitsyn, "neither from the stone of the fruit, nor from the thief of good." Having built a state system, all Soviet society according to the laws of the Gulag, the theoreticians and practitioners of communism actually "reeducated" - with the help of "blatnyaks" - a huge mass of workers and party state leaders in thieves.

With all their might, those who appreciated "One Day.", tried to prove that the story denounces only individual violations of socialist legality and restores the "Leninist norms" of the party and public life(only in this case, the story could see the light of day in 1963, and even be nominated by the magazine for the Lenin Prize). However, Solzhenitsyn's path from One Day. to "The Gulag Archipelago" irrefutably proves how far the author was already by that time from socialist ideals, from the very idea of ​​"Sovietness". "One day." - just a small cell of a huge organism called the Gulag. In turn, the GULAG is a mirror image of the system of government, the system of relations in society. So the life of the whole is shown through one of its cells, and not the worst. The difference between "One day." and "Archipelago" primarily in scale, in documentary accuracy. And "One Day.", And "Archipelago" - not about "individual violations of socialist legality", but about the illegality, more precisely, the unnaturalness of the system itself, created not only by Stalin, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, but also by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other party leaders. Is it a man? This question is asked by the reader, who opens the first pages of the story and seems to be plunging into a nightmarish, hopeless and endless dream. All the interests of the prisoner Shch-854 seem to revolve around the simplest animal needs of the body: how to “mow down” an extra portion of gruel, how not to start a cold under the shirt at minus twenty-seven on stage shmon, how to save the last crumbs of energy in a weakened chronic hunger and exhausting work body - in a word, how to survive in the camp hell. And this is not bad for the dexterous and savvy Russian peasant Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Summing up the day, main character he rejoices at the successes achieved: for the extra seconds of morning slumber he was not put in a punishment cell, the brigadier closed the percentage well - the brigade will receive extra grams of rations, Shukhov himself bought tobacco for two stashed rubles, and the disease that had begun in the morning was managed to be overcome on the masonry of the wall of the thermal power plant. All the events of the story seem to convince the reader that everything human is left behind barbed wire. The stage going to work is a solid mass of gray padded jackets. The names have been lost. The only thing that confirms the individuality is the camp number. Human life is devalued. An ordinary prisoner is subordinate to everyone - from the guard and escort who are in the service to the cook and foreman of the barracks, quiet prisoners like him. They can deprive him of lunch, put him in a punishment cell, providing him with tuberculosis for life, or even shoot him. And yet behind all the inhuman realities of camp life there are human traits. They manifest themselves in the character of Ivan Denisovich, in the monumental figure of brigadier Andrei Prokofyevich, in the desperate rebelliousness of the captain Buinovsky, in the inseparability of the “brothers” - the Estonians, in the episodic image of an old intellectual who is serving his third term and, nevertheless, does not want to give up decent human resources. manners. There is an opinion that it is time to stop remembering horrors long gone Stalinist repressions that the memoirs of eyewitnesses overflowed book market political space.

Yes, they did what they could, but for the time being Soviet power sneeze was on all these efforts. The power of the state only grew. And suddenly everything changed. Maybe our endless disputes with you stem from this. I personally do not believe in even the slightest participation in the collapse of Soviet power of all these Maximov's "Continents", Solzhenitsyn's "Gulags" or Entees's "Crops". But have all these current thievish rulers, all these Khodorkovskys and Pochinki, read at least some anti-Soviet literature? Or do you think Boris Yeltsin studied the "Gulag Archipelago" before climbing on his tank in 1991? Alas, the Soviet government itself in large numbers gave birth to this rotten top. Therefore, by the way, quite rightly, none of the dissidents was allowed to power in the anti-Soviet perestroika period. It's not their doing - this coup. And you all scold Solzhenitsyn and even Rasputin for collaborating with him, Shafarevich, Glazunov... Don't you think that by doing so you exaggerate their significance in the events of the last decade? Why did practically the entire Soviet leadership betray the Soviet regime? This is the main question for all communists at all times, why is there a rebirth? Why is it necessary to constantly update the year 1937 or the Chinese campaign of the Red Guards for the triumph of communism? Otherwise, the top becomes totally bourgeois? V. Bushin

From this language, the language of verbal art is formed as a sign system of the second level. The described sign situation allows us to assert that in the linguistic analysis of a literary text, the language of the “first level” is actually studied. The language of the “second level” is the subject of linguo-poetic, aesthetic and, in a certain sense, literary analysis. In the study of linguistic units, the means and techniques for creating the expressiveness of a literary text are distinguished, i.e. a kind of struggle between general linguistic and poetic meanings and meanings. Linguistic analysis allows us to see the picture of the aesthetic whole in its true light, such as the writer created it and wanted to be perceived. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that not one full-fledged literary analysis can take place without a holistic linguistic analysis, which is only a part of such an analysis. The purpose of this work is to study the language of the cycle “Persian Motifs” by S.A. Yesenin, through which the ideological and related emotional content of this cycle is expressed.

The conscious suppression of the novels "The Prince of this World" and "My Name is Legion" should be perceived by the reader in the same way as the former suppression of "Kolyma Tales" by Varlam Shalamov, "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova, "Tulaev's Case" by Viktor Serge, "Imaginary Values" by Nikolai Narokov, Nikolai Klyuev's "Pogorelytsin"; Ivan Solonevich's "Russia in a Concentration Camp", Boris Shiryaev's "The Unquenchable Lampada", Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago"... All versions of such a mass extermination of peoples must be read. And do they really contradict each other? Take Serge's "Tulaev Case" and Narokov's "Imaginary Values" with their logical explanations of the inevitability and mass processes and sincere confessions of victims about monstrous crimes that have never been committed. Don't they fit into the picture of satanic corruption of the people and the state? And why do we observe the processes of such bloody purges of society throughout world history, when no one has yet heard of Marxism? The author does not remove responsibility for what he did either from the victims of the purges or from the executioners

Deprived of the right to emigrate, Soviet citizens did not dare to dream of changing their citizenship. And only one "state" has always willingly accepted them into its citizenship - the Gulag Archipelago. NOTES 1. S.Z.SSSR, 1930, Art. 366 and 367. Resolution of the CEC and the Council of People's Commissars. Foreign citizens who lived abroad were admitted to Soviet citizenship by decree of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and those living on the territory of the USSR - by decree of the Central Executive Committee of the Union republics. The refusal of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Union Republic could be appealed to the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Exit from Soviet citizenship for persons living in the USSR was allowed only with the permission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR or a union republic, and for persons who were abroad - with the permission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Exceptions to these rules were made by industrial and agricultural immigrants and foreigners who requested asylum or changed citizenship due to marriage. In this case, the decision on admission to citizenship or withdrawal from it (for those who were in the USSR) could follow the decision of the district executive committee or the plenipotentiary representative of the USSR (if the applicant was abroad)

This pronounced antipathy serves at the same time as a characteristic of Mercutio himself as a man of the Renaissance, to whom the medieval morality of Tybalt is hostile. Therefore, the duel of Mercutio and Tybalt far outgrows the scope of a street fight started by young people from respectable families, a phenomenon that was very common for those times. The duel between Mercutio and Tybalt is also the broadest generalization, symbolizing the clash of the old beginning, embodied in Tybalt, and the free, life-loving spirit of the Renaissance, of which Mercutio acts as a brilliant bearer. The symbolic nature of this duel is emphasized last words dying Mercutio. Feeling the fatal blow, Mercutio realizes that he did not just die from the blow of a vile nonentity, capable of nevertheless killing a person. The death curse that he sends to both houses: “Plague, plague on both your houses! Because of them I will go to the worms for food, Disappeared, died. A plague on both your houses!” (III, 1,103 - 105) - proves that Mercutio himself considers himself a victim of a senseless medieval enmity.

Before January 21, 1793, and the 19th century murders, the regicides only wanted to destroy the king, not the principle. The only problem was personality. The year 1789 is a turning point in modern history: “the people of that time desired, among other things, to overthrow the principle of divine right and introduce into history the force of negation and rebellion that had been formed in the struggle of ideas over the past centuries.” Rousseau, according to Camus, creates a “new gospel” - the “Social Contract”, which “gives a broad interpretation and dogmatic presentation of a new religion, in which God is reason, coinciding with nature, and its representative on earth instead of the king is the people, regarded as the embodiment of the general will. Thus, it appears new god and now it will come new era when the assassination of the "priest-king" is accomplished. Here, Saint-Just takes over the baton of the revolutionary politician, putting forward his idea that any king is a rebel or a usurper. This is how the assassination of the king is carried out. Now is the time for a new religion, the "religion of virtue" to enter into its legal rights. After all, everything is wonderful: “The people are an oracle to which one must turn in order to understand what the eternal order of the universe requires.

After all, it was the novel Cavalry that brought fame to Babel. But he paid, unfortunately, for him with his life: in the forties, Babel was declared an enemy of the people and sentenced to death. As you know: "The truth pricks the eyes!" Bibliography

GULAG (historical and sociological aspect) The purpose of this work is to show the true statistics of the prisoners of the Gulag, a significant part of which has already been cited in the articles by A.N. Dugin, V.F. Despite the existence of these publications, in which the corresponding truth and documented number of GULAG prisoners is called, the Soviet and foreign public for the most part is still under the influence of far-fetched and not corresponding to historical truth statistical calculations contained both in the works of foreign authors (R. Conquest , S. Cohen and others), and in the publications of a number of Soviet researchers (R.A. Medvedev, V.A. Chalikova and others). Moreover, in the works of all these authors, the discrepancy with genuine statistics never goes in the direction of understatement, but exclusively only in the direction of multiple exaggeration. One gets the impression that they are competing with each other to amaze readers with numbers, so to speak, more astronomically. Here is what, for example, S. Cohen writes (with reference to the book by R. Conquest "The Great Terror", published in 1968 in the USA): "By the end of 1939, the number of prisoners in prisons and separate concentration camps grew to 9 million. people (compared to 30 thousand in 1928 and 5 million in 1933-1935)" . In reality, in January 1940, there were 1,334,408 prisoners in the Gulag camps, 315,584 in the Gulag colonies, and 190,266 in prisons.

In Italy of this period, there is an increasing departure from the previous medieval traditions, which did not have such significance as in other countries. New symbols and allegories based on ancient mythology appear. However, the artists of the High Renaissance retain both the old traditional attributes and symbols in their work. All three works, different in size, are in the tondo format, which is common mainly in Italian art. The circle shape is the most perfect geometric figure. In the era of the High Renaissance, artists strove for correctness, precise alignment, for the ideal of a compositional solution, often depending on the format. Tondo limited freedom of action and required special compositional skills. At the same time, this form is neutral in relation to the environment and therefore the tondo is a good interior decoration. Compared to other formats, the tondo is “not serious”: it does not pretend to be a real altar painting. On the other hand, this form is closest to the human vision of the world.

Solzhenitsyn makes every reader imagine himself a "native" of the Archipelago - a suspect, arrested, interrogated, tortured. Prisoners of prisons and camps ... Anyone involuntarily imbued with the unnatural, perverted psychology of a person disfigured by terror, even one shadow of terror hanging over him, fear; gets used to the role of a real and potential prisoner. Reading and disseminating Solzhenitsyn's research is a terrible secret; it attracts, attracts, but also burns, infects, forms like-minded people of the author, recruits more and more opponents of the inhuman regime, its irreconcilable opponents, fighters against it, which means more and more of its victims, future prisoners of the Gulag (as long as it exists, lives, hungers for new "streams", this terrible Archipelago). And the Gulag Archipelago is not some other world: the boundaries between “that” and “this” world are ephemeral, blurred; it's one space! “Along the long crooked street of our life, we happily rushed or unhappily wandered past some kind of fences - rotten, wooden, adobe duvals, brick, concrete, cast-iron fences. We did not think - what is behind them? We did not try to look beyond them with our eyes or mind - and that is where the country of the Gulag begins, very close, two meters from us. And yet we did not notice in these fences a myriad of tightly fitted, well-camouflaged doors and gates. All, all these they were prepared for us! - and then the fatal one quickly swung open, and four white male hands, not accustomed to work, but grasping, grab us by the hand, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear - they drag us like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate into our past life , slammed forever. All. You are under arrest! And n-wh-wh-why are you not to answer this, except for lamb vodka: I-eh ?? For what??.. That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and blow, from which the present is immediately shifted into the past, and the impossible becomes a full-fledged present. Solzhenitsyn shows what irreversible, pathological changes take place in the mind of an arrested person. What moral, political, aesthetic principles or beliefs are there! They are finished almost at the same moment when you move to the "other" space - on the other side of the nearest fence with barbed wire. Especially striking, catastrophic is the change in the consciousness of a person brought up in classical traditions - sublime, idealistic ideas about the future and what is due, moral and beautiful, honest and fair. From the world of dreams and noble illusions, you suddenly find yourself in a world of cruelty, unscrupulousness, dishonesty, ugliness, dirt, violence, criminality: a world where you can survive only by voluntarily accepting its ferocious, wolf laws; into a world where being a human is not supposed to be, even mortally dangerous, and not being a human means breaking down forever, ceasing to respect yourself, reducing yourself to the level of the dregs of society and treating yourself the same way. To let the reader feel the inevitable changes with him , to experience more deeply the contrast between dream and reality, A.I. Solzhenitsyn deliberately suggests recalling the ideals and moral principles of the pre-October silver age”- so it is better to understand the meaning of the psychological, social, cultural, worldview revolution that has taken place. “Now, former prisoners, and even just people of the 60s, may not be surprised by the story about Solovki. But let the reader imagine himself a Chekhovian or after Chekhov's Russia , a man of the Silver Age of our culture, as they called the 1910s, brought up there, well, albeit shocked by the civil war, but still accustomed to the food, clothes, mutual verbal address adopted by people ... ". And that same “man of the silver age” suddenly plunges into a world where people are dressed in gray camp rags or in bags, have a bowl of gruel and four hundred, maybe three hundred, or even a hundred grams of bread (!); and communication - mate and thug jargon. "Fantasy world!". This is an external breakdown. And the inner one is tighter. Start with an accusation. “In 1920, as Ehrenburg recalls, the Cheka put the question before him like this: “Prove that you are not an agent of Wrangel.” And in 1950, one of the prominent lieutenant colonels of the MGB, Foma Fomich Zheleznov, declared to the prisoners as follows: “We will not bother to prove his guilt. Let him prove to us that he had no hostile intentions.” And countless memories of millions fit into this uncomplicated straight line. What an acceleration and simplification of the consequence, unknown to previous mankind! A captured rabbit, trembling and pale, having no right to write to anyone, call anyone on the phone, bring anything from the outside, deprived of sleep, food, paper, pencil and even buttons, seated on a bare stool in the corner of the office, must himself find and spread out in front of the loafer -an investigator to prove that he had no hostile intentions! And if he did not look for them (and where could he get them), then by the same token he brought approximate evidence of his guilt to the investigation! But this is only the beginning of the breaking of consciousness. Here is the next stage of self-degradation. Rejection of oneself, of one's convictions, of the consciousness of one's innocence (hard!). Still not hard! - Solzhenitsyn sums up, - yes, it is unbearable for the human heart: having fallen under a native ax - to justify it. And here is the next step of degradation. “All the firmness of the imprisoned faithful was only enough to destroy the traditions of political prisoners. They avoided dissenting cellmates, hid from them, whispered about the terrible consequences so that non-party or Socialist-Revolutionaries would not hear - "do not give them material against the party!" And finally - the last (for the "ideological"!): to help the party in its struggle against enemies, even at the cost of the lives of their comrades, including their own: the party is always right! (Article 58, paragraph 12 “On failure to report in any of the acts described under the same article, but in paragraphs 1-11” had no upper limit!! This paragraph was already such an all-encompassing expansion that it did not require further. He knew and did not say - it's the same as what he did himself!). And what way did they find for themselves? - ironically Solzhenitsyn. - What effective solution was suggested to them by their revolutionary theory? Their decision is worth all their explanation! Here it is: the more they plant, the sooner they will understand the mistake at the top! And therefore - try to name as many names as possible! Give as many fantastic testimonies on the innocent as possible! The whole party will not be arrested! (But Stalin didn’t need everything, he only needed a head and long-term employees.)”. And the camp inmates, meeting them, these faithful communists, these "well-intentioned orthodox people", these real "Soviet people", "they say with hatred:" There, in the wild, you - us, here we will be - you! "Loyalty? - asks the author of "Archipelago". - And in our opinion: at least a stake on your head. These adherents of the theory of development saw loyalty to their development in the rejection of any development of their own. And this, Solzhenitsyn is convinced, is not only the misfortune of the communists, but also their direct fault. And the main fault is in self-justification, in justifying the native party and native Soviet power, in removing from everyone, including Lenin and Stalin, responsibility for the Great Terror, for state terrorism as the basis of their policy, for the bloodthirsty theory of class struggle, which makes the destruction of "enemies" , violence - a normal, natural phenomenon of social life.

Solzhenitsyn A.I., Gulag Archipelago.
PART 1. THE PRISON INDUSTRY
In the era of dictatorship and surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes showed unnecessary softness, unnecessary gentleness.
Krylenko, speech at the "Industrial Party" trial
Chapter 1. Arrest
Those who go to govern the Archipelago get there through the schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those who go to protect the Archipelago are called up through military registration and enlistment offices. And those who go there to die must pass without fail and only through arrest.
The traditional arrest is a night call, hurried preparations and many hours of search, during which nothing is sacred. Night arrest has the advantage of surprise, no one sees how many were taken away overnight, but this is not the only kind. Arrests differ in different ways: night and day; home, office, travel; primary and secondary; dismembered and group; and dozens more categories. The authorities most often had no grounds for arrest, but only reached the target figure. People who had the courage to run were never caught or prosecuted, and those who remained to wait for justice received time.
Almost everyone behaved cowardly, helplessly, doomed. Universal innocence breeds universal inaction. Sometimes the main feeling of the arrested person is relief and even joy, especially during arrest epidemics. The parishioners hid the priest, Father Heraclius, for 8 years. From this life, the priest was so exhausted that during the arrest he sang praises to God. There were people, genuinely political, who dreamed of being arrested. Vera Rybakova, a Social Democrat student, went to prison with pride and joy.
Chapter 2
One of the first blows of the dictatorship fell on the Cadets. At the end of November 1917, the Cadets were outlawed, and mass arrests began. Lenin proclaimed the single goal of "cleansing the Russian land of all harmful insects." Almost all social groups fell under the broad definition of insects. Many were shot without being taken to a prison cell. Apart from the suppression of the famous rebellions (Yaroslavl, Murom, Rybinsk, Arzamas), some events are known only by one name - for example, the Kolpinsky execution in June 1918. Following the Cadets, the arrests of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats began. In 1919, they were shot according to the lists and simply imprisoned the intelligentsia: all scientific circles, all university, all artistic, literary and all engineering.
Since January 1919, the surplus appropriation was expanded, this caused resistance from the village and gave a plentiful flow of arrests over the course of two years. Since the summer of 1920, many officers have been sent to Solovki. In 1920-21, the Tambov peasant uprising, led by the Union of the Labor Peasantry, was crushed. In March 1921, sailors from the rebellious Kronstadt were sent to the islands of the Archipelago, and in the summer the Public Committee for Assistance to the Starving was arrested. In the same year, arrests of students for "criticism of the order" were already practiced. At the same time, the arrests of socialist foreign party members expanded.
In the spring of 1922, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Profiteering decided to intervene in church affairs. Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two high-profile trials were carried out with executions: in Moscow - the distributors of the patriarchal appeal, in Petrograd - Metropolitan Veniamin, who interfered with the transfer of church power to the living churchmen. Metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and for big fish there were small shoals - archpriests, monks and deacons. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, monks, nuns, church activists, and just believing lay people were imprisoned.
Throughout the 20s, the catching of surviving white officers, as well as their mothers, wives and children, continued. All former state officials were also caught. So streams flowed "for concealing social origin" and for "former social position." A convenient legal term appears: social prevention. A systematic purge begins in Moscow - quarter by quarter.
Since 1927, the work to expose pests has been in full swing. There was a wave of arrests in the engineering environment. So in a few years they broke the back of Russian engineering, which was the glory of our country. The relatives connected with the doomed people were also caught in this stream. In 1928, the high-profile Shakhtinsk case was heard in Moscow. In September 1930, "organizers of the famine" - 48 pests in the food industry - are sued. At the end of 1930, the impeccably rehearsed trial of the Industrial Party was carried out. Since 1928, the time has come to settle accounts with the Nepmen. And in 1929-30, a multimillion-dollar stream of dispossessed people poured in. Bypassing prisons, he went straight to the stages, to the Gulag country. They were followed by streams of "pests of agriculture", agronomists - everyone was given 10 years in the camps. A quarter of Leningrad was "cleared" in 1934-35 during the Kirov Stream. And finally, the flow of the "Tenth Point", aka ASA (Anti-Soviet Agitation) - the most stable of all - has never been stopped.
All the long-term activity of the Organs was given force by only one article of the Criminal Code of 1926, Fifty-Eighth. There was no such act that could not be punished with the help of Article 58. Her 14 points, like a fan, covered the entire human existence. This article was applied in full swing in 1937-38, when Stalin added new terms to the criminal code - 15, 20 and 25 years. In 1937, a crushing blow was struck at the top of the party, the Soviet administration, the military command, and the top of the NKVD itself. The "reverse release" of 1939 was small, about 1-2% taken before that, but skillfully used in order to blame everything on Yezhov, to strengthen Beria and the power of the Leader. The returnees were silent, they were dumb with fear.
Then the war broke out, and with it the retreat. In the rear, the first military stream was - spreaders of rumors and sowers of panic. There was also a stream of all the Germans who lived anywhere in the Soviet Union. From the end of the summer of 1941, a stream of encirclement poured in. These were the defenders of the fatherland, who were captured through no fault of their own. In the high spheres, too, flowed a flood of those responsible for the retreat. From 1943 until 1946, the flow of arrests continued in the occupied territories and in Europe. Honest participation in an underground organization did not save one from the fate of falling into this stream. Among this stream, streams of guilty nations passed one after another. The last years of the war there was a stream of prisoners of war, both German and Japanese, and a stream of Russian emigrants. Throughout 1945 and 1946, a large stream of true opponents of power (Vlasovites, Krasnovite Cossacks, Muslims from the national units created under Hitler) moved into the Archipelago - sometimes convinced, sometimes unwilling.
It is impossible to remain silent about one of Stalin's decrees of June 4, 1947, which was baptized by the prisoners as the "Four-Sixths" Decree. An "organized gang" now received up to 20 years in the camps, at the factory the upper term was up to 25 years. The years 1948-49 were marked by an unprecedented, even for Stalin's injustice, tragic comedy of "repeaters", those who managed to survive 10 years of the Gulag. Stalin ordered that these cripples be imprisoned again. They were followed by a stream of "children of the enemies of the people." The flows of the 37th year were repeated again, only now the new Stalinist "quarter" has become the standard. Ten already went in children's terms. In the last years of Stalin's life, a flow of Jews began to take shape, and for this the "doctors' case" was started. But Stalin did not have time to arrange a big Jewish massacre.
Chapter 3
The investigation under Article 58 was almost never a revelation of the truth. His goal was to bend, break a person, turn him into a native of the Archipelago. For this, torture was used. A person was tortured with insomnia and thirst, put in a hot chamber, burned his hands with cigarettes, pushed him into a pool of sewage, squeezed his skull with an iron ring, lowered him into a bath with acids, tortured him with ants and bugs, drove a hot ramrod into the anus, crushed his genitals with a boot. If until 1938 some kind of permission was required for the use of torture, then in 1937-38, due to the emergency situation, torture was allowed indefinitely. In 1939, the general permit was withdrawn, but from the end of the war and in the post-war years, there were certain categories of prisoners to whom torture was applied. There was no list of torture, just the investigator had to follow the plan. And he did it in every possible way.
But in most cases, in order to get the necessary testimony from the prisoner, torture was not needed. A few tricky questions and a properly drawn up protocol were enough. Those under investigation did not know their rights and laws, and the investigation was based on this. Only a strong-willed person who put an end to his past life could survive. When I was arrested, I did not yet know this wisdom. Only because the memories of the first days of the arrest do not gnaw at me with remorse, because I avoided putting someone in jail. I signed the indictment along with count 11, which doomed me to eternal exile.
Chapter 4
Practically any employee of the Organs (Servants of the Blue Establishment, Blue Kants) had two instincts: the instinct of power and the instinct of profit. But even they had their flows. The organs also had to be cleansed. And the kings of the Organs, and the aces of the Organs, and the ministers themselves laid their heads under their own guillotine. One joint was taken away by Yagoda, the second was soon pulled by the short-lived Yezhov. Then there was the jamb of Beria.
Chapter 5
For the arrested person, his first cell is always in a special account. Experienced in it has nothing similar in all his life. It is not the floor and dirty walls that arouse the love of the prisoner, but the people with whom he shared the first imprisonment in his life.
My first love was cell number 67 in the Lubyanka. The most difficult hours in the sixteen-hour day of our cell are the first two, forced wakefulness from six o'clock, when it is impossible to take a nap. After the mandrel, we are returned to the cell and locked up until six o'clock. Then we share a meager ration, and only now the day begins. At nine o'clock - morning check, after it - a strip of interrogation calls. We are looking forward to a twenty-minute walk. The first three floors of the Lubyanka were unlucky - they were let out onto the lower damp courtyard, but the prisoners on the 4th and 5th floors were taken out to the roof. Once every 10 days, we are given books from the Lubyanka library. The library of Bolshaya Lubyanka is made up of confiscated books. Here one could read books forbidden in the wild. Finally, lunch - a scoop of soup and a scoop of liquid slurry, dinner - another scoop of slurry. After him - the evening mandrel, the second in a day. And then an evening full of arguments and chess games. And now the lamp flashes three times - lights out.
On May 2, Moscow fired thirty volleys, and on May 9, lunch was brought along with dinner - only by this we guessed the end of the war. That victory was not for us.
Chapter 6
The spring of 1945 became the spring of Russian captives, only they did not betray the Motherland, but the Motherland betrayed them. She betrayed them when the government did everything possible to lose the war, when she left in captivity, when she put on a noose immediately after returning. Escape home from captivity also led to the dock. Escape to the partisans only delayed the retribution. Many were recruited as spies only to escape from captivity. They sincerely believed that they would be forgiven and accepted. Not forgiven. Spy mania was one of the main features of Stalin's madness. Only the Vlasovites did not expect forgiveness. For world history, this is an unprecedented phenomenon: for several hundred thousand young people to take up arms against their Fatherland in alliance with its worst enemy. Who is more to blame - this youth or the Fatherland?
And that spring, a lot of Russian emigrants were in the cells. Then there was a rumor about an amnesty in honor of great victory but I didn't wait for it.
Chapter 7
On July 27, the OSO decided to give me eight years in labor camps for anti-Soviet agitation. OSO was invented in the 1920s, when Troikas of the GPU were created bypassing the court. Everyone knew the names of the assessors - Gleb Boky, Vul and Vasiliev. In 1934 Troika was renamed OSO.
Chapter 8
In addition to high-profile lawsuits, there were also silent ones, and there were many more of them. In 1918, there was an official term: "extrajudicial execution". But there were also courts. In 1917-18 the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Tribunals were established; the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal was created under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the system of Revolutionary Railway Tribunals and the unified system of Revolutionary Tribunals of the Internal Guard troops. On October 14, 1918, Comrade Trotsky signed a decree establishing a system of Revolutionary Military Tribunals. They had the right to immediately deal with deserters and agitators. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee had the right to intervene in any court case, to pardon and execute at its own discretion unlimitedly.
The most famous accuser of high-profile trials (and then an exposed enemy of the people) was then N.V. Krylenko. His first trial of the word was the Russkiye Vedomosti case on March 24, 1918. From 1918 to 1921 - the case of three investigators of the Moscow Tribunal, the case of Kosyrev, the case of "churchmen". There were 28 defendants in the Tactical Center case; Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra Lvovna, was sentenced to three years in the camps. In the case of Tagantsev in 1921, the Cheka shot 87 people. Thus the sun of our freedom rose.
Chapter 9
The Glavtop Trial (May 1921) is the first to concern engineers. The year 1922 was rich in public trials. In February, the suicide case of the engineer Oldenborger; Moscow church trial (April 26 - May 7); Petrograd church process (June 9 - July 5). At the trial of the Social Revolutionaries (June 8 - August 7), 32 people were tried, who were defended by Bukharin himself, and accused by Krylenko.
Chapter 10
At the end of 1922, about 300 of the most prominent Russian humanists were expelled from the country - Soviet Russia was liberated from the rotten bourgeois intelligentsia. In the Shakhty case (May 18 - June 15, 1928) there were 53 defendants. Then - the process of "Industrial Party" November 25 - December 7, 1930. On March 1-9, 1931, the trial of the Allied Bureau of the Mensheviks took place. Bukharin had a hand in many cases. He himself was arrested in 1937. Such performances were too expensive and troublesome, and Stalin decided not to use open trials anymore.
Chapter 11
death penalty in Soviet Russia was first canceled on October 28, 1917, but since June 1918 - established as new era executions. More than 1,000 people were shot a month. In January 1920, the death penalty was again abolished, but this decree, by order of Yagoda, did not apply to the revolutionary military tribunals. The effect of the decree was short-lived; on May 28, 1920, the Cheka was given back the right to execute. In 1927, it began to be canceled again, leaving only for the 58th article. According to articles protecting individuals, on murders, robberies and rapes, the execution was canceled. And in the 32nd, the death penalty was added according to the law from the "seventh-eighth". In the Leningrad Crosses alone, 264 suicide bombers were waiting for their fate at the same time. In 1936, the Father and Teacher renamed the All-Russian Central Executive Committee into the Supreme Council, and the death penalty into capital punishment. In 1939-40, half a million "political" and 480 "criminals" were shot across the Union. Since 1943, a decree was issued on hanging. In May 1947, Joseph Vissarionovich abolished the death penalty in peacetime, replacing it with 25 years in the camps. On January 12, 1950, the opposite decree was issued - to return the death penalty for "traitors to the motherland, spies and subversive bombers." And so it dragged on one after another: 1954 - for premeditated murder; May 1961 - for embezzlement of state property and forgery of money, February 1962 - for encroachment on the life of policemen, for rape, for bribery. And all this is temporary, until it is completely cancelled.
No science fiction writer could imagine the death chambers of 1937. The suicide bombers suffered from cold, from tightness and closeness, from hunger, without medical assistance. They waited for months to be shot (academician Vavilov waited almost a year until he was pardoned).
Chapter 12
As early as December 1917, it became clear that it was impossible without prisons, and by the 38th the official terms had been established - tyurzak (imprisonment) and TON (special purpose prison). It was good that place of detention, from where there was no communication with the outside world for half a year, and in 1923 the first prisoners were transferred to Solovki. Although the Archipelago grew, the TONs did not grow weak, they were needed to isolate the socialists and camp rebels, as well as to keep the weakest and sickest prisoners. Used old royal prisons and monasteries. In the 1920s, the food was still decent in political isolators, and in 1931-33 the food deteriorated sharply. In 1947, prisoners were constantly hungry. There was no light in the cells in the 1930s and 1940s: muzzles and reinforced cloudy glass created constant twilight in the cells. The air was also rationed, the windows were locked. Visits with relatives were banned in 1937 and were not resumed, only letters were allowed. Nevertheless, the old campers recognized TONs as a resort. After the TONs, the stages began.
PART 2. PERPETUAL MOTION
Wheels are also not standing, Wheels ...
Spinning, dancing millstones,
Spinning...
W. Muller
Chapter 1. Ships of the Archipelago
From the Bering Strait to the Bosporus, the islands of the Archipelago are scattered. Its ports are transit prisons, its ships are wagons. This is a well-established system, it has been created for decades. The car-zak is an ordinary docked car, only compartments for prisoners are separated from the corridor by a grate. 22 people were pushed into each compartment, and this was not the limit. The whole trip lasted 3 weeks. All this time, the prisoners were fed herring and were not given water. Political prisoners mixed with criminals and few could resist the blatars. Having gone through the meat grinder of a political investigation, a person was crushed not only in body, but also in spirit, and the blatari did not go through such an investigation. Political robbed not only by the blatari, the convoy himself became a thief. In 1945-46, when prisoners were streaming from Europe, the escort officers could not stand it either. The passengers of the wagon did not know where the train was going. Many people threw letters right on the rails, hoping that someone would pick them up, send them, and let their families know. But the best thing is to immediately understand that they are not returning from here. Sometimes a prisoner falls under the “pendulum”: the convoy does not come for him, he is taken to the end of the route, and then back, and at the same time he is not fed.
Back in the 1920s, prisoners were driven on foot, but in 1927 the Archipelago began to use the "black crow", and more affectionately - the funnel. For many years they were gray steel, but after the war they were painted in cheerful colors and written on top: "Bread", "Meat", and even "Drink Soviet champagne". Inside the funnels could be empty, with benches or with single boxes along the sides. They stuffed as many people there as they could fit, one on top of the other, political interspersed with thieves, men along with women.
Chapter 2. Ports of the Archipelago
The sons of the Gulag can easily count up to fifty transfers - the ports of the Archipelago. They all look like an illiterate convoy; a long wait in the sun or in the rain; strip search; unclean haircut; cold baths and fetid latrines; cramped, stuffy, dark and damp cells; raw, almost liquid bread; gruel, cooked as if from a silo. On many transfers, people stayed for months. In 1938, the Kotlasskaya Perezyka was just a piece of land, divided into cages by a fence, people lived in the open air both in summer and in winter. Later, two-story log cabins were built there, and six-story bunks were built in them. In the winter of 1944-45, 50 people a day died there. Karabas, a transfer near Karaganda, consisted of barracks with an earthen floor, and the Knyazh-Pogostsky transit point consisted of huts built in a swamp. They fed there only zatirukha from cereals and fish bones. In 1937, some Siberian prisons did not even have enough buckets. And at all stages, the political ones are in charge of the urki, whom the chief specially selects for this. But any beginner needs a transfer - it accustoms him to the camp, gives him a broad view. For me, such a school was Krasnaya Presnya in the summer of 1945.
Chapter 3
Millions of peasants, Volga Germans, emigrants were transported in red trains. Wherever he comes, there will immediately rise a new island of the Archipelago. And again the prisoner is squeezed between cold and hunger, between thirst and fear, between criminals and the convoy. The red echelon differs from other direct long-distance trains in that the one who got into it does not know whether he will get out. In the winters of 1944-45 and 1945-46, trains of prisoners went without stoves and came carrying a car or two of corpses. For transportation, not only railways, but also rivers served. Barge stages along the Northern Dvina did not die out even by 1940. The prisoners stood in the hold closely for more than one day. Transportation along the Yenisei continued for decades. In the Yenisei barges there were deep, dark holds, where neither the guards nor the doctors descended. In the ships going to the Kolyma, everything was like in barges, only the scale was larger. There were also walking stages. We covered up to 25 kilometers a day.
Chapter 4
The prisoners were also transported alone. It was called a special convoy. Few people had to move like that, but I had three times. Special convoy should not be confused with special equipment. The special task force more often travels in a general stage, and the special convoy travels alone. AT account card In the Gulag, I called myself a nuclear physicist and ended up in a sharashka for half a term. That's why I managed to survive.
No one knows the number of inhabitants of the Archipelago, but the world is very small. The prison telegraph is attention, memory and meetings. In July, I was brought from the camp to Butyrki on the mysterious "order of the Minister of the Interior." Probably the 75th camera was the best in my life. Two streams met in it: freshly convicted and specialists - physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers - sent to no one knows where. I was kept in that cell for two months.
PART 3. EXTRAORDINARY LABOR
Only children can understand us, who ate at the same time with us from one cup.
From a letter from a Hutsul woman, a former convict
Chapter 1
The archipelago was born under the shots of the Aurora. The leading idea of ​​the Archipelago - forced labor - was put forward by Lenin in the first month of the revolution. On July 6, 1918, the rebellion of the Left SRs was suppressed. From this historical bottom, the creation of the Archipelago began. On June 23, the "Temporary instruction on deprivation of liberty" was adopted, which stated: "Deprived of liberty and able-bodied are necessarily involved in physical labor." In February 1918, Comrade Lenin demanded an increase in the number of places of detention and intensified criminal repressions. The decisions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on forced labor camps were passed on April 15 and May 17, 1919. In the decree on the Red Terror, signed on September 5, 1918 by Petrovsky, Kursky and V. Bonch-Bruevich, in addition to instructions on mass executions, it was said: "to ensure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.
After the end of the civil war, the role of forced labor camps in the structure of the RSFSR increased. In 1922, all places of detention were merged into a single GUMZak (Main Directorate of Places of Confinement). He united 330 places of detention with a total number of people deprived of liberty - 80-81 thousand. Soon the GUMZak of the USSR was renamed the GUITU of the USSR (Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Institutions), from which the Gulag turned out.
Chapter 2. The archipelago arises from the sea
The Northern Special Purpose Camps (SLON) were created in June 1923 in the Solovetsky Monastery, after the monks were expelled from there. By that time, the concentration camps were recognized as insufficiently strict, and already in 1921 the SLON was founded. Solovki Gate - Kemperpunkt, forwarding to Kemi. The quarantine company was dressed in ordinary bags with holes for the head and hands. The dream of every prisoner was a standard type of clothing, which was worn only by the detcolony. In the two-story cathedral on Sekirnaya Gora, punishment cells were set up. The prisoners in them had to sit all day on poles as thick as an arm. In the summer naked man tied to a tree, under mosquitoes. The man was crushed in spirit, not yet starting the Solovetsky life. During the first six months, by December 1923, more than 2,000 prisoners had already gathered on Solovki, and in 1928 there were 3,760 people in the 13th company alone. Even more was the "17th company" - common cemetery pits.
Until 1929, in the RSFSR, only 34 to 41% of prisoners were "covered" with labor. The first year of the first five-year plan (1930), which shook the whole country, shook Solovki as well. Now the most terrible for the prisoners were business trips to the mainland. From Kem to the west across the swamps, the prisoners laid the Kem-Ukhta tract - they drowned in the summer, froze in the winter. In the same year, roads were laid on the Kola Peninsula. In winter, beyond the Arctic Circle, people dug the earth by hand. This was before the "cult of personality".
The archipelago began to expand. Escapes multiplied. It was impossible to allow the fugitives to be helped. And rumors began to circulate: that there were murderers and rapists in the camps, that every fugitive was a dangerous bandit. Bessonov's group (Malzagov, Malbrodsky, Sazonov, Pribludin) fled to England. Books began to appear there that amazed Europe, but we did not believe them. On June 20, 1929, the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky came to Solovki with a check - and did not find those horrors that are described from English books. In the children's colony, a 14-year-old boy told him the whole truth. On the 23rd, Gorky sailed away without doing anything for the prisoners, and the boy was immediately shot.
From the end of the 1920s, bytoviki and punks began to be driven to Solovki. On March 12, 1929, the first batch of minors arrived at Solovki. They hung up the slogan: "The prisoner is an active participant in socialist construction!" and even came up with the term - reforging. In the autumn of 1930, the Solovetsky headquarters for competition and shock work was created. Notorious recidivist thieves suddenly "reforged" and organized a commune and "labor collectives". Article 58 was accepted into not a single collective, it was sent to distant, godforsaken places to open new camps.
Chapter 3
Since 1928, the Solovetsky crayfish began to spread across Karelia - for laying roads, for logging. SLON camps appeared at all points of the Murmansk railway. Since 1931, the famous BelBaltLag was born. Nothing prevented the Archipelago from spreading across the Russian north. In 1931, the North Ural branch of the SLON was founded. Created on the go new organization Archipelago: Camp Administrations, camp departments, camp points, camp sites. The entire 58th rushed north and into Siberia - to master and perish.
The history of the Archipelago has found almost no reflection in public writing. Soviet Union. The exceptions were Belamorkanal and Volgokanal. On August 17, 1933, a "walk" of 120 writers took place along the newly completed canal on a steamboat. As a result, the book "The White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin" was born, edited by Gorky, L.L. Averbakh and S.G. Firin. After 2-3 years, most of the leaders glorified in it were declared enemies of the people, and the "immortal work" was withdrawn from libraries and destroyed.
The Belomorkanal was chosen for the first great construction of the Archipelago. Stalin needed a great construction site somewhere that would absorb many workers and many lives of prisoners. Great Leader declared the construction urgent and released 20 months for it: from September 1931 to April 1933. Less than two years to build 227 kilometers of the canal, and not a penny of currency. There were no cars, no tractors, no cranes, everything was done by the hands of a hundred thousand prisoners. For this northern project, hydraulic engineers and irrigators from Central Asia were brought in (they were just imprisoned), and they began to do the project before surveying on the ground. Echelons of convicts arrived at the future route, where there were no barracks, no supplies, no tools, no exact plan yet. The norm was: to break two cubic meters of granite rock and take it out a hundred meters in a wheelbarrow. Only on the White Sea Canal was it discovered what a real camp is. Ventilated barracks, a twelve-hour working day, cold slurry - muddy slurry with heads of anchovy and individual grains of millet. After the end of the working day, people remained frozen to death on the track. By May 1, 1933, People's Commissar Yagoda reported to his beloved Teacher that the channel was ready. Most of the "canal army" went to build the next canal - Moscow-Volga, which continued and developed the traditions of Belomor.
Chapter 4
By 1937, the Archipelago was greatly strengthened, not only at the expense of those arrested from freedom. “Special settlers” turned to prisoners, those dispossessed who miraculously managed to survive both in the taiga and in the tundra - there are still millions of them. The settlements of "special settlers" were entirely included in GLULAG. This addition was the main tide to the Archipelago in 1937. Its regime became even more stringent, labor collectives were banned, meetings with relatives were banned, corpses were not issued for burial, vocational courses for prisoners were canceled. The Corrective Labor Code of 1933 was forgotten for 25 years. Electric lighting stretched along the zones, and guard dogs were included in the staff. All connections with the will were interrupted, the holes were plugged, the last "observation commissions" were expelled. Then the 58th was driven into pits in order to more reliably guard. The Gulag did not part with only one thing: with the encouragement of punks, thieves. They became the internal camp police, camp stormtroopers. They freely robbed, beat and strangled the 58th. So the Archipelago ended the second five-year plan.
The convicts learned about the beginning of the Great Patriotic War only the next day, June 23. Radio in the zones was abolished for the duration of our military failures. Forbidden to write letters home. Throughout the Archipelago, from the first days of the war, the liberation of the 58th was stopped. Dietary norms in the camps decreased: vegetables were replaced by fodder turnips, cereals - by vetch and bran. Here they buried no less during the war than at the front. For the 58th wartime camp, it was especially difficult to wind up the second terms. The closer to the end of the war, the more brutal the regime became for the 58th. Before the Finnish war, the Solovki, which had become too close to the West, merged into the NorilLag that was being created, which soon reached 75,000 people. The conquest of the deserts of Kazakhstan by the Archipelago also belongs to the pre-war years. Neoplasms swell in the Novosibirsk region, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, in Khakassia, in Buryat-Mongolia, in Uzbekistan, in Mountain Shoria, in the Russian North. There was no region without its own camp. Entire villages of Volga Germans are included in the zone.
Chapter 5
The archipelago was born from an economic need: The state needed a free and unpretentious labor force. The Criminal Code of 1926 provided the theoretical foundation. Forcing a prisoner to work 12-14 hours a day is humane and leads to his correction. The meaning of the existence of the Archipelago and serfdom is the same: these are social devices for the forced and ruthless use of the free labor of millions of slaves. All differences are to the benefit of serfdom. In the camps, the CPSU (b) was deciphered as the Second Serfdom (Bolsheviks). Three whales on which the Archipelago stands are: Kotlovka, Brigade and Two Heads. Kotlovka is the distribution of rations, when the prisoner received it in small portions, handouts, depending on the fulfilled norm. When the kotlovka could not force people to work, a brigade headed by a foreman was invented, who ended up in a punishment cell if the brigade did not fulfill the norm. The two principalities are like pincers, like a hammer and anvil. In the hands of one was production, in the hands of the other - the labor force (labor force).
Chapter 6. Fascists have been brought!
On August 14, 1945, I was transferred to the camp New Jerusalem. In the rooms - bare lining without mattresses and linen. Rise - at a quarter to five, and immediately to the dining room for a gruel - cabbage soup from nettles without meat, without fat, even without salt. On the first day of me former officer, is appointed as a shift foreman of a clay quarry. A few days later, this position is abolished, and I go to dig clay and get faded rags in the camp cloakroom. My soul was not yet that of a prisoner, but my skin had already become that of a prisoner. We still hoped for an amnesty, but it has already arrived. Only bytoviks were amnestied, and we ("fascists", as the 58th was then called) replaced them. The amnesty freed the 58th for up to three years, which almost no one was given. Even wartime deserters were amnestied. Because of the amnesty, there were not enough workers, and I was "thrown" from the quarry to the workshop - to push trolleys with bricks, then back to the quarry.
Chapter 7
The whole life of the natives of the Archipelago consists of endless work, of hunger, cold and cunning. There are countless types of general work, but the oldest, most important work is logging. During the war, Lagerniki called logging a dry execution. According to the norms of the Gulag, it is impossible to feed a person who has been working in the cold for 13 hours. The boiler was divided depending on the fulfilled norm, but the drummers went into the ground before the refuseniks. And after work - a hut, a dugout; in the North - a tent, somehow sprinkled with earth and lined with hemp; bare bunks on several floors. Wet clothes were dried on themselves - there was no change. At night, clothes froze to the bunks and walls of the tent. And yet - the eternal camp inconstancy of life: stages; mysterious shuffles, transfers and commissions; inventory of property, sudden night searches, scheduled searches by May 1 and November 7, and three times a month destructive baths. Waste of the life of the Archipelago - goners. Everything that is built by the Archipelago is squeezed out of them. Another part of the life of the Gulag is the camp medical unit. Until 1932, camp sanitation was subordinate to the People's Commissariat of Health, and doctors could be doctors, but in 1932 they were completely transferred to the Gulag and became gravediggers. It was the sanchat who refused to state the fact of the beating and signed the orders for landing in the punishment cell. Medical assistance was not provided to self-mutilators at all, and seriously ill patients were not released from work. Only one thing no blue cap can take away from a prisoner - death. From the autumn of 1938 to February 1939, 385 out of 550 people died in one of the Ust-Vym camps. Linen, shoes, rags from the dead again went into action.
Chapter 8
In the yard of Krasnaya Presnya it happened to me to sit next to a group of women, and I saw that they were not as exhausted as we were. Equal prison rations for all and prison trials turn out to be easier for women, they do not give up so quickly from hunger. In the camp, on the contrary, it is harder for a woman. Arrival at the camp begins with a bathhouse, where the "camp jerks" choose women for themselves. This way it is easier for a woman to save her life, but the majority of the 58th are women for whom this step is more unbearable than death. It makes it easier that no one is judging anyone here; unleashes the fact that life has no meaning left. According to the statistics of the 1920s, there was one woman for every 6-7 men. The woman's only protection was sheer old age or sheer deformity; attractiveness was a curse. There were 6000 women in Karlag, many of them worked as loaders. At a brick factory in Krivoshchekovo, women were pulling logs from a worked-out quarry. There was no consolation in love either. Gulag instructions demanded that those caught in cohabitation be immediately separated and the less valuable of the two be sent by stage. Camp love arose almost not carnal, but from this it became even deeper. The camp spouses were separated not only by supervision and superiors, but also by the birth of a child - nursing mothers were kept in separate camps. After the end of feeding, the mother was sent to the stage, and the child - to Orphanage. Mixed camps existed from the first years of the revolution until the end of the 2nd World War. From 1946 to 1948 a great separation of women and men took place in the Archipelago. The women were sent to work together. Now pregnancy was a life saver. Separate women's camps bore the brunt of the general work, only in 1951 was women's logging formally abolished.
Chapter 9
One of the main concepts of the Archipelago is a camp jerk, one who left the general work or did not get to them at all. According to the statistics of 1933, they accounted for 1/6 of the total number of prisoners. Basically, they survived in the camps. Jerks are: cooks, bread cutters, storekeepers, doctors, paramedics, hairdressers, all kinds of managers, accountants, engineers - everything in key positions. They are always well fed and cleanly dressed. After New Jerusalem, when transferring to the next camp, to the Kaluga outpost, I lied that I was a rationing officer. But my career failed again, for the second week I was expelled for general work, in a brigade of painters.
Chapter 10
Article 58 ceased to be "political" and became an article of counter-revolutionaries, "enemies of the people." A deaf-mute carpenter throws a jacket over a bust of Lenin - 58th, 10 years old; during the game, the kids tore off some kind of poster in the club - two older ones were given a sentence. There was a standard set of accusations from which the appropriate one was chosen. Most often, the tenth point was used - anti-Soviet agitation. Only the 12th point can be compared with him in terms of public access - non-reporting. Very handy here accounted for denunciations. This is probably an unprecedented event in the world history of prisons: when millions of prisoners realize that they are innocent. But true "political" also existed. In 1950, students of the Leningrad Mechanical College created a party with a program and charter. Many were shot, the rest were given 25 years. On October 27, 1936, a Trotskyist hunger strike took place along the entire Vorkuta line of camps, which lasted 132 days. The demand of the starving people was accepted, but not fulfilled. A little later, there was another major hunger strike in Vorkuta (170 people). Their fate was execution. The results of the opposition to the system were negligible.
Chapter 11
Most of the 58th were those who, despite everything, retained a communist consciousness. Their beliefs were deeply personal, and such people did not hold high positions in the wild and in the camp. Sometimes they remained convinced to the end. But there were also orthodox people who showed their ideological conviction during the investigation, in prison cells, in camps. Before their arrest, they occupied major posts, and it was more difficult for them in the camp - it was painful for them to fall, to experience such a blow from their own party. Among them, it was considered forbidden to ask the question: "Why were you imprisoned?". They argued in the cells, defending all the actions of the authorities - it was necessary for them to stay in the consciousness of being right so as not to go crazy. These people were not taken until 1937 and after 1938, so they were called "set of the 37th." They gave various explanations for their arrests, but none of them ever blamed Stalin for this - he remained an unclouded sun. The well-meaning orthodox believed that they were the only ones imprisoned in vain, and the rest were in prison for the cause, the camp could not change them. They readily observed the camp regime, respectfully treated the camp authorities, were devoted to work, instead of trying to escape they sent requests for pardon, never mixed with the rest of the 58th and "knocked" the camp authorities.
Chapter 12
For the entire era that this book covers, almost the only eyes and ears of the Cheka-KGB were informers. They were called secret collaborators, this was reduced to seksots, and passed into common usage. The Archipelago had its own names: in prison - a mother hen, in a camp - a snitch. Any person could be a sexot, recruitment was in the very air of our country. It was worth a little threat, pressure, promise - and a new sexot is ready. In the camp it was even easier. But sometimes a "tough nut" comes across, and a note is put in the camp case: "do not recruit!". They also tried to recruit me. I signed the commitment, but something kept me going. Then I was sent to the sharashka according to the special squad of the ministry. Many years of camps and exile passed, and suddenly in 1956 this commitment found me. I excused myself with my illness.
Chapter 13
The streams that feed the Archipelago do not rest here, but are once again pumped through the pipes of the second effects. The second camp terms were given in all years, but most often - in 1937-38 and during the war years. In 1948-49 they were imprisoned for the second time, they were called repeaters. In 1938, the second term was given right in the camp. In Kolyma they gave ten, and in Vorkuta - 8 or 5 years according to the OCA. During the war years, in order not to get to the front, the camp commanders "revealed" the terrible conspiracies of the goners. When the "conspiracies" were over, since 1943 a lot of "agitation" cases began. Skvortsov was sentenced to 15 years in Lokhchemlag on charges of "opposing the proletarian poet Mayakovsky to a certain bourgeois poet." New terms were given during the war, and in 1938 more were shot. Known are the "Kashketian" executions (after the Trotskyist hunger strike in March 1937) and the "Garanin" executions.
Chapter 14
The only way out for the prisoner was to escape. In March 1930 alone, 1328 people fled from the places of detention of the RSFSR (changed their fate). After 1937, the Archipelago began to grow, and the guards became less and less. There were invisible chains that kept the prisoners well. The first of them is a general humility with one's position and the hope for an amnesty; the second is the camp famine, when there is no strength to run, and the threat of a new term. A deaf barrier was the geography of the Archipelago and the hostility of the district population. They paid generously for the capture of a fugitive. The main form of fighting escapees in the Archipelago is to beat and kill the fugitive. In the meantime, the fugitives are running, they are being wound up with second terms.
Chapter 15
The Correctional Labor Code of 1933, which was in effect until the early 1960s, prohibited isolation wards. By this time, other types of intra-camp punishments had been adopted: RURs (Reinforced Security Companies), BURs (Reinforced Security Brigades), ZURs (Reinforced Security Zones) and ShIZOs (Penal Isolators). Basic requirements for ShIZO: cold, damp, dark and hungry. To do this, they did not heat, did not insert glasses for the winter, fed them with Stalin's rations (300 g per day), and hot food - once every three days. In Vorkuta they gave only 200 g, and instead of hot - a piece of raw fish. According to the law, it was impossible to imprison in ShIZO for more than 15 days, but sometimes the term was extended for a year. They kept them in BUR longer, from a month to a year, and most often - indefinitely. BUR is either an ordinary barracks fenced with barbed wire, or a stone prison in a camp with bolts, concrete floors and a punishment cell. The desire to force the guilty to work forced them to be allocated to separate penalty zones (SAMs). In ZUR - reduced soldering and the hardest work. They liked to send believers, stubborn and thieves, caught fugitives to ZURs. Sent for refusing to become a snitch. In the ZUR Kraslag, the Roaring working day lasted 15 hours at 60 degrees below zero. Refuseees were hunted down by sheepdogs. Cannibalism flourished on the penal assignment of SevZhelDorLag in 1946-47.
Chapter 16
All this did not concern thieves, murderers and rapists. For state theft they were given 10 years (and from the 47th and 20); for robbing an apartment - up to one year, sometimes - 6 months. The "Voroshilov" amnesty on March 27, 1953 flooded the country with a wave of criminals who were hardly caught after the war. Lumpen is not a proprietor, he cannot get along with socially hostile elements, but rather will get along with the proletariat. Therefore, in the Gulag they were officially called "socially close". They diligently cultivated "a contemptuous and hostile attitude towards kulaks and counter-revolutionaries, that is, towards Article 58. In the 1950s, shrugging off social intimacy, Stalin ordered that thieves be put in isolation wards and even separate prisons should be built for them.
Chapter 17
A considerable part of the natives of the Archipelago were youngsters. Already in 1920, there was a colony of juvenile delinquents under the People's Commissariat of Education. From 1921 to 1930 there were workhouses for minors, and from 1924 there were labor communes of the OGPU. Homeless children were taken from the streets, not from their families. It all started with Article 12 of the Criminal Code of 1926, which allowed for theft, violence, mutilation and murder to judge children from the age of 12. In 1927, prisoners aged 16 to 24 accounted for 48% of all prisoners. In 1935, Stalin issued a decree to judge children with the use of all penalties, including execution. And finally, the decree of July 7, 1941: to judge children from the age of 12 with the application of all penalties in the same way in cases where they committed a crime not intentionally, but through negligence. There were two main types of keeping young children in the Archipelago: Separate children's colonies (mostly under 15 years old) and in mixed camps (over 15), more often with disabled people and women. None of these methods freed youngsters from thieves' upbringing. In children's colonies, youngsters worked for 4 hours, and another 4 hours had to study. In the adult camp, they received a 10-hour working day with a reduction in the norm, and food was the same as for adults. Due to malnutrition at 16, they look like small, frail children. In adult camps, youngsters retained the main feature of their behavior - the unity of attack and rebuff. According to the 58th, there was no age minimum. Galya Venediktova, the daughter of enemies of the people, was sentenced at 11 to 25 years in the camps.
Chapter 18
In the Gulag, everyone was reeducated under the influence of each other, but not a single person was reeducated from the funds of the Cultural and Educational Department (KVCh). The time for slogans, camp newspapers and vocational courses has passed. The KVCh employees had to hand out letters and organize amateur performances. I also performed in concerts in the camp. There were also special theatrical troupes in the Gulag made up of prisoners released from general work - real serf theaters. I never managed to get into such a theater. I remember my participation in amateur performances as a humiliation.
Chapter 19
This ethnographic essay proves that the zeks of the Archipelago constitute a separate nation and are a different biological type compared to Homo sapiens. The chapter examines in detail the life and jargon of prisoners.
Chapter 20
We know least of all about the successive chiefs of the Gulag - these kings of the Archipelago, but their common features can be traced without difficulty. Arrogance, stupidity and tyranny - in this the campers caught up with the worst of the serfs of the 18th and 19th centuries. All camp commanders have a sense of patrimony - this is how they perceive the camp. Their most universal feature is greed, money-grubbing. There was no bridle, neither real nor moral, which would hold back lust, anger and cruelty. If it was still possible to meet a person in a prison and camp guard, then in an officer it was almost impossible. Arbitrariness in the officers of the vohra (military guards) thickened even more. These young lieutenants had a feeling of power over being. Some of them transferred cruelty to their soldiers. The most power-hungry and strong of the Vokhrovites tried to jump into the internal service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and advance there. This is how many kings of the Archipelago have risen. But the real recruitment and training of these troops began simultaneously with the Special Camps - from the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s.
Chapter 21
Each island of the Archipelago, like a piece of rotten meat, maintains a fetid zone around it. Everything infectious seeps from the Archipelago to this zone, and then disperses throughout the country. Not a single camp zone existed on its own, there was always a free village near it. Sometimes large cities grew out of such settlements, such as Magadan, Norilsk, Balkhash, Bratsk. Sometimes entire districts, like Tanshaevsky, belonged to the camp world. There are towns (for example, Karaganda), founded before the Archipelago, but then they were surrounded by many camps and turned into one of the capitals of the Archipelago. Lived in camp areas locals, vokhra, camp officers with their families, guards with their families, former convicts and semi-repressed, production bosses and freemen - various strays who came to work, adventurers and rogues. Some of them can no longer live in another world and move from one zone to another all their lives. Operational surveillance was carried out over each such village, there were also informers.
Chapter 22
The archipelago was beneficial to the state from a political point of view. And with the economic? The Correctional Labor Code of 1924 required that places of detention be self-supporting. Since 1929, all correctional labor institutions of the country were included in the national economic plan, and from January 1, 1931, all camps and colonies of the RSFSR and Ukraine were transferred to full self-sufficiency. But there was no self-sufficiency - the irresponsible prisoners did not want to work sparing no effort for the good of the state. Freemen did the same, and they stole hard. In addition, the prisoners had to be guarded, and the state had to keep at least one overseer for every working native of the Archipelago. And also - the natural and forgivable oversights of the leadership. Pejheldorlag built the road to Vorkuta - winding, as it were, and then the finished road had to be straightened. The archipelago not only did not pay for itself, but the country also had to pay extra to have it. Everything was further complicated by the fact that the whole state needed self-financing, and the head of a separate camp did not give a damn about him.
PART 4. SOUL AND BARBED WIRE
I tell you a secret: we will not all die, but we will all change.
1 Corinthians 15:51
Chapter 1
It was believed for centuries: for this, a time was given to the criminal so that he could repent. But the Gulag Archipelago knows no remorse. For the thieves, crime is not a reproach, but valor, while the rest did not have any crime - there is nothing to repent of. Probably, in the universal consciousness of innocence, the reason for the rarity of camp suicides lay - there were much more escapes. Each prisoner makes a vow to himself: to survive until his release at any cost. Some set themselves the goal of simply surviving, while others - to survive at any cost, which means - at the cost of another. At this camp crossroads, the divider of souls, not a large number turn right, but not alone. In 1946, a group of intellectuals came to death at the camp in Samarka. Anticipating imminent death, they do not steal or whimper, time after time they gather and lecture each other.
The day of liberation does not give anything: a person changes, and everything at will becomes a stranger. And is it possible to free someone who is already free in soul? While laying claim to a man's labor, the camp does not infringe on the structure of his thoughts. No one persuades a prisoner to join the party, there is no trade union, no production meetings, no agitation. A free head is the advantage of living in the Archipelago. A person who has turned in the right direction begins to transform, rise spiritually, learn to love those who are close in spirit. Lying in the recovery room of the camp hospital, I rethought my past life. Only in this way I was able to go the very road that I always wanted.
Chapter 2
But many campers did not experience this transformation. Their heads were occupied only with thoughts about bread, tomorrow was worth nothing to them, labor was the main enemy, and those around them were rivals in life and death. Such a person is constantly afraid of losing what he still has. It is impossible to rise in these evil feelings and calculations. No camp can corrupt those who have an established core. Those who were not enriched by any spiritual education before the camp are corrupted.
Chapter 3
As the human body is poisoned by a cancerous tumor, so our country was gradually poisoned by the poisons of the Archipelago. Free life was a single style with the life of the Archipelago. Man was tormented by constant fear, which led to the consciousness of his insignificance and the absence of any right. This was aggravated by the fact that a person could not freely change work and place of residence. Stealth and distrust replaced hospitality and became protection. From this was born a general ignorance of what is happening in the country. The squealing has grown exponentially. With many years of fear for himself and his family, betrayal was the safest form of existence. Each act of opposition to the authorities required courage, not commensurate with the magnitude of the act. In this environment, people survive physically, but inside they decay. The total life of society consisted in the fact that traitors were put forward, mediocrity triumphed, and all the best and honest went crumbling from under the knife. Constant lies, like betrayal, become a safe form of existence. Cruelty was sung and brought up, and the boundary between good and bad was blurred.
Chapter 4
This chapter contains the full biographies of several prisoners.
PART 5. Hard labor
Let's turn Siberia into hard labor, shackle - Soviet, socialist Siberia!
Stalin
Chapter 1
On April 17, 1943, 26 years after the February revolution abolished hard labor and the gallows, Stalin reintroduced them. The very first hard labor camp was created at the 17th mine of Vorkuta. It was a frank gas chamber, stretched out in time. People were settled in tents 7 × 20 meters. This tent accommodated 200 people. Neither the restroom, nor the dining room, nor the medical unit were ever allowed - they had either a bucket or a feeder for everything. Stalin's hard labor of 1943-44 was a combination of the worst that is in the camp with the worst that is in prison. The first Vorkuta convicts went underground in one year. At the Vorkuta mine No. 2 there was a women's hard labor camp. Women worked in all underground jobs. Some will say that only traitors were sitting there: policemen, burgomasters, "German litters." But all these tens and hundreds of thousands of traitors came from Soviet citizens, we ourselves sowed this malice in them, these are our "waste products." The deification of Stalin in the 1930s was not a condition of the whole people, but only of the party, the Komsomol, urban student youth, a substitute for the intelligentsia (placed in place of the destroyed ones) and the working class. However, there was a minority, and not so small, who saw only lies around.
The village was incomparably more sober than the city, it did not share the deification of Old Man Stalin (and indeed the world revolution). This is evidenced by the great exodus of the population from the North Caucasus in January 1943 - the peasants left along with the retreating Germans. There were also those who, even before the war, dreamed of taking up arms and beating the Red Commissars. 24 years of communist happiness were enough for these people. The Vlasovites called for turning the war with the Germans into a civil one, but even earlier Lenin did this during the war with Kaiser Wilhelm.
By 1945, the convict barracks were no longer prison cells. In 1946-47, the line between penal servitude and the camp began to blur. In 1948, Stalin had the idea to separate the socially close thieves and bytoviki from the socially hopeless 58th. Special camps were created with a special charter - softer than hard labor, but tougher than ordinary camps. Only anti-Soviet agitators (single), non-informers and accomplices of the enemy were set aside with the bytoviki. The rest were waiting for the Special Camps. To avoid mixing, since 1949, each native, in addition to the sentence, received a decision - in which camps to contain him.
Chapter 2
I spent the middle of the term in warmth and cleanliness. Little was required of me: 12 hours of sitting at a desk and pleasing the authorities, but I lost my taste for these benefits. We were taken to the Special Camp for a long time - three months. Throughout the stage, we were blown by the breeze of hard labor and freedom. At the Butyrsky railway station, we were mixed with newcomers who had 25-year terms. These terms allowed the prisoners to speak freely. We were all taken to one camp - Stepnoy. At the Kuibyshev transfer, we were kept for more than a month in a long cell-stable. Then we were received by the convoy of the Steppe camp. Trucks with bars in the front part of the body were driven behind us. They drove for 8 hours, through the Irtysh. Around midnight we arrived at the camp surrounded by barbed wire. Revolution here and did not smell.
Chapter 3
We were lucky: we did not get to the copper mines, where the lungs could not withstand more than 4 months. In order to tighten the regime of the Special Camps, each prisoner was given numbers that were sewn onto clothes. The guards were ordered to call people only by numbers. In some camps, handcuffs were used as punishment. The special camp regime would be designed for complete deafness: no one will complain to anyone and will never be released. Work for the Special Camps was chosen as hard as possible. Sick prisoners and disabled people were sent to die in Spassk near Karaganda. At the end of 1948 there were about 15 thousand prisoners of both sexes. With an 11-hour working day, there is rarely anyone withstood more than two months. In addition, with the move to the Special Camp, communication with the will almost ceased - two letters a year were allowed.
The Ekibastuz camp was established a year before our arrival - in 1949. Here everything was in the likeness of the former - the commandant, the barracks of idiots and the line in the punishment cell, only the thieves no longer had the former scope. Weeks, months, years dragged on, and no breakthrough was foreseen. We, the new arrivals, mostly Western Ukrainians, huddled together in one brigade. For a few days we were considered unskilled laborers, but soon we became a team of masons. A successful escape was made from our camp, and at that time we were completing the construction of the camp drill.
Chapter 4
According to the socialist interpretation, the whole of Russian history is a series of tyrannies. But the Decembrist soldiers were forgiven four days later, and only five of the Decembrist officers were shot. Alexander II himself was assassinated seven times, but he did not exile half of Petersburg, as was the case after Kirov. Brother Lenin makes an attempt on the emperor, and in the fall of the same year, Vladimir Ulyanov enters the Kazan Imperial University in the law department. And when Tukhachevsky was repressed, they not only imprisoned his family, but also arrested two of his brothers with their wives, four sisters with their husbands, and dispersed their nephews to orphanages and changed their surnames. In the most terrible time of the "Stolypin terror" 25 people were executed, and society was shocked by this cruelty. And only the lazy did not run from the link. The methods of the prisoner's resistance to the regime were: protest, hunger strike, escape, rebellion. Our escapes were doomed, because the population did not help, but sold the fugitives. Revolts led to insignificant results - without public opinion, a revolt has no development. But we didn't. In the Special Camps we became political.
Chapter 5
Arriving in Ekibastuz in the sixth year of my imprisonment, I set out to get a working specialty. I did not expect to go to the assholes - I needed a head cleared of turbidity. I had been writing a poem for two years now, and it helped me not to notice what was being done to my body. It was impossible to keep what was written. I wrote in small pieces, memorized and burned. On the Kuibyshev transfer, I saw how Catholics made rosaries out of bread, and I made the same ones for myself - they helped me memorize the lines. There were many like me in the Archipelago. Arnold Lvovich Rappoport, for example, compiled a universal technical reference book and wrote a treatise "On Love". How many poetic people were revealed to me in a shaved headbox, under a prisoner's black jacket.
Chapter 6-7. Convinced Runaway
A convinced fugitive is one who does not doubt for a minute that a person cannot live behind bars; the one who thinks about escaping all the time and sees him in a dream; the one who signed up to be irreconcilable and knows what he is getting into. Just as a bird is not free to refuse a seasonal flight, so a convinced fugitive cannot help but run. Such was Georgy Pavlovich Tenno. He graduated from a naval school, then - a military institute foreign languages, spent the war in the northern fleet, went to Iceland and England as a liaison officer on English escort ships. He was arrested on Christmas Eve 1948 and given 25 years in the camps. The only thing left for him now was to escape. Escapes of prisoners have their own history and their own theory. History is former shoots, it can be learned from the captured fugitives. The escape theory is very simple: if you run away, you know the theory. The rules are as follows: it is easier to run from an object than from a residential area; it is more difficult to run alone, but no one will betray; you need to know the geography and people of the surrounding area; one must prepare an escape according to plan, but at any moment be ready to escape on occasion. The Tenno gathered a group and escaped on September 17, 1950. They were caught 20 days later near Omsk, tried again and given another 25 years. Georgy Pavlovich Tenno died on October 22, 1967 from cancer.
Chapter 8
The leaders of the Gulag perceived the escapes from the ITL as a spontaneous phenomenon, inevitable in a vast economy. It was not so in the Special Camps. They were equipped with enhanced security and weapons at the level of modern motorized infantry. In the instructions of the Special Camps, it was laid down that there could be no escapes from there at all. Each escape is the same as crossing the state border by a major spy. When the 58th began to receive 25-year terms, there was nothing more to keep the political from escaping. Although there were fewer escapes in the Special Camps than in the ITL, these escapes were tougher, harder, irreversible, hopeless - and therefore more glorious. In Ekibastuz, the Enhanced Security Brigade increased disproportionately from escapes, the camp prison could no longer accommodate it. Frightened by the escapes, the owners of Ekibastuz surrounded the objects and the residential area with ditches a meter deep, but in 1951 12 people managed to escape from there. And after that, let them say that we did not fight.
Chapter 9
We were guarded by Red Army soldiers, self-guards, old storekeepers. Finally, young vigorous boys came, who had not seen the war, armed with brand new machine guns - and went to guard us. They have the right to shoot without warning. The whole cunning and strength of the system is that our connection with the guards is based on ignorance. For these boys, we are fascists, fiends. They don't know anything about us. The political instructor will never tell the boys that they are imprisoned here for faith in God, for the thirst for truth, for the love of justice, and for nothing at all. This is how those who beat the bread out of the mouth of a gray-haired old man in handcuffs are formed. For the murder of a prisoner - a reward: a monthly salary, a month's vacation. And between the guards there is a competition - who will kill more. In May 1953, these sons with machine guns gave a sudden burst of fire at the column waiting for the entrance search. There were 16 wounded by explosive bullets, long banned by all conventions. The universal human foundation was weak in these boys, if it did not resist the oath and political conversations.
Chapter 10
Like everything undesirable in our history, riots were carefully cut down and locked in a safe, their participants were destroyed, and witnesses were intimidated. Now these uprisings have already become a myth. The earliest outbreaks occurred in January 1942 on a business trip to Osh-Kurye near Ust-Usa. The civilian Retyunin gathered a couple of hundred volunteers from the 58th, they disarmed the guards and went into the woods to partisan. They were killed gradually, and in the spring of 1945 they imprisoned completely uninvolved people in the "Retunin case". Driving the 58th to the Special Camps, Stalin thought that it would be worse, but it turned out the other way around. His whole system was based on the division of the discontented, and in the Special Camps the discontented met with masses of many thousands. And there were no thieves - the pillars of the camp regime and the authorities. There was no theft - and people looked at each other with sympathy. The camp psychology begins to die out: "you die today, and I will die tomorrow." It's passed on even to idiots. These changes affect only those who have a remnant of conscience. There is no real shift in consciousness yet, and we are still oppressed.
It was enough to ask the question: "How to make sure that we do not run away from them, but they run away from us?" - and the era of escapes ended in the camps, the era of rebellions began. They began to cut in all the special camps, even in the invalid Spassk. The Dubovsky stage brought the bacillus of rebellion to us. Strong guys, taken directly from the partisan path, immediately began to act. Murder has become the norm. This illegal court judged more fairly than all the tribunals, troikas and OSOs we know. Of the 5,000, about a dozen were killed, but with each blow of the knife, the tentacles fell off, clinging to us. The informers did not knock, the air cleared of suspicion. For all the years of the existence of the Cheka - GPU - the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the one called to them proudly refused to go. The camp owners "deafened" and "blinded." National centers were born and strengthened, a unifying consultative body appeared. There were not enough foremen, they hid in the BUR along with the informers. The camp authorities called this movement banditry. So they whitewashed themselves, but they also lost the right to shoot. All other measures - threatening orders, a penalty regime, a wall across the residential area - did not help.
Chapter 11
We still worked, but this time voluntarily, so as not to let each other down. Now we had freedom of speech, but we could not extend it beyond the zone. On Sunday, 1952, we were locked in the barracks and then sorted out. Ukrainians remained in one half of the camp, and three thousand other nations remained in the other. During the night, our three thousand rebelled. Guards with machine guns stepped in. The rebellion was crushed, a hunger strike began, which lasted three days. I had a year left until the end of the term, but I did not regret anything. The 9th barrack, the most hungry, was the first to surrender. On January 29, the foremen were gathered to file complaints. From that meeting, I was taken to the hospital: because of the hunger strike, my tumor began to grow rapidly. And the meeting was a distraction. It was followed by mass arrests. Only a few were returned to the zone. As the only concession, the Camp Administration gave us self-financing. Now 45% of what was earned was considered ours, although 70% of this was taken by the camp. The money could be converted into camp currency - bonds - and spent. The majority was glad to such "concession" of owners.
In the meantime, the contagion of freedom has spread throughout the Archipelago. In 1951, there was a five-day hunger strike of five hundred people in the Sakhalin camp of Vakhrushevo. Strong excitement is known in the Ozerlag after the murder in the ranks at the watch on September 8, 1952. On March 5, 1953, on the day of the Leader's death, an amnesty was announced, which, according to tradition, was extended mainly to thieves. This convinced the Special Camp that Stalin's death did not change anything, and in 1953 camp unrest continued throughout the Gulag.
Chapter 12
Everything changed after the fall of Beria - it weakened hard labor. The Kengir convoy began to shoot at the innocent more and more often. In February 1954, a man - an "evangelist" - was shot dead at Woodworking. A strike began, and the owners brought and placed 650 criminals in the Special Camp to put things in order. But the owners did not get a subdued camp, but the largest rebellion in the history of the Gulag. The islands of the Archipelago live on the same air through the transfers, and therefore the unrest in the Special Camps did not remain unknown to the thieves. By the 54th, it became noticeable that the thieves began to respect the convicts. Instead of resisting the political ones, the thieves agreed with them. The rebellion was brutally suppressed only on June 25. In the autumn of 1955 there was a closed trial of the leaders. And in Kengir, self-financing flourished, they did not put bars on the windows and did not lock the barracks. They introduced parole and even released the half-dead. And in 1956 this zone was liquidated.
PART 6. LINK
And the bones are crying at home.
Russian proverb
Chapter 1
In the Russian Empire, the link was legally approved under Alexei Mikhailovich in 1648. Peter exiled in hundreds, and Elizabeth replaced the execution with exile in Siberia. In total, half a million people were exiled in the 19th century. The Soviet Republic also could not do without exile. On October 16, 1922, a permanent Commission for the Expulsion of "socially dangerous persons, leaders of anti-Soviet parties" was created under the NKVD. The most common period was 3 years. From 1929, they began to develop a link in combination with forced labor. At first, the Soviet treasury paid its political exiles, but soon the exiles lost not only their financial allowance, but also all their rights. By 1930, the remaining SRs were still exiled, but the Georgian and Armenian Dashnaks, exiled after the capture of their republics by the communists, were more numerous. In 1926, the socialist Zionists, who created agricultural Jewish communes in the Crimea, were exiled. The exiles were weakened by hostile relations between the parties, the alienation of the local population and the indifference of the country. The whole party was responsible for the escape of one person, and the exiles themselves forbade themselves to escape.
The link had many gradations. Until the 1930s, the easiest form was preserved - minus: the repressed were not indicated the exact place of residence, but they were allowed to choose a city minus some. According to the amnesty, by the 10th anniversary of October, the exiles began to drop a quarter of the term, but then it was time for the next trial. Anarchist Dmitry Venediktov was again arrested by the end of the three-year Tobolsk exile and sentenced to death. The link was a sheep pen for everyone assigned to the knife.
Chapter 2
In the Second World War we lost twenty million people, and by 1932, 15 million peasants were exterminated, and 6 million more died out during the famine. The Extermination Peasant Plague was being prepared since November 1929, when the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks forbade the admission of wealthy peasants (kulaks) to the collective farms. In July 1929, confiscations and evictions began, and on January 5, 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks issued a resolution on accelerating collectivization. The entire Kuban village of Urupinskaya was evicted, from the old man to the baby. In 1929, all residents (Germans) of the village of Dolinka were dispossessed and evicted. Village millers and blacksmiths necessarily fell under dispossession. Sometimes the one who quickly joined the collective farm stayed at home, and the stubborn poor man who did not submit an application was expelled. It was the Great Fracture of the Russian ridge.
They were carried in convoys. If in summer, then on carts, and in winter, in severe frost, on open sleighs, with babies. With the approach of the Plague, in 1929, all the churches in Arkhangelsk were closed: now the dispossessed were placed in them. They were buried without coffins, in common pits. The path of the rest lay further - to Onega, to Pinega and up the Dvina. From all subsequent exiles, the peasant differed in that they were exiled not to a settled place, but to the wilderness, to a primitive state. For special settlements, security officers chose places on rocky slopes. Sometimes it was expressly forbidden to sow grain. In 1930, 10 thousand families were abandoned in the upper reaches of the Vasyugan and Tara, leaving them neither food nor tools. Machine-gun outposts did not let anyone out of the gas chamber. All died out. In their special settlements, the dispossessed lived like prisoners in camps. Sometimes it happened that the dispossessed were taken to the tundra or taiga and forgotten there. Such settlements not only survived, but grew stronger and richer. Until the 1950s, special settlers did not have passports.
Chapter 3
In the 1920s, the link was a transshipment base in front of the camp. Since the late 1930s, it has acquired independent significance as a type of isolation. Since 1948, the link has become a place where the waste of the Archipelago was dumped. From the spring of 1948, at the end of the term, the 58th was released into exile, which served as a layer between the USSR and the Archipelago. Karaganda was considered one of the capitals of the exiled side. In the village of Taseevo in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, exiles were forbidden to marry, and in Northern Kazakhstan, on the contrary, they were forced to marry within two weeks in order to bind the exile more tightly. In many places, exiles did not have the right to file complaints with Soviet institutions - only with the commandant's office. The exile had to appear on any call of the commandant officer. Until 1937, 5 years in the camps were given for escaping from exile, after the 37th - 10 years, after the war - 20 years of hard labor. The second landings in exile, as in the camps, went on constantly, and there was no end to it at all.
Chapter 4
Until the very expulsion of the peoples, our Soviet exile could not be compared with the camps. The first experience was cautious: in 1937, several tens of thousands of Koreans were transferred from Far East to Kazakhstan. In 1940, Finns and Estonians near Leningrad were resettled deep into the Karelian-Finnish Republic. The scale gradually increased. In July 1941, the autonomous republic of the Volga Germans was expelled to the east of the country. Here, for the first time, the method of exile of entire peoples was applied. Then there were Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Kalmyks, Kurds, Crimean Tatars, Caucasian Greeks. The criminal nation was surrounded by a ring of machine guns and given 12 hours to pack. Willingly and a lot referred to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia, the Northern Urals and the North of the European part of the USSR were not deprived. The Baltic States began to be cleaned back in 1940, as soon as our troops entered there. But it was not a link, but a camp. The main exiles of the Baltics took place in 1948, 49 and 51. In the same years, Western Ukraine was also evicted. Grief was the exile who was forcibly recorded in the prospecting artels. For absence from work - a court, 25% of forced labor, and they earned 3-4 gold rubles a month, a quarter living wage. In some mines, the exiles received not money, but bonds. It was even worse for those who were sent to collective farms. For the first year of work on the collective farm, Maria Sumberg received 20 grams of grain and 15 kopecks per workday.
Chapter 5
From the very first remand prisons, the dream of exile has not left the prisoner. In me, this dream has become especially strong. After the end of the term, I was kept in the camp for only a few days, and again the transfers began to flash. Destination - Kok-Terek region, a piece of desert in the center of Kazakhstan. They were taken under escort, but they didn’t give us rations: after all, we were already free. The next day, upon arrival in the village of Aidarly, we are allowed to leave not private apartments. My mistress is the Novgorod exiled grandmother Chadova. I was not hired to work at the school. By some miracle, I managed to get a job as a planner-economist in the district police department.
Chapter 6
Soon the young head teacher of the school managed to get me a mathematics teacher. I taught special children - children of exiles. Each of them always felt his collar. Their self-esteem was saturated only in their studies. After the 20th Congress, I wrote a request for a review of my case. In the spring they began to remove exile from all over the 58th, and I went to a muddy world.
Chapter 7
The term is from call to call; liberation is from zone to zone. The passport is defiled by the 39th passport article. According to her, they are not registered anywhere, they are not hired. Deprived of reference - that's what these unfortunate people should be called. In the Stalin years, after liberation, they remained right there, in the camp zone, where they were hired. In Kolyma, there was no choice at all. When he was released, the convict immediately signed a "voluntary" obligation: to continue working in Dalstroy. Permission to leave for the mainland was more difficult to obtain than release. Rehabilitation did not help: even old friends turned away from former prisoners. Voldemar Zarin, 8 years after his release, told his colleagues that he had been imprisoned. An investigation was immediately launched against him. Each person experienced liberation in their own way. Some put in too much strength to survive, in the wild they relax and burn out in a few months. Others - on the contrary, after liberation they become younger, straighten out. I belong to the second category. For some, liberation is like a form of death. Such people do not want to have anything for a long time: they remember how easy it is to lose everything. Many in the wild begin to catch up - some in ranks and positions, some in earnings, some in children. But most of all those who try to forget as soon as possible. And the former convicts will also meet in the wild - meetings with their wives, husbands, and children. It is far from always possible for them to get back together: their life experience is too different.
PART 7. NO STALIN
And they did not repent of their murders ...
Apocalypse, 9, 21
Chapter 1
We did not lose hope that they would tell about us: after all, sooner or later the whole truth about everything that happened in history is told. I had this luck: to push the first handful of truth into the solution of iron sheets, before they slam shut again. Letters flowed. I keep these letters. The breakthrough has been made. Yesterday we had no camps, no Archipelago, but today the whole world has seen - there is. The masters of inversion were the first to pour into this gap in order to close the Archipelago from the astonished spectators with the joyful flapping of their wings. They flapped their wings so deftly that the Archipelago, as soon as it appeared, became a mirage.
When Khrushchev gave permission for "Ivan Denisovich", he was firmly convinced that this was about Stalin's camps, that he did not have such. I also sincerely believed that I was talking about the past, and did not expect a third stream of letters - from current prisoners. Today's Archipelago sent me its objections and anger. In a rare camp, my book got legally, it was confiscated from libraries and parcels. The convicts hid it during the day and read it at night. In some camp in the North Urals, they made a metal cover for it - for durability. This is how the convicts read the book "approved by the party and the government." We talk a lot about how important it is to punish escaped West German criminals, but we don’t want to judge ourselves. Therefore, in August 1965, from the rostrum of a closed ideological conference, it was proclaimed: "It's time to restore the useful and correct concept of an enemy of the people!"
Chapter 2
The fall of Beria sharply accelerated the collapse of the Special Camps. Their separate history ended in 1954, then they were not distinguished from the ITL. From 1954 to 1956, a grace period was established in the Archipelago - an era of unprecedented indulgences. The ruthless blows of liberalism undermined the system of camps. Light duty camps were set up. They began to come to the camps of the Commission of the Supreme Council, or "unloading", but they did not lay new moral foundations for social life. They tended to the fact that before being released, the prisoner must admit his guilt. Such a liberation did not blow up the system of camps and did not interfere with new arrivals, which were not stopped even in 56-57. Those who refused to plead guilty were put aside to sit. Yet! 955-56 became fatal for the Archipelago, and could have been the last for it, but did not. Khrushchev never completed anything. In 1956, the first restrictive orders on the camp regime were already issued, and continued in 1957. In 1961, a decree was issued on the death penalty in the camps "for terror against reformed (informers) and against supervisory staff", and four camp regimes were approved - now no longer Stalinist, but Khrushchev's. Since then, these camps have been standing. They differ from Stalin's only in the composition of the prisoners: there is no multi-million 58th, but helpless victims of injustice are also sitting. The archipelago remains because this state regime could not exist without it.
We have traced the history of the Archipelago from the scarlet volleys of its birth to the pink haze of rehabilitation. On the eve of the new Khrushchev hardening of the camps and the new criminal code, we consider our story over. There will be new historians, those who know the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev camps better than we do. The novelty of the Khrushchev camps is that there are no camps, instead of them there are colonies, and the Gulag turned into a GUITK. The regimes introduced in the 61st are: general, enhanced, strict, special. The choice of mode is made by the court. Parcels are allowed only to those who have served half the term. Our compatriots are still corrected by hunger. A special regime is brought up especially well, where a striped "uniform" is introduced.
Emvedeshniki are strength. They survived in 1956, which means they will still stand. I was driven to them by these unexpected letters from modern natives. To look more solid, I choose the time when I am nominated for the Lenin Prize. It turns out that the Commission of Legislative Suggestions has been busy for several years now compiling a new Correctional Labor Code - instead of the 1933 code. They arrange a meeting for me. I leave them tired and broken: they are not at all shaken. They will do everything in their own way, and the Supreme Council will approve unanimously. With the Minister of Defense Public Order Vadim Stepanovich Tikun I talk for a long time, about an hour. I left in the weary conviction that there were no ends, that I hadn't moved a hair's breadth. At the Institute for the Study of the Causes of Crime, I was introduced to the director. On his face is well-fed well-being, firmness and disgust. And then I suddenly get the answers I've been looking for for so long. It is impossible to raise the standard of living of prisoners: the camp is not to bring them back to life. The camp is a punishment. The archipelago was, the archipelago remains, the archipelago will be. Otherwise, there is no one to take out the miscalculations of the Advanced Teaching - that people do not grow up as planned.
Chapter 3
Our country has never been political. And now the outside is clean and smooth. Most of our fellow citizens have never heard of the events in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962. On June 1, a decree was issued to increase the prices of meat and butter, and the next day the whole city was engulfed in strikes. The city committee of the party was empty, and all the students were locked in the dormitories. By evening, a rally gathered, which they tried to disperse with tanks and armored personnel carriers with machine gunners. On June 3, the wounded and the dead went missing, the families of the wounded and the dead were deported to Siberia, and the stores were enriched with scarce products. A series of closed and open trials took place. On one, 9 men were sentenced to death, and two women - to 15 years under the article on banditry. There are no more political ones, but the stream that never dried up in the USSR is still flowing. Under Khrushchev, believers began to be persecuted with new frenzy, but these are also not political, they are "religious", they need to be educated: fired from work, forced to attend anti-religious lectures, destroy churches and disperse old women from the fire gut. From 1961 to June 1964, 197 Baptists were convicted. Most were given 5 years of exile, some - 5 years in a strict regime camp and 3-5 years of exile.
The current of the political is now incomparable with Stalin's time, but not because the law has been amended. It was only for a while that the direction of the ship changed. As they used to shred according to the 58th, now they shred it according to criminal articles. The dull, deaf investigative-judicial carcass lives by the fact that it is sinless. That is why she is strong in that she never reconsiders her decisions, and every judge is sure that no one will correct him. Such stability of justice allows the police to use the “trailer” or “bag of crimes” technique - when all unsolved crimes for the year are hung on one person. It could also be done as if there was no criminal offense at all. Justice was strengthened even more in the year when it was ordered to seize, judge and evict parasites. The same haze of wrong is hanging in our air. The vast state is bound with steel hoops of the law, and there are hoops, but there is no law.

Historical epic A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

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