Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander by The Gulag Archipelago Book 1

Author:The Gulag Archipelago, Book 1 [1, The Gulag Archipelago, Book]
Format: epub
Published: 2011-06-14T19:50:17.380387+00:00

because of "technical considerations." But, making up for this lack, the accuser croons to us: "From beginning to end, it was self-flagellation and repentance for the mistakes they committed. The political instability and the interim nature of the intel- ligentsia . . . [yes, yes, here comes another one: interim nature] completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia made by the Bolsheviks."

I don't know. Perhaps they did engage in self-flagellation. Perhaps they didn't. Perhaps the passion to save one's life at any cost had already come into being. Perhaps the old dignity of the intelligentsia had still been maintained. ... I don't know.

Who was that young woman flashing past?

That was Tolstoi's daughter, Alexandra. Krylenko asked her: "What did you do during these conversations?" And she an- swered: "I attended to the samovar." Three years of concentra- tion camp!

And who was that man over there? His face was familiar. It was Savva Morozov. But listen here: after all, he gave the Bolsheviks all that money! And now he has handed a little to these people? Three years in prison, but released on probation. Let that be a lesson to him!

[He would soon cut his own throat.]

And that's how the sun of our freedom rose. It was as just such a well-nourished little imp that our Octobrist child—Law— began to grow.

Today we don't remember this at all.

Chapter 9

The Law Becomes a Man

Our review has already grown. Yet we have in fact hardly begun. All the big and famous trials are still ahead of us. But their basic lines have already been indicated.

So let us stick with our Law while it is still in its boy scout stage.

Let us recall one long-forgotten case which was not even political.

F. The Case of Glavtop—May, 1921

This case was important because it involved engineers—or, as they had been christened in the terminology of the times, "specialists," or spetsy. (Glavtop was the Main Fuels Committee.)

Nineteen twenty-one was the most difficult of all the four winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains simply couldn't get to the next station; and there were cold and famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories- strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous question: Who is to blame?

Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even the local leadership. That was important. If the "comrades who were often brought in from outside"—i.e., the Communist leaders —did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to "outline for them the correct approach to the problem." And this meant that "it was not the leaders who were to blame. . . . Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had re- figured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan"— which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to

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