The Gulag Archipelago Three (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII) by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Author:Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

After this failure they started inflating balloons with smoke.

6. When it was all over and the women's column was marched through the settlement on the way to work, married women, Russian women, gathered* along the roadside and shouted at them: "Prostitutes! Dirty whores! Couldn't do without it, could you ... P and other, still stronger remarks. The same thing happened next day, but the women prisoners had left the camp prepared, and replied to these insulting creatures with a bombardment of stones. The escort troops just laughed.

The Forty Days of Kengi'r | 319

With a following wind they flew quite well, exhibiting inscriptions in large letters to the settlement:

"Save the women and old men from being beaten!"

"We demand to see a member of the Presidium."

The guards started shooting at these balloons.

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

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

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

(Perhaps it will help the reader to place the events at Kengir chronologically if we recall what was happening outside during the days of the mutiny. The Geneva Conference on Indochina was in session. The Stalin Peace Prize was conferred on Pierre Cot. Another progressive French man, the writer Sartre, arrived in Moscow to join in the life of our progressive society. The third centenary of the reunification of Russia and the Ukraine was loudly and lavishly celebrated. 8 On May 31 there was a solemn parade on Red Square. The Ukrainian S.S.R. and the Russian S.F.S.R. were awarded the Order of Lenin. On June 6 a monument to Yuri Dolgoruky was unveiled in Moscow. A Trade Union Congress opened on June 8 [but nothing was said there about Kengir]. On the tenth a new state loan was launched. The twentieth was Air Force Day, and there was a splendid parade at Tushino. These months of 1954 were also marked by a powerful

8. The Ukrainians at Kengir declared it a day of mourning.

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