The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV) by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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

35. Captain Lebedev, a "godfather'

camp, who might become centers of rebellion, had to be suppressed and isolated. The bloody local boys immediately sensed the riches in this vein—their own deliverance from the front. This was evidently guessed in more than one camp and rapidly taken up as useful, ingenious, and a salvation. The camp Chekists also helped fill up the machine-gun embrasures—^but with other people's bodies.

378 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Let the historian picture to himself the pulse of those years: The front was moving east, the Germans were around Leningrad, outside Moscow, in Voronezh, on the Volga, and in the foothills of the Caucasus. In the rear there were ever fewer men. Every healthy male figure aroused reproachful glances. Everything for the front! There was no price too big for the government to pay to stop Hitler. And only the camp officers (and their confreres in State Security) were well fed, white, soft-skinned, idle—all in their places in the rear. (In Illustration No. 35—^this camp "godfather," for example. How badly he needed to stay alive.) And the farther into Siberia and the North they were, the quieter things were. But we must soberly understand: theirs was a shaky prosperity. Due to end at the first outcry: Bring out those rosy-cheeked, smart camp fellows! No battle experience? So they had ideology. And they would be lucky to end up in the police, or in the behind-the-lines "obstacle" detachments,* but it could happen otherwise; otherwise it was into officer battalions and be thrown into the Battle of Stalmgrad! In the summer of 1942 they picked up whole officer-training schools and hurled them into the front, uncertified, their courses unfinished. All the young and healthy convoy guards had abready been scraped up for the front. And the camps hadn't fallen apart. It was all right. And they wouldn't fall apart if the security officers were called up either! (There were already rumors.)

Draft deferment—^that was life. Draft deferment—^that was happiness. How could you keep your draft deferment? Easy— you simply had to prove your importance! You had to prove that if it were not for Chekist vigilance the camps would blow apart, that they were a caldron of seething tar! And then our whole glorious front would collapse! It was right here in the camps in the tundra and the taiga that the white-chested security chiefs were holding back the Fifth Column, holding back Hitler! This was their contribution to victory! Not sparing themselves, they conducted interrogation after interrogation, exposing plot after plot.

Until now only the unhappy, worn-out camp inmates, tearing the bread from each other's mouths, had been fighting for their lives! But now the omnipotent Chekist security officers shamelessly entered the fray. "You croak today, me tomorrow." Better you should perish and put off my death, you dirty animal.

And so they cooked up a "rebel group" in Ust-Vym: eighteen persons! They wanted, of course, to disarm the Militarized Guard, get its weapons away from it (half a dozen old rifles)! What then?

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