Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

Yet, both Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle end on a note of contingent optimism. In the former, Oleg Kostogolov finds that his body and the body politics have had simultaneous remissions from the cancers afflicting them, and though he returns to exile, he knows that it is no longer perpetual exile, and he has the hopes that things are on the mend. In the latter, Gleb Nerzhin deliberately has himself sent from the first circle of hell to its lowest depths, consciously heartened and hardened by the determination to survive and to write his history, which will indict the institutions and individuals responsible for having brought him and his country to such a state. Throughout, Solzhenitsyn’s hopefulness is guarded, made ambiguous by irony and humor, sometimes even by gallows humor, but the hope is there nevertheless, refusing to die.

In The First Circle we are witnessing a penal society throwing into dramatic relief the basic human condition: the trivial becomes tragic; the absurd becomes profound; weakness becomes strength and unseasoned faith gives life its only logic. Solzhenitsyn sets his story in a few fleeting hours from December 24th to the 28th, 1949. The scene is a special prison “institute” in Moscow. The characters are the prisoners, their guards, the directors of the Institute, the high officials of the Police Ministry.

A Stalinist directive issued in 1948 has created this special prison and given it its purpose: a crash program to invent a voice scrambler and voice-identification technique. This technique will be used by Stalin and the Organs to indict those who thrive as “enemies of the state.”

The spirits who inhabited Dante’s First Circle had committed no sins and this, in essence, is equally true of those who inhabit Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle. The gulag was hell on earth, and Solzhenitsyn was its Dante. As in Dante’s, this Circle stands on the edge of the eternal abyss, and descent is easy, frequent and almost inevitable. But Solzhenitsyn deals not with the spirits of the past. His men and women are composed of flesh and blood. All of their dreams are possible. Gleb Nerzhin, the brilliant prisoner-mathematician, distinguishes between the rhetorical objectives of the Bolshevik Revolution and the unequal operative values.

What was the Revolution against? Against privileges. What were the Russian people sick of? Privileges: Some being dressed in overalls and others in sables, some dragging along on foot. While others rode in carriages, some listening for the factory whistle while others were fattening their faces in restaurants. True? Of course. Right. Then why is it that people don’t shun privileges but pursue them. I’ve simply come to the conclusion that if it’s to be equality, then it must be equality for everyone, and if it isn’t, then shove it.24

 Solzhenitsyn is resisting national inequality in the Soviet Union. This problem was foreseen by Marx and Engels as the noted Soviet historian Roy A. Medvedev (1972) documents in Let History Judge.

Marx and Engels, who foresaw the possibility of the bureaucratic degeneration of a proletarian state, thought two measures would provide effective protection: universal election and recall of all officials and a level of salaries not exceeding workers wages.25

Yet, the Soviet Union possesses no means, no organizations, and no political institutions to guarantee citizens democratic rights. For the most part, restrictions on official salaries turned out to be a livid deterrent to degeneration. Undoubtedly, there were some prisoners who constantly inquired into the limitations of the law and as to their rights. Solzhenitsyn, as portrayed by Gleb Nerzhin, was indubitably cognizant of his rights and the governmental violations thereof.

The lieutenant colonel left Nerzhin waiting in the corridor of the Staff headquarters because in general Nerzhin was an insolent person (prisoner) always trying to find out what the law was. 26

For the most part, resistance in the Mavrino Institute focused on psychological games that were being played out by the zek prisoners seeking concessions from the prison administration. Nerzhin is protesting vis-a-vis a way of thinking by not being carried away by the exalted Joseph Stalin. Nerzhin, a righteous individual, is accepting of the consequences inherent in his outlook.

…he [Gleb Nerzhin] clearly sensed the falsity in the exaggerated stifling exaltation of one man! If he was everything, did it not mean that other men were nothing. Out of pure protest Nerzhin refused to let himself be carried away.27

A constant theme throughout much of Solzhenitsyn’s work is the belief in the reemerging of the free man, who has been previously been denied of everything, that which gave him freedom. This belief undermines those who imprison, whether they be high or low.