Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

It is said that in 1942 at the Gorky Transit Prison some officer prisoners (including Gavrilov, the military engineer Schebetin, and others) nonetheless rebelled, beat up the thieves, and forced them to stay in line. Another incident is said to have occurred at the Kotlas Transit Prison in 1940. The thieves started grabbing money out of the hands of the political prisoners lined up at the commissary. The politicals began beating up the thieves so badly that they couldn’t be stopped. The guards entered the compound with machine guns to defend the thieves. Solzhenitsyn affirms his belief in this latter occurrence, “now there’s something that rings true. That’s the way it really was.”16

The prisoners were still not free even within the confines of their cellblocks. They were also exposed to juveniles. They were still boys, some as young as twelve years old. They had already been processed through a thieves’ trial a la the Criminal Code, and they continued their apprenticeship with their seniors Solzhenitsyn recounts with almost total recall, he and his fellow zeks being jumped by three of them, who then proceeded on in stealing their food parcels.

It took no more than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon, sugar and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid. We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.17

In persisting to put the Gulag archipelago in its proper perspective, the following is imperative. During the years when the prisoners’ cases did not carry any indication of their final destination, the transit prisons turned into slave markets. The conscientious merchants demanded that the ‘merchandise’ be displayed alive and bare-skinned for them to inspect.    “Well, what merchandise have you brought? asked a buyer at Butyrki station, observing and inspecting the attributes of a seventeen-year old girl named Ira kalian. Solzhenitsyn continues in documenting an incident whereby twenty-four officers of the Gulag came for a ‘buy’ at Usman Prison in 1947. All the women prisoners were forced to undress and parade before these officers. Solzhenitsyn observes, “These officers were very seriously selecting bedmates for themselves and their colleagues.”18

Moving along in time, let us now make reference to 1960, when Gennady Smelov, a non-political offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad Prison. The prosecutor went to his cell and asked him” “Why are you torturing yourself?” And Smelov replied: “Justice is more precious to me than life.” This phrase so astonished the prosecutor that the very next day Smelov was taken to Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor proceeded to tell him: “We suspect you may be a schizophrenic.” 19

As the political scientist Sidney Hook (1965) affirms in Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy, Stalin transformed dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union into dialectical terrorism.20 The former constituted a view of the world as developing systems based upon the material forces which exist independently of all consciousness, human or divine. The latter, established by Stalin, held that the Central Committee leaders were the only person(s) vested in interpreting dialectical materialism. In brief, this meant that the power to decide what was valid and invalid rested with Stalin. Class enemies would be extirpated vis-a-vis purging.

Continuing along this line, Stalin manifested social fascism in order to achieve hegemony over the working class.21 All Social democrats were thus the moderate wing of fascism and they were to be destroyed due to their intermittent involvement in Western coalition governments. It appears that, unfortunately, consistency was maintained most methodically with relation to terroristic means. So pervasive was the repression, so fragile the human condition that, dissent had no demonstrative function.

Tyrannous and oppressive governments are as old as mankind. Some human experiences, which occur under them are so traumatic that they leave forever their mark on those who have endured them-and survived. Few, not only feel compelled to recall the events, but thereafter to bear witness, to give testimony, to tell the world what they were like. So it has been and still is with the survivors of Hitler’s holocaust; so, too, with those who lived through the Stalinist reign of terror. Sporadically yet definitively, purposely and accidental, legally and illegally, works bearing witness are emerging out of the Soviet Union, and they have been on the increase since the death of Stalin. None of these Russian writings whether they be fiction, or non-fiction, has received greater attention than the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.