“Archipelago GULag” Solzhenitsyn in brief
Part 1. Prison industry
In the era of dictatorship and surrounded by enemies on all sides, we sometimes showed unnecessary softness, unnecessary kind-heartedness.
Krylenko, speech at the process of “Industrial Party”
Chapter 1. Arrest
Those who go to the Archipelago to manage – get there through the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those who go to guard the Archipelago are called through the military commissariats. And those who go there to die, must pass by all means and only – through arrest.
The traditional arrest is a night call, hurried charges and a long search, during which there is nothing sacred. Night arrest has the advantage of surprise, no one can see how many were taken away during the night, but this is not his only sight. Arrests vary in different ways: night and day; home, office, travel; primary and repeated; dismembered and group; and a dozen categories. The bodies most often had no grounds for arrest, but
Almost all were fainthearted, helpless, doomed. Universal innocence generates universal inaction. Sometimes the main feeling of the arrested person is relief and even joy, especially during the arrest of epidemics. The priest, the father of Irakli, was hidden by the parishioners for 8 years. From this life the priest was so exhausted that during the arrest he sang praises to God. There were people, genuinely political, who dreamed of arrest. Vera Rybakova, a student of the Social Democrat, went to prison with pride and joy.
Chapter 2. History of our sewerage system
One of the first strikes of the dictatorship came in the Cadets. At the end of November 1917 the Cadet Party was outlawed, and mass arrests began. Lenin proclaimed the unified goal of “purging the Russian land of all harmful insects.” Almost all social groups came under the broad definition of insects. Many were shot without bringing them to the prison cell. Apart
Since January 1919, a surplus-appropriation has been expanded, which has provoked resistance from the village and gave an abundant stream of prisoners for two years. Since the summer of 1920, many officers have been sent to Solovki. In 1920-21, the Tambov peasant uprising led by the Union of the Labor Peasantry was defeated. In March 1921 the sailors of the rebellious Kronstadt were sent to the islands of the Archipelago, and in summer the Public Committee for Assistance to the Hungry was arrested. In the same year, students were also arrested for “criticizing order”. At the same time, the arrests of socialist party members increased.
In the spring of 1922, the Extraordinary Commission on Counter-Revolution and Speculation decided to intervene in church affairs. Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two high-profile trials were carried out with executions: in Moscow – distributors of the patriarchal appeal, in Petrograd – Metropolitan Veniamin, which prevented the transfer of church authority to the church leaders. Metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and for large fish there were shoals of shallow – archpriest, monks and deacons. All the 20s and 30s were imprisoned by monks, nuns, church activists and simply believing lay people.
All 20-ies continued to catch the surviving white officers, as well as their mothers, wives and children. Also, all former government officials were also fished. So streams flowed “for concealment of social origin” and for “former social status”. A convenient legal term appears: social prevention. In Moscow, systematic cleaning begins – quarter after quarter.
Since 1927, the work on exposing pests has been in full swing. In the engineering environment there was a wave of arrests. So a few years broke the backbone of Russian engineering, which was the glory of our country. In this flow, the relatives, connected with the doomed, were also caught. In 1928 in Moscow the loud Shakhtinskoe case is heard. In September 1930, “organizers of hunger” -48 pests in the food industry are judged. At the end of 1930 irreproachably rehearsed the process of the Industrial Party. Since 1928 it’s time to settle with the Nepmen. And in 1929-30 a multimillion-dollar flood of dekulakized people poured in. Passing the prison, he went straight to the stages, the country GULag. After them streams of “pests of agriculture”, agronomists – were given to all 10 years of camps. The quarter of Leningrad was “cleared” in 1934-35 during the Kirov stream.
All the many years of activity of the Organs was given only one clause of the Criminal Code of 1926, Fifty-Eight. There was no such thing that could not be punished with the help of Article 58. Her 14 points, like a fan, covered all of human existence. This article was applied in full swing in 1937-38, when Stalin added the new terms to the criminal code -15, 20 and 25 years. In the year 37, a crushing blow was struck at the top of the party, the Soviet administration, the military command and the upper echelons of the NKVD itself. The “reverse issue” of 1939 was small, about 1-2% of those taken before, but skillfully used to throw everything down on Yezhov, to strengthen Beria and the power of the Leader. The returnees were silent, they were numb with fear.
Then a war broke out, and with it a retreat. In the rear, the first military stream was – distributors of rumors and sowers of panic. There was also a stream of all Germans who lived somewhere in the Soviet Union. Since the end of the summer of 1941, a stream of encirclement has poured in. They were defenders of the fatherland, who were not guilty of captivity. In high spheres, too, the flood of culprits of retreat was pouring. From 1943 until 1946, the flow of prisoners continued in the occupied territories and in Europe. Honest participation in an underground organization did not spare the fate to get into this stream. Among this stream, one after another, streams of guilty nations passed. The last years of the war were the flow of prisoners of war, both German and Japanese, and the flow of Russian emigrants. All the years 1945 and 1946 moved to the Archipelago a large flow of true opponents of power – sometimes convinced, sometimes involuntary.
One can not keep silent about one of the Stalin’s edicts of June 4, 1947, which was baptized by prisoners, like the Four-Sixth Ordinance. “Organized gang” now received up to 20 years of camps, the plant had an upper term of 25 years. The years 1948-49 were marked by an unprecedented tragedy, even for Stalin’s unjust, comedy “repeaters”, those who managed to survive 10 years of the GULAG. Stalin ordered that these cripples be planted again. Behind them stretched the stream of “children of the enemies of the people.” Again flows of the 37th year were repeated, only now the standard was the new Stalin “quarter”. Ten already went to the children’s terms. In the last years of Stalin’s life, a stream of Jews began to be planned, for this purpose the “doctors’ affair” was started. But Stalin did not manage to arrange a great Jewish beating.
Chapter 3. Consequence
The investigation in the 58th article was almost never a revealing of the truth. His goal was to bend, break a man, turn him into a native of the Archipelago. For this, torture was used. The man was tortured with insomnia and thirst, put in a red-hot chamber, cauterized his hands with cigarettes, pushed into the pool with sewage, squeezed the skull with an iron ring, lowered them into a bath with acids, tortured with ants and bugs, pounded a red-hot ramrod into the anus, pinched the genital parts with the boot. If prior to 1938 for the use of torture required some kind of permission, then in 1937-38 in the face of an emergency situation, torture was allowed unrestrictedly. In 1939, the general permission was lifted, but from the end of the war and in the post-war years there were certain categories of prisoners, to whom torture was used. The list of torture did not exist, it was just the investigator who had to fulfill the plan.
But in most cases, to get the necessary testimony from the prisoner, torture was not needed. It was enough to have a few tricky questions and a properly drafted protocol. The defendants did not know their rights and laws, this was the basis for the investigation. Only a strong spirit could survive, who put an end to his past life. When I was arrested, I did not yet know this wisdom. Only because the memories of the first days of arrest do not bite me with remorse, that I escaped someone to put. I signed the indictment together with the 11th item, which condemned me to eternal exile.
Chapter 4. Blue Edges
Virtually every employee of the Organs had two instincts: the instinct of power and the instinct of gain. But even they had their own flows. Organs also had to be cleaned. And the kings of the Organs, the Organ aces, and the ministers themselves put their heads under their own guillotine. One jamb took Yagoda behind him, the second was soon pulled by the short-lived Yezhov. Then there was the cant of Beria.
Chapter 5. The First Chamber – First Love
For the arrested person is always on a special count his first camera. The experience lived in it has nothing similar in his entire life. Not the floor and dirty walls cause the love of the prisoner, but the people with whom he shared the first conclusion in life.
My first love was camera number 67 on the Lubyanka. The heaviest hours in the sixteen-hour day of our cell are the first two, violent wakefulness from six o’clock, when you can not take a nap. After the mandrel, we are returned to the cell and locked up to six o’clock. Then we divide the meager ration, and only now the day begins. At nine o’clock – morning check, behind it – a strip of questioning calls. We are looking forward to a twenty-minute walk. No luck at the first three floors of the Lubyanka – they are let out to the lower damp patio, but the convicts of the 4th and 5th floors are taken to the roof. Once in 10 days we are given books from the Lubyanka library. The library of the Big Lubyanka is made up of confiscated books. Here you could read books forbidden in the wild. Finally, and dinner – scoop soup and scoop liquid gruel, dinner – even on the scoop gruel. After him – the evening mandrel, second per day. And then an evening full of disputes and chess games. And now the lamp is flashing three times-the light-out.
On the second of May, Moscow slashed thirty volleys, and on May 9th dinner was brought with dinner, only on this we guessed the end of the war. It was not for us that victory.
Chapter 6. That Spring
The spring of 1945 was the spring of Russian prisoners, but they did not change the Motherland, and the Motherland them. She betrayed them when the government did everything possible to lose the war, when she left in captivity, when she threw a stranglehold right after returning. Escape to his homeland from captivity, too, brought to the dock. Escape to the partisans only delayed the payment. Many were recruited into spies just to escape from captivity. They sincerely believed that they would be forgiven and accepted. Not forgiven. Spy mania was one of the main features of Stalin’s insanity. Only Vlasovites did not expect forgiveness. For world history, this phenomenon is unprecedented: that several hundred thousand young people raise their arms to their Fatherland in alliance with its worst enemy. Who is more to blame – this youth or Fatherland?
And in that spring a lot was in the cells of Russian emigrants. Then there was a rumor about an amnesty in honor of the great victory, but I did not wait for it.
Chapter 7. In the engine room
On July 27, the CCA decided to give me eight years of forced labor camps for anti-Soviet agitation. The CCA was invented in the 1920s, when the Troika of the GPU was created bypassing the court. The names of the assessors knew everything – Gleb Bokiy, Vul and Vasiliev. In 1934 the Troika was renamed into the CCA.
Chapter 8. The Law – the Child
In addition to high-profile litigation, there were also secret, and there were much more. In 1918 there was an official term: “extrajudicial punishment”. But the courts also existed. In 1917-18, workers ‘and peasants’ revolutionary tribunals were established; The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the system of Revolutionary Railway Tribunals and the unified system of the Revolutionary Tribunals of the Internal Guard troops have been established. October 14, 1918, Comrade Trotsky signed a decree on the establishment of a system of Revolutionary Military Tribunals. They had the right to immediately deal with deserters and agitators. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee had the right to intervene in any case, to pardon and execute at its discretion unlimited.
The famous accuser of high-profile trials was then NV Krylenko. His first trial of the word was the case of “Russian Vedomosti” on March 24, 1918. From 1918 to 1921 – the case of three investigators of the Moscow tribunal, the Kosyrev case, the case of “churchmen.” In the case of the “Tactical Center” there were 28 defendants; daughter of Tolstoy, Alexandra Lvovna, was sentenced to three years in the camps. In the Tagantsev case in 1921 the Cheka shot 87 people. Thus the sun of our freedom ascended.
Chapter 9. The law is cruel
The Glavtop process was the first one that concerned engineers. Rich in the vowel processes of 1922. In February, the case of the suicide of engineer Oldenborger; the Moscow church process; the Petrograd church process. The trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries was judged by 32 people, whom Bukharin himself defended, and accused Krylenko.
Chapter 10. The Law Has Ripened
At the end of 1922, about 300 of the most prominent Russian humanists were expelled from the country – Soviet Russia was liberated from the rotten bourgeois intelligentsia. There were 53 defendants in the Shakhty case. Then – the process of “Industrial Party” on November 25-December 7, 1930. March 1-9, 1931, the process of the Menshevik Union Bureau was held. Bukharin put his hand to many things. He himself was arrested in 1937. Such performances were too expensive and troublesome, and Stalin decided to no longer use open processes.
Chapter 11. To the highest measure
The death penalty in Soviet Russia was first abolished on October 28, 1917, but from June 1918 it was established as a new era of executions. They shot more than 1,000 people a month. In January 1920, the death penalty was again abolished, but this decree, according to Yagoda’s order, did not apply to the Revolutionary Banks. The decree was short-term, on May 28, 1920 the Cheka was returned the right of execution. In 1927, it was again started to be canceled, leaving only for Article 58. For articles defending individuals, for murders, robberies and rapes, the shooting was canceled. And in the 32nd was added the death penalty by law from the “seventh-eighth”. In the Leningrad Cross alone, 264 suicide bombers awaited their fate at a time. In 1936, the Father and Teacher renamed the Central Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet, and the death penalty – the highest penalty. In 1939-40, half a million “political” and 480 “blatars” were shot at the Union. Since 1943, a decree about hanging was issued. In May 1947, Joseph Vissarionovich abolished the death penalty in peacetime, replacing it with 25 years of camps. January 12, 1950 issued an opposite decree – to return the death penalty for “traitors to the homeland, spies and subversive saboteurs.” So it came one after another: 1954 – for intentional murder; May 1961 – for theft of state property and counterfeit money, February 1962 – for encroachment on the lives of policemen, for rape, for bribery. And all this is temporary, until it is completely canceled. replacing it with 25 years of camps. January 12, 1950 issued an opposite decree – to return the death penalty for “traitors to the homeland, spies and subversive saboteurs.” So it came one after another: 1954 – for intentional murder; May 1961 – for theft of state property and counterfeit money, February 1962 – for encroachment on the lives of policemen, for rape, for bribery. And all this is temporary, until it is completely canceled. replacing it with 25 years of camps. January 12, 1950 issued an opposite decree – to return the death penalty for “traitors to the homeland, spies and subversive saboteurs.” So it came one after another: 1954 – for intentional murder; May 1961 – for theft of state property and counterfeit money, February 1962 – for encroachment on the lives of policemen, for rape, for bribery. And all this is temporary, until it is completely canceled.
No science fiction writer could imagine the death cells of 1937. The suicide bombers suffered from cold, from closeness and stuffiness, from hunger, without medical assistance. They waited months for execution.
Chapter 12. TURZACK
As early as December 1917, it became clear that without prisons it was impossible, and by the 38th official terms – Türzak and TON – had been established. It was good that the place of imprisonment, where half a year there is no connection with the outside world, and in 1923 the first prisoners were transported to Solovki. Although the Archipelago grew, but also the TONs did not burn, they were needed to isolate the socialists and camp rebels, and also to keep the weakest and sickest prisoners. The old royal prisons and monasteries were used. In the 1920s, the politisolators were still fed fairly well, and in 31-33 the food deteriorated sharply. In 1947, prisoners were constantly hungry. There were no lights in the cells either in the 30s or 40s: the muzzles and the reinforced cloudy glass created constant twilight in the chambers. The air was also normalized, the windows were on the castle. Visits with relatives were banned in 1937 and did not resume, only letters were allowed. Nevertheless, the old campers recognized the TONS as a resort. After the TONS, the stages began.
Part 2. Eternal movement
Wheels are also not worth, Wheels…
Turning, dancing millstones,
Turning…
V. Muller
Chapter 1. Ships of the Archipelago
From the Bering Strait and to the Bosphorus, the islands of the Archipelago are scattered. Its ports are transit jails, its ships are wagon-zaki. This is a well-established system, it was created for decades. The wagon-zak is an ordinary docked car, only the compartment for the prisoners is separated from the corridor by a grate. In each compartment 22 people were shoved, and this was not the limit. The whole trip lasted 3 weeks. All this time the prisoners were fed herring and did not give water. Political prisoners mingled with criminal prisoners and few could resist the blatars. Having passed the meat grinder of the political investigation, the man was crushed not only by the body, but also by the spirit, and the blatars of such a consequence did not pass. Political robbed not only the blatars, the convoy and he himself became a thief. In 1945-46, when prisoners were drawn from Europe, convoy officers could not stand it either. The passengers did not know the car, where the train goes. Many threw letters directly on the rails, hoping that someone will pick up, send, let know relatives. But the best thing is to immediately understand that they do not return from here. Sometimes the prisoner falls under the “pendulum”: the convoy does not come after him, he is taken to the end of the route, and then back, and without being fed.
Back in the 1920s, the convicts were driven by foot columns, but in 1927 the Archipelago began to use the “black crow”, and the loser was a funnel. For many years they were gray steel, but after the war they began to paint in cheerful colors and write from above: “Bread”, “Meat”, and even “Drink Soviet champagne.” Inside the funnels could be empty, with benches or with single boxes on the sides. They pushed as many people as they could fit in, one on top of another, politically mixed with thieves, men with women.
Chapter 2. Ports of the Archipelago
Sons of the Gulag can easily count up to fifty shipment – the ports of the Archipelago. All of them are like an illiterate convoy; long wait in the sun or in the rain; a striped search; unscrupulous haircut; cold baths and smelly latrines; close, stuffy, dark and damp chambers; raw, almost liquid bread; the balance welded as if from a silo. On many shipments people stayed for months. In 1938 the Kotlas transfer was just a piece of land, divided by a fence into cages, people lived in the open air both in summer and in winter. Later, they built two-story log buildings, and in them – six-story bunks. In the winter of 1944-45, 50 people per day died there. Karabas, a transfer near Karaganda, consisted of barracks with an earthen floor, and Knyazh-Pogostsky transit point – from huts built on the swamp. They fed there only zatirkha of gritsya sichki and fish bones. In the 37th year in some Siberian prisons there was not even a parachute. And at all stages of the political management of the hacks, which the chief specifically selects for this. But to any newcomer the transfer is necessary – it accustoms him to the camp, gives a broad view. For me, such a school was Krasnaya Presnya in the summer of 1945.
Chapter 3. Caravans of slaves
Millions of peasants, Germans from the Volga region, emigrants were transported by red echelons. Wherever he comes, there that hour will be a new island of the Archipelago. And again the convict is clamped between cold and hunger, between thirst and fear, between blatars and escort. From other non-stop long-distance trains, the red echelon differs in that it does not know who gets into it – it will crawl out. In the winters of 1944-45 and 1945-46, the convoy trains marched without stoves and came, carrying a wagon or two corpses. For transportation, not only railways, but also rivers served. Barge stages along the Northern Dvina did not die out by the 1940s. Arrestants stood in the hold closely not one day. Transport on the Yenisei lasted for decades. There were deep, dark holds in the Yenisei barges, where neither the guard nor the doctors descended. In steamboats going to Kolyma everything was like in barges, only scale larger. There were also foot steps. The day was up to 25 kilometers.
Chapter 4. From island to island
The prisoners were transported alone. This was called the special law. I did not get to move that much, I had three drops. Spetskonvoy should not be confused with a special squad. The special agent is more likely to go to the general stage, but the special police unit alone. In the account card of the Gulag, I called myself a nuclear physicist and got into sharashka for half a year. That’s why I managed to survive.
Nobody knows the number of inhabitants of the Archipelago, but the world is very small. The arresting telegraph is attention, memory and meetings. In July, I was brought from the camp to Butyrki by a mysterious “order of the Minister of Internal Affairs”. Probably, the 75th camera was the best in my life. There were two streams in it: freshly condemned and specialists-physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers-directed to no one knows where. I was held in that cell for two months.
Part 3. Fighter-labor
Only the children can understand us, they ate with us from one cup at a time.
From the letter gutsulki, former zekki
Chapter 1. The fingers of the Aurora
The archipelago was born under the shots of the Aurora. The leading idea of the Archipelago – forced labor – was put forward by Lenin in the first month of the revolution. July 6, 1918 there was a suppression of the mutiny of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. From this historical bottom, the creation of the Archipelago began. On June 23, the “Provisional Instruction on Deprivation of Liberty” was adopted, which stated: “Deprived of freedom and able-bodied are necessarily involved in physical labor.” In February 1918, Comrade Lenin demanded an increase in the number of places of detention and increased criminal repression. The decisions of the Central Executive Committee on forced labor camps were held on April 15 and May 17, 1919. In the decree on the Red Terror signed on September 5, 1918 by Petrovsky, Kursky and V. Bonch-Bruevich, in addition to the instructions for mass executions, it was said:
At the end of the civil war, the role of forced labor camps in the structure of the RSFSR intensified. In 1922, all places of detention were united into a single GUMZak. He combined 330 places of detention with a total of 80-81 thousand prisoners. Soon, GUMZak of the USSR was renamed into the USSR GUIT, from which it turned out the Gulag.
Chapter 2. The archipelago arises from the sea
The Northern Special Purpose Camps were established in June 1923 in the Solovki Monastery, after the monks were expelled from there. By that time, the concentration camps had been deemed insufficiently strict, and already in 1921 the ELEPHANT were founded. The gate of Solovki – Kemperpunkt, transfer to Kemi. The quarantine company was dressed in ordinary bags with holes for the head and hands. The dream of every prisoner was clothing of a standard type, which was worn only by the children’s colony. In the two-story cathedral on Sekirnaya mountain, the punishment cells were arranged. The prisoners in them had to sit all day on poles thick in the arm. And in the summer the naked man was tied to a tree, under mosquitoes. The man was crushed by the spirit, still not having begun the life of Solovki. For the first six months, by December 1923, more than 2,000 prisoners had already gathered in Solovki, and in 1928 there were 3,760 people in the 13th company alone.
Until 1929, according to the RSFSR, only 34 to 41 per cent of the prisoners were “covered” by labor. The first year of the First Five-Year Plan, which shook the whole country, Solovki also shook. Now the most terrible for prisoners were business trips to the mainland. From Kemi to the west along the swamps, the prisoners built the Kem-Ukhtinsky tract – they were drowned in the summer, they froze in the winter. In the same year, roads were laid on the Kola Peninsula. In winter, beyond the Arctic Circle, people dug the earth manually. This was before the “personality cult”.
The archipelago began to creep away. The shoots multiplied. It was impossible to let the runaways help. And rumors began to spread: that in the camps – killers and rapists, that every fugitive is a dangerous bandit. The group Bessonova fled to England. There they began to publish books that astonished Europe, but they did not believe us. June 20, 1929 on Solovki came with a test of the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky – and did not find those horrors that are described with the English books. In the children’s colony, a 14-year-old boy told him the whole truth. On the 23rd Gorky set sail, doing nothing for the prisoners, and the boy was immediately shot.
From the late 20-ies on Solovki began to drive the household and punks. On March 12, 1929, Solovki received the first batch of minors. They hung up the slogan: “A prisoner is an active participant in socialist construction!” and even came up with the term – reforging. In the fall of 1930 the Solovki headquarters of the competition and shock work was established. The notorious thieves-recidivists suddenly “perekovalis” and organized the commune and “labor collectives.” Article 58 was adopted in no collective, it was sent to distant, wretched places to open new camps.
Chapter 3. Archipelago gives metastases
Since 1928 Solovetsky cancer has spread to Karelia – to lay roads, to fellings. The camp points of the ELEPA appeared at all points of the Murmansk railway. Since 1931 the famous BelBaltLag was born. Nothing prevented the Archipelago from spreading across the Russian north. In 1931, the North-Ural branch of the SLON was founded. On the move, the new organization of the Archipelago was also created: Camp Guards, camp departments, camps, camp sites. All 58th gushed north and Siberia – to master and perish.
The history of the Archipelago found almost no reflection in the public literature of the Soviet Union. The exception was Belomorkanal and Volgokanal. On August 17, 1933, a “walk” of 120 writers took place on the ship just completed on the steamer. As a result, the book “White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin” was published under the editorship of Gorky, LL Averbakh and SG Firin. After 2-3 years, most of the leaders glorified in it were declared enemies of the people, and “immortal labor” was removed from libraries and destroyed.
For the first great construction of the Archipelago was chosen Belomorkanal. Stalin needed somewhere a great construction project that would devour many workers and many lives of prisoners. The Great Leader declared the construction urgent and released it for 20 months: from September 1931 to April 1933. Less than two years to build 227 kilometers of the channel, and not a penny of currency. There were no cars, no tractors, no cranes, everything was done by the hands of a hundred thousand prisoners. For this northern project, hydrotechnicians and irrigation workers of Central Asia were brought, and they began to do the project before surveying on the ground. The train of convicts arrived on the future route, where there were no barracks, no supplies, no tools, no exact plan. The norm was: to smash two cubic meters of granite rock and take out for a hundred meters a wheelbarrow. Only at the White Sea Canal was discovered what a real camp is. Swept barracks, a twelve-hour working day, a cold steward – a muddy slime with kamsa heads and individual grains of millet. After the end of the working day on the road remained frozen people to death. By May 1, 1933, the People’s Commissar Yagoda reported to his beloved Teacher that the channel was ready. Most of the “channel-men” went to the next channel – Moscow-Volga, which continued and developed the traditions of Belomor.
Chapter 4. The Archipelago Stones
By 1937, the Archipelago was very much strengthened not only at the expense of those arrested from the will. Referred to the convicts “special settlers,” those dispossessed, who miraculously survived in the taiga and the tundra – there are still millions left. The settlements of the “special settlers” were included entirely in the Glukhag. This addition was the main tide to the Archipelago in 1937. Its regime was further tightened, labor collectives, visits with relatives were forbidden, burial corpses were not issued, professional courses for prisoners were abolished. The Corrective Labor Code of 1933 was forgotten for 25 years. Electric light was stretching along the zones, and security sheepdogs were included in the staff. All ties with the will were interrupted, the holes were plugged, the last “supervisory commissions” were expelled. It was then that the 58th was pounded into trenches to protect it more reliably. The GULag did not part with only one thing: with the encouragement of punks, thieves. They became internal camp police, camp attack planes. They unhindered to rob, beat and smother the 58th. So the Archipelago finished the second five-year plan.
About the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the convicts learned only the next day, June 23. Radio in the zones was abolished for the whole time of our military failures. They forbade writing letters home. From the first days of the war, the liberation of the 58th was stopped on the entire Archipelago. The norms of nutrition in the camps were reduced: vegetables were replaced by stern turnips, cereals – with vetch and bran. There they were buried in the war no less than at the front. For the 58th wartime camp, they were especially hard at winding up the second terms. The closer to the end of the war, the more violent the regime became for the 58th. Before the Finnish war, Solovki, which had become too close to the West, merged into the created NorilLag, which soon reached 75,000 people. The pre-war years include the conquest of the Archipelago of the deserts of Kazakhstan. New growths are swelling in the Novosibirsk region, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, in Khakassia, in Buryat-Mongolia, in Uzbekistan, in Gornaya Shoria, in the Russian North. There was no area without his camp. Entire villages of Germans in the Volga region are enclosed in a zone.
Chapter 5. What is the Archipelago
The archipelago was born from an economic need: The state needed a free and unpretentious workforce. The Criminal Code of 1926 provided a theoretical foundation. To make a prisoner work 12-14 hours a day is humane and leads to his correction. The meaning of the existence of the Archipelago and serfdom is the same: they are social devices for the compulsory and ruthless use of the free labor of millions of slaves. All differences – to the benefit of serfdom. In the camps, the VKP was deciphered as the Second Serfdom. The three whales on which the Archipelago stands are: Kotlovka, Brigade and Two Powers. Kotlovka is the distribution of the ration, when the prisoner received it in small portions, with handouts depending on the norm. When the boiler could not get people to work, a brigade was formed, headed by a team leader, who got into the punishment cell if the brigade did not comply with the norms. Two bosses are like mites, like a hammer and an anvil. In the hands of one was production, in the hands of the other – labor.
Chapter 6. Fascists were brought!
On August 14, 1945, I was transferred to the camp of New Jerusalem. In the rooms – bare lining without mattresses and linen. Ascent – at quarter past four, and immediately into the dining room behind the baling – the nettles with nettles without meat, without fat, even without salt. On the first day, as a former officer, I was appointed a replacement clay quarry master. A few days later this post is abolished, and I go to dig the clay and get a faded rag in the camp kapitka. My soul was not yet zekovskaya, and the skin was already zekov. We still hoped for an amnesty, but it has already come. Only domestic workers were amnestied, and we replaced them. Amnesty exempted 58 to three years, which almost no one was given. Even wartime deserters were amnestied. Because of the amnesty, there were not enough workers, and I was “thrown” out of the quarry into the shop – pushing the trolleys with bricks, then back in the quarry.
Chapter 7. Indigenous life
The whole life of the natives of the Archipelago consists of endless work, of hunger, cold and cunning. There are countless kinds of common works, but the oldest, the most important work is felling. During the war, the Lagerniki called the sawmill a dry shot. You can not feed the norms of the Gulag man, 13 hours working in the cold. The boiler was divided according to the norm, but the drummers went to the ground before the refuseniks. And after work – barracks, dugout; in the North – a tent, somehow sprinkled with earth and laid with grass; bare bunks in several floors. Wet clothes dried on themselves – no change. At night, clothes snaked to the benches and walls of the tent. And yet – the eternal camp-like impermanence of life: the stages; mysterious shuffles, transfers and commissions; inventory of property, sudden night searches, planned searches by May 1 and November 7, and three times a month disastrous baths. Waste activity of the Archipelago – goners. Everything that is built by the Archipelago is squeezed out of them. Another part of the life of the Gulag is the camp unit. Until 1932, camp sanitation was subordinated to the People’s Commissar for Health, and doctors could be doctors, but in the 32nd they were completely transferred to the Gulag and became gravediggers. It was she who refused to acknowledge the fact of the beating and signed resolutions for landing in the punishment cell. Member-mediators did not receive medical aid at all, and the seriously ill patients were not released from work. Only one no blue cap can not take away from the prisoner – death. From the autumn of 1938 to February 1939, 385 people died out of 550 people in one of the Ust-Vymsky camps. In the central manor of the Burepoloma camp in barracks, in February 1943, 50 of the 50 people died during the night. Lingerie, shoes,
Chapter 8. The woman in the camp
In the courtyard of Krasnaya Presnya, I fell out to sit next to the women’s stage, and I saw that they were not as exhausted as we are. Equal to all, prison rations and prison tests are easier for women, they do not give up quickly because of hunger. In the camp, on the contrary, the woman is heavier. Arrival to the camp begins with a bathhouse, where “camp fools” choose their women. So a woman is easier to save life, but most of the 58th are women, for whom this step is more intolerable than death. It facilitates the fact that no one here condemns anyone; unleashes that life has no meaning. According to the statistics of the 1920s, there was one woman for 6-7 men. The protection of a woman was only sheer old age or sheer ugliness; attraction was a curse. In Karlage, there were 6,000 women, many of them worked as porters. At a brick factory in Krivoshchekov, women pulled logs from a spent quarry. There was no consolation in love. Instructions GULAG required: convicted of cohabitation immediately tear apart and less valuable of the two send a stage. Camp love arose almost not carnal, but from this it became even deeper. The camp spouses were separated not only by supervision and superiors, but also the birth of a child – nursing mothers – were kept in separate camp sites. After the end of feeding, the mother was guided through the stage, and the child to the orphanage. Mixed camps existed from the first years of the revolution to the end of World War II. From 1946 to 1948, the Archipelago passed a great division of women and men. Women were driven to work in common. Now the pregnancy was the salvation of life. Individual women’s camps carried the full burden of common work,
Chapter 9. The Idiots
One of the basic concepts of the Archipelago is a camp jerk, one who left general work or did not get at all. According to the statistics of 1933, they accounted for 1/6 of the total number of prisoners. Basically, they survived in the camps. Assholes are: cooks, bread cutters, storekeepers, doctors, paramedics, hairdressers, all kinds of managers, accountants, engineers – all holding key posts. They are always full and cleanly dressed. After the New Jerusalem, during the transfer to the next camp, at the Kaluga Gate, I lied that I was a rationer. But my career again broke, for the second week I was banished to general work, to the brigade of painters.
Chapter 10. Instead of political
Article 58 ceased to be “political” and became an article of counter-revolutionaries, “enemies of the people.” A deaf-mute carpenter throws a jacket on Lenin’s bust -58th, 10 years; the children during the game tore off a poster in the club – the two elders were given a term. There was a standard set of charges from which the appropriate one was chosen. Most often, the tenth point was used – anti-Soviet agitation. To compare with him by general availability is only the 12th point – failure to report. Very opportunely there were denunciations. Probably, this is an unprecedented event in world history of prisons: when millions of prisoners realize that they are innocent. But the true “political” also existed. In 1950, students of the Leningrad Mechanical College created a party with a program and charter. Many were shot, the rest were given for 25 years. October 27, 1936 throughout the Vorkuta line of the camps there was a hunger strike of the Trotskyites, which lasted 132 days. The demand of the hungry was accepted, but not fulfilled. A little later on Vorkuta there was another major hunger strike. Their fate was the execution. The results of confrontation with the system were negligible.
Chapter 11. Well-meaning
The greater part of the 58th was composed of those who, in spite of everything, preserved the communist consciousness. Their beliefs were deeply personal, and such people did not occupy high posts at will and in the camp. Sometimes they remained convinced until the end. But there were also orthodoxes who exhibited their ideological conviction during the investigation, in prison cells, in the camps. Prior to the arrest, they occupied large posts, and in the camp they had to harder – they were hurt to fall, to experience such a blow from their native party. Among them it was considered forbidden to ask the question: “Why did they put you in jail?”. They argued in the chambers, defending all the actions of the authorities – they needed to stay in their minds rightly, so as not to go insane. These people were not taken until 1937 and after 1938, so they were called the “set of the 37th”. They gave various explanations for their arrests, but none of them ever accused Stalin of this – he remained an undisturbed sun. Well-meaning Orthodox believed that only they were planted in vain, and the rest sit for work, the camp could not change them. They readily complied with the camp regime, respectfully treated the camp authorities, were devoted to work, instead of trying to escape, they sent requests for pardon, they never mixed up with the rest of the 58th and “knocked” the camp authorities.
Chapter 12. Knocking-knocking
For the entire era that this book covers, almost the only eyes and ears of the Cheka-KGB were informers. They were called secret collaborators, it was reduced to seksoty, and passed into general use. The Archipelago had its own names: in prison there was a hen, in the camp – a snitch. A seksotom could be any person, the recruitment of the vital in the very air of our country. It was necessary to threaten a little, press, promise – and a new sexot is ready. In the camp it was even easier. But sometimes there is a “tough nut”, and put in the camp business note: “do not recruit!”. I tried to recruit. I signed the commitment, but something helped me to stay. Then I was sent to the sharashka by special order of the ministry. Many years of camps and exile passed, and suddenly in 1956 this commitment found me. I dissuaded myself from my illness.
Chapter 13. Having given up the skin, give up the second!
The streams feeding the Archipelago do not calm down here, but once again they are pumped through the pipes of the second consequences. The second camp terms were given in all years, but more often – in 1937-38 and during the war. In 1948-49, for the second time, they were put to death, they were called repeaters. In 1938 the second term was given directly in the camp. On the Kolyma was given the top ten, and on Vorkuta-8 or 5 years for the CCA. In the war years, not to get to the front, the camp chiefs “uncovered” terrible conspiracies. When the “conspiracies” ended – since 1943, a lot of cases on “agitation” have gone. Skvortsov in Lokhchlag was sentenced to 15 years on charges of “opposing the proletarian poet Mayakovsky to a certain bourgeois poet.” New terms were given during the war, and in 1938 they shot more. Known are “Kashketkin” executions and “Garanin” executions.
Chapter 14. Change fate!
The only way out for the prisoner was to escape. For only in March 1930, 1328 people fled from the places of detention of the RSFSR. After 1937, the Archipelago began to grow, and the protection became less and less. There were invisible chains that held prisoners well. The first of them is general humility with one’s position and hope for an amnesty; the second – camp hunger, when there is no escape, and the threat of a new term. The deaf barrier was the geography of the Archipelago and the hostility of the district population. For catching the fugitive was generously paid. Home in the Archipelago is the form of fighting shoots – to beat and kill the fugitive. And while the fugitives flee, they are reeled in second terms.
Chapter 15. SHIZO, BURS, ZURS
The Corrective Labor Code of 1933, which was in force until the early 1960s, banned insulators. By this time other types of intrapersonal punishment were mastered: RURs, BURy, ZURy and Shizo. The basic requirements for Shizo: cold, damp, dark and hungry. For this, they did not drown, did not insert glasses for the winter, fed Stalin’s rations, and hotter – once in three days. Only 200 g were given on Vorkuta, and instead of the hot one – a piece of raw fish. By law, Shizo could not be put in more than 15 days, but sometimes the time was extended for a year. In the BUR held for longer, from a month to a year, and more often – for an unlimited period. BUR is either an ordinary barrack fenced with barbed wire, or a stone prison in a camp with bars, concrete floors and a punishment cell. The desire to force the guilty to work forced them to separate them into separate penalty zones. In the ZUR – reduced soldering and the hardest work. To send in ZURy loved believers, manageable and thieves, caught fugitives. They sent for refusing to become a snitch. At Krasnaya ZUR, the roaring working day lasted 15 hours at 60 degrees below zero. The refuseniks were poisoned with sheepdogs. Cannibalism flourished in 1946-47 in the SevZelDorLag free-of-charge detachment.
Chapter 16. Socially-Related
All this did not concern thieves, murderers and rapists. For state theft was given 10 years; for robbing an apartment – up to one year, sometimes -6 months. “Voroshilovskaya” amnesty on March 27, 1953 flooded the country with a wave of criminals, who were hardly captured after the war. Lumpen is not an owner, he can not come into contact with socially hostile elements, but will rather come to terms with the proletariat. Therefore, in the Gulag they were officially called “socially-close”. They diligently cultivated a “contemptuous hostile attitude to the kulaks and counterrevolutionaries, that is, to Article 58. In the 1950s, waving his hand at social intimacy, Stalin ordered the thieves to be put in isolation and even to build separate prisons for them.
Chapter 17. Juveniles
A considerable part of the natives of the Archipelago were youngsters. Already in 1920, under the People’s Commissariat of Education there was a colony of juvenile offenders. From 1921 to 1930, there were labor camps for minors, and from 1924 – laborers of the OGPU. Street children were taken from streets, not from families. It all began with Article 12 of the Criminal Code of 1926, allowing for theft, violence, mutilation and murder to judge children from the age of 12. In 1927, prisoners between the ages of 16 and 24 had 48% of all prisoners. In 1935, Stalin issued an edict to judge children with the application of all penalties, including shooting. And finally, the decree of 7 July 1941: to judge children from the age of 12 with the application of all penalties as well, in those cases when they committed the crime not intentionally, but by imprudence. There were two main types of youngsters in the Archipelago: Separate children’s colonies and mixed camps, more often with disabled people and women. None of these methods did not release young people from thieves’ upbringing. In the children’s colonies, young children worked 4 hours, and 4 more hours had to learn. In the adult camp, they received a 10-hour work day with a decrease in the norm, and food – the same as in adults. Due to malnutrition at the age of 16, they look like small, frail children. In adult camps, youngsters retained the main feature of their behavior – the amicability of attack and rebuff. On the 58th there was no age minimum. Galya Venediktova, daughter of the enemies of the people, was sentenced at 11 years to 25 years of camps. and 4 more hours had to learn. In the adult camp, they received a 10-hour work day with a decrease in the norm, and food – the same as in adults. Due to malnutrition at the age of 16, they look like small, frail children. In adult camps, youngsters retained the main feature of their behavior – the amicability of attack and rebuff. On the 58th there was no age minimum. Galia Venediktova, daughter of the enemies of the people, was sentenced at 11 years to 25 years of camps. and 4 more hours had to learn. In the adult camp, they received a 10-hour work day with a decrease in the norm, and food – the same as in adults. Due to malnutrition at the age of 16, they look like small, frail children. In adult camps, youngsters retained the main feature of their behavior – the amicability of attack and rebuff. On the 58th there was no age minimum. Galya Venediktova, daughter of the enemies of the people, was sentenced at 11 years to 25 years of camps.
Chapter 18. Muses in the Gulag
In Gulag, all were re-educated under the influence of each other, but no one was re-educated from the means of the Cultural-Educational Unit. The time has passed for slogans, camp newspapers and vocational courses. The staff of the EHF remained to distribute letters and organize amateur performances. I also performed in concerts at the camp. There were also special theatrical troupes from the prisoners who were released from the general works-real serf theaters in the Gulag. I did not manage to get into such a theater. I remember my participation in amateur performance as humiliation.
Chapter 19. Zeks as a Nation
This ethnographic sketch proves that the convicts of the Archipelago constitute a separate nation and are a different biological type in comparison with Homo sapiens. In the chapter the life and jargon of the prisoners is discussed in detail.
Chapter 20. The Psalms Service
The least we know about the successors of the Gulag, these kings of the Archipelago, but their common features can be traced without difficulty. Hubris, dullness and tyranny – in this the campers caught up with the worst of the 18th and 19th century feudalists. All camp leaders have a sense of patrimony – so they perceive the camp. The most universal feature of them is greed, money-grubbing. There was no bridle neither real nor moral, which would restrain lust, anger and cruelty. If a prisoner and camp supervisor could still meet a man, then in an officer – it’s almost impossible. Even more arbitrariness was felt in the officers of the vohra. These young lieutenants had a sense of power over being. Some of them suffered cruelty against their soldiers. The most power-hungry and strong of the Vakhivtsy tried to jump into the internal service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and move on there already. This is how many kings of the Archipelago rose up. But the real acquisition and training of these troops began simultaneously with the Special Offices – from the late 40’s and early 50’s.
Chapter 21. Praligernyi world
Each island of the Archipelago, like a piece of rotten meat, maintains a fetid zone around itself. All infectious seeps from the Archipelago into this zone, and then diverges throughout the country. No camp zone existed by itself, there was always a village of freemen around it. Sometimes large cities such as Magadan, Norilsk, Balkhash, and Bratsk grew out of such settlements. At times, entire regions, like Tanshaevsky, belonged to the camp peace. There are towns founded before the Archipelago, but later they were surrounded by many camps and turned into one of the capitals of the Archipelago. In the camps there were local residents, vohra, camp officers with families, warders with families, former convicts and half-repressed, production bosses and freemen – various stray, come to work, adventurers and rascals. Some of them can no longer live in another world and all their lives move from one zone to another. Above each such settlement there was an operative supervision, there were also their informers.
Chapter 22. We build
The archipelago was profitable to the state from the political point of view. And with the economic? The correctional labor code of 1924 required the self-repayment of places of detention. Since 1929, all the Soviet labor institutions have been included in the national economic plan, and since January 1, 1931, all the camps and colonies of the RSFSR and Ukraine have been transferred to full self-sufficiency. But there was no self-sufficiency – they did not want unconscious prisoners to work hard for the good of the state. Freemen also acted, and even stole steadfastly. In addition, the prisoners had to be guarded, and the state had to maintain at least one supervisor for every working native of the Archipelago. And also – natural and forgiving oversights of the leadership. Peczheldorlag was building a road to Vorkuta – a meandering, as it were, and then the road had to be straightened. The archipelago not only did not self-pay, but the country had to pay extra to have it. Everything was complicated by the fact that self-financing was needed by the whole state, and the head of a separate camp did not care about him.
Part 4. Soul and barbed wire
I tell you a secret: not all of us will die, but everything will change.
1 Corinthians 15:51
Chapter 1. Ascension
It was considered for centuries: to give the perpetrator time to repent. But the Gulag Archipelago does not know remorse. For blatnym crime is not a reproach, and valor, but the rest did not have any crime – there is nothing to repent of. Probably, in the general consciousness of innocence, the reason for the rarity of camp suicides – the shoots was much greater. Every prisoner gives himself a vow: to live until liberation at any cost. Some people set a goal simply to live, and others – to live at any cost, it means – at the expense of another. At this camp crossroads, the divider of souls, not much turns to the right, but not a single person. At the camp in Samarka in 1946, a group of intellectuals comes to their deaths. Anticipating close death, they do not steal or snivel, time after time they gather and read lectures to each other.
Day of liberation does not give anything: a person changes, and everything becomes a stranger in the wild. And is it possible to free one who is already free in soul? Claiming for a person’s labor, the camp does not encroach on the order of his thoughts. No one persuades a prisoner to join the party, there is no trade union, no production meetings, no agitation. The free head is the advantage of life on the Archipelago. A person who has turned in the right direction begins to change, to rise spiritually, to learn to love loved ones in spirit. Lying in the postoperative ward of the camp hospital, I rethought my past life. Only so I was able to pass the very same road that I always wanted.
Chapter 2. Or corruption?
But many prisoners did not experience this transformation. Their heads were occupied only with thoughts of bread, tomorrow it cost them nothing, labor was the main enemy, and the surrounding ones were rivals in life and death. Such a person is constantly afraid of losing what else he has. In these vicious feelings and calculations it is impossible to rise. No camp can corrupt those who have a well-established core. Those who were not enriched by any spiritual upbringing are decayed.
Chapter 3. The Forced Will
As a human body is poisoned by a cancerous tumor, so our country was gradually poisoned by the poisons of the Archipelago. Freestyle was a single style with the life of the Archipelago. A man was tormented by constant fear, which led to the consciousness of his insignificance and the absence of any right. This was aggravated by the fact that a person could not freely change jobs and residence. Subtlety and incredulity replaced hospitality and became a defense. This gave rise to a general ignorance of what is happening in the country. Incredible development of stoolness. With years of fear for themselves and their family, betrayal was the safest form of existence. Every act of opposing power required courage, not commensurate with the magnitude of the act. In this situation, people survive physically, but inside – decay. The cumulative life of society was, that traitors were nominated, mediocrities triumphed, and all the best and honest went from the knife. Constant lies, like treachery, become a safe form of existence. The brutality rang and was brought up, and the boundary between good and bad was blurred.
Chapter 4. Several Fates
In this chapter, biographies of several prisoners are given in their entirety.
Part 5. Cuts
Let’s make Siberia out of Siberia, the cadal one – Siberia Soviet, socialist!
Stalin
Chapter 1. Doomed
On April 17, 1943, 26 years after the February revolution abolished hard labor and the gallows, Stalin again introduced them. The very first convict camp was established at the 17th Vorkuta mine. It was a frank gaspage, stretched in time. People settled in tents 7 × 20 meters. In this tent there were 200 people. Neither in the restroom, nor in the dining room, nor in the hospital they were never admitted – everything was either a scab or a feeder. Stalin’s penal servitude of 1943-44 was a combination of the worst that there is in the camp with the worst that is in prison. The first Vorkuta convicts went underground in one year. At the Vorkuta mine No. 2 was a female convict camp. Women worked in all underground works. Some will say that only traitors were there: policemen, burgomasters, “German litter”. But all these tens and hundreds of thousands of traitors left the Soviet citizens, this anger was sown in them by ourselves, these are our “production waste”. Stalin’s deification in the 1930s was not a state of the whole people, but only of the party, the Komsomol, the urban student youth, the substitute for the intelligentsia and the working class. However, there was a minority, and not so small, that saw around only a lie.
The village was incomparably more sober than the city, it did not in any way divide the idolization of Father Stalin. This is indicated by the great outcome of the population from the North Caucasus in January 1943 – the peasants left together with the retreating Germans. There were those who, even before the war, dreamed of taking up arms and beating the Red Commissars. These people had enough 24 years of communist happiness. Vlasovites called for the transformation of the war against the Germans into civil war, but even earlier it was done by Lenin during the war with Kaiser Wilhelm.
By 1945 barracks of convicts had ceased to be prison cells. In 46-47 years the line between hard labor and the camp began to wear off. In 1948, Stalin had an idea to separate the socially close criminal and everyday people from the socially hopeless 58th. Special Camps were created with a special charter – softer than hard labor, but more rigid than ordinary camps. Only the anti-Soviet agitators, the non-bearers and accomplices of the enemy were left with the inhabitants. The rest were waiting for Special Camps. To avoid mixing, since 1949, every native, except for the sentence, received a decree – in which camps to keep it.
Chapter 2. Revolutionary breeze
The middle of the term I spent in warmth and cleanliness. From me it was required a little: 12 hours to sit at a desk and please the authorities, but I lost the taste for these goods. We were taken to the Special Camp for a long time – three months. Throughout the whole stage, we were surrounded by the breeze of hard labor and freedom. At the station we were confused with the newcomers, who had 25-year terms. These terms allowed the prisoners to speak freely. All of us were taken to the same camp – Steppe. On the Kuibyshev transfer we were kept for more than a month in a long stable cell. Then he took us to the convoy of the Steppe camp. We were driven by lorries with bars in the front of the body. We drove 8 hours, through the Irtysh. About midnight we arrived at the camp, surrounded by barbed wire. The revolution here and did not smell.
Chapter 3. Chains, chains…
We were lucky: we did not get to copper mines, where the lungs could not stand more than 4 months. To toughen the regime of the Special Camps, each prisoner was given numbers that they sewed on clothes. Overseers were ordered to call people only by numbers. In some camps, handcuffs were used as punishment. Mode osobolov would be calculated for complete deafness: no one will complain to anyone and will never be free. The work for the Special Forces was chosen as hard as possible. Sick prisoners and disabled people were sent to die in Spassk near Karaganda. At the end of 1948 there were about 15 thousand prisoners of either sex. At an 11-hour working day, there were few who survived more than two months. In addition, with the move to Osoblag, communication with the will almost ceased – two letters were allowed per year.
Ekibastuz camp was established a year before our arrival – in 1949. Here everything was in the likeness of the former – the commandant, the barrack of idiots and the turn to the punishment cell, only the blatny ones had no previous scope. The weeks, months, and years dragged on, and no lumen was foreseen. We, the new arrivals, mostly Western Ukrainians, got together in one brigade. For several days we were considered laborers, but soon became a team of masons. A successful escape was made from our camp, and at that time we were completing the camp BUR.
Chapter 4. Why tolerated?
According to the socialist interpretation, the entire Russian history is a series of tyrannies. But the Decembrist soldiers were forgiven four days later, and only five of the Decembrist officers were shot. Alexander II himself attempted seven times, but he did not exile the half-Petersburg, as it was after Kirov. Lenin’s own brother makes an attempt on the emperor, and in the autumn of that year Vladimir Ulyanov goes to the Kazan Imperial University for a law department. And when Tukhachevsky was repressed, they not only imprisoned his family, but also arrested his two brothers with his wives, four sisters and husbands, and his nephews were dispersed to orphanages and changed their names. In the most terrible time of the “Stolypin terror” 25 people were executed, and the society was shocked by this cruelty. And from the link did not run only lazy. Methods of resistance to the prisoner regime were: protest, hunger strike, escape, rebellion. Our shoots were doomed, because the population did not help, but sold fugitives. Insurrections led to insignificant results – without public opinion, a mutiny does not have development. But we could not stand it. In the Special Offices we became political.
Chapter 5. Poetry under the stove, true under the stone
Arriving in Ekibastuz for the sixth year of imprisonment, I set myself the goal of obtaining a working specialty. I did not expect going into assholes – I needed a head cleaned from the turbidity. I wrote a poem for two years already, and she helped me not to notice what I was doing with my body. You could not keep it. I wrote in small pieces, memorized and burned. On the Kuibyshev transfer I saw how the Catholics made the beads from the bread, and made themselves the same – they helped me memorize the lines. There were many like me in the Archipelago. Arnold Lvovich Rappoport, for example, was a universal technical reference book and wrote a treatise on “Love.” How many poetic people opened up to me in a shaved head box, under a black zek jacket.
Chapter 6-7. Persuaded fugitive
A convinced fugitive is one who does not doubt a moment that a person can not be kept behind bars; one who always thinks of escape and sees it in a dream; one who has signed to be implacable and knows what he is on. As a bird is not free to refuse a seasonal flight, so a convinced fugitive can not help but flee. This was George Pavlovich Tenno. He graduated from the nautical school, then – the military institute of foreign languages, waged a war in the northern fleet, went to Iceland and England to become a communications officer on the English escort vessels. He was arrested on the eve of Christmas 1948, gave 25 years of camps. The only thing that remained to him now is escape. Escape prisoners have their own history and their theory. History – this is the former shoots, it can be learned from captured fugitives. The theory of shoots is very simple: ran away – then you know the theory. The rules are as follows: from the object to run easier, than from a residential area; one is more difficult to run, but no one betrays; It is necessary to know the geography and people of the surrounding area; It is necessary to prepare an escape according to plan, but at any moment be ready to run off on the occasion. Tenno assembled the group and fled September 17, 1950. They were caught twenty days later around Omsk, again judged and given another 25 years. George Pavlovich Tenno died on October 22, 1967 of cancer.
Chapter 8. Shoots with morals and shoots with engineering
The shoots from the ITL were determined by the Gulag as a spontaneous phenomenon, inevitable in a vast economy. It was not so in the Special Offices. They were equipped with enhanced protection and armament at the level of modern motorized infantry. In instructions of the Special Forces it was laid that there could not be any shoots from there. Every escape is also that the transition of the state border is a major spy. When the 58th began to receive 25-year terms, the political was no longer kept from escaping. While shoots Osoblageryah was less than in the labor camp, but the shoots were tougher, harder, irreversible, hopelessness – and so nice. In Ekibastuz from escapes the Team of the Reinforced Mode has disproportionately increased, the prison camp it already could not contain. Frightened shoots, the owners of Ekibastuz surrounded objects and living area ditches depth of one meter, but in 1951 managed to escape from there 12 people. And after that let them say,
Chapter 9. Sons with machine guns
We were guarded by Red Army men, self-guardsmen, old people’s storerooms. Finally came the young, vigorous boys who had not seen war, armed with brand new automatic weapons – and they went to protect us. They are given the right to shoot without warning. The whole cunning and strength of the system is that our relationship with security is based on ignorance. For these boys we are fascists, feces of hell. They do not know anything about us. The politruk will never tell the boys that they are here for believing in God, for the thirst for truth, for the love of justice and for nothing at all. That’s how those who are formed in a gray-haired old man in handcuffs knock out bread from the mouth. For the murder of a prisoner – a reward: monthly salary, vacation for a month. And between the guards there is a competition – who will kill more. In May 1953, these sons with submachine guns gave a sudden turn on the column waiting for an entrance search. There were 16 wounded bullet holes, long forbidden by all conventions. The general basis was weak in these boys, if she did not resist the oath and political talk.
Chapter 10. When the earth is burning in the zone
Like all the undesirable in our history, the riots were neatly carved and locked in a safe, the participants destroyed, and the witnesses intimidated. Now these uprisings have already turned into a myth. The earliest outbreaks occurred in January 1942 on a business trip Osh-Courier near Ust-Usa. The civilian Retunin collected a couple of hundred volunteers from the 58th, they disarmed the guards and went to the forest to partisan. They were interrupted gradually, and in the spring of 1945 they put absolutely unhappy people in the “retyuninsky case”. By driving the 58th to the Special Camps, Stalin thought that it would be more terrible, but it turned out the opposite. His entire system was based on the disunity of the discontented, and in Osobylagyah the discontented met thousands of people. And there were no criminals – the pillars of the camp regime and the authorities. There was no theft – and people looked at each other sympathetically. The camp psychology begins to die: “Die you today, and I will tomorrow.” This was transmitted even to assholes. These changes affect only those who have survived remnants of conscience. There is no real shift of consciousness yet, and we are still depressed.
It was enough to ask the question: “How can we prevent them from fleeing from us, and they would run away from us?” – and ended in the camps, the era of shoots, the era of rebellion began. Cut steel in all the Special Offices, even in the disabled Spassk. To us the bacillus of rebellion was brought by the Dubovski stage. Strong guys, taken directly from the guerrilla path, immediately began to act. Murders have become the norm. This illegal court judged more justly than all the tribunals, troika and CCA familiar to us. Out of 5,000, about a dozen were killed, but with each blow of the knife the tentacles that clung to us fell off. The informers did not knock, the air cleared of suspicion. For all the years of the existence of the Cheka – GPU – MVD, the one called to them proudly refused to go. Camp owners “deafened” and “blinded.” National centers were born and strengthened, a unifying advisory body appeared. The brigade leaders did not snap, they hid in the BUR with the informers. The camp authorities called this movement banditry. So they cheated themselves, but they were deprived of the right to shoot. All other measures – threatening orders, penalty regime, a wall across the residential area – did not help.
Chapter 11. Chains are easy to touch
We still worked, but this time voluntarily, so as not to let each other down. Now we had freedom of speech, but we could not spread it beyond the zone. On Sunday, 1952, we were locked up in barracks, and then sorted. In one half of the camp remained Ukrainians, in the other – thousands of the other three nations. At night our three thousand people rebelled. In the case came guard with assault rifles. The revolt was suppressed, a hunger strike began, which lasted three days. I remained a year before the end of my term, but I did not regret anything. The first to surrender was the 9th barrack, the most hungry. On Jan. 29, the foremen were assembled to present complaints. From this meeting I was taken to the hospital: because of the hunger strike, my tumor began to grow rapidly. And the meeting was for a diversion. Mass arrests followed. Only a few were returned to the zone. As a single concession, The management of the camp gave us self-financing. Now 45% of our earnings were considered ours, although 70% of them took the camp. Money could be transferred to the camp currency – booms – and spent. Most were happy with this “concession” of the hosts.
The outbreak of freedom meanwhile spread to the whole archipelago. In 1951, in the Sakhalin camp of Vakhrushevo, there was a five-day hunger strike of five hundred people. There is a strong excitement in Ozerlag after the murder in the ranks of the watch on September 8, 1952. On March 5, 1953, on the day of the death of the Leader, an amnesty was declared, which, according to tradition, was distributed mainly to thieves. This convinced the Special Camp that Stalin’s death did not change anything, and in 1953 the camp unrest continued throughout the Gulag.
Chapter 12. Forty Days of Kengir
Everything changed after the fall of Beria – it weakened hard labor. Kengir convoy began to shoot more and more innocent. In February 1954, on the Woodworker, a man was shot and killed – an “evangelist.” The strike began, and the owners brought and placed in the Special Unit 650 criminals, so that they cleaned up. But the hosts received not a subdued camp, but the largest mutiny in the history of the Gulag. The islands of the Archipelago through the shipments live in the same air, and therefore the excitement in the Special Forces did not remain for the thieves unknown. By the 54th it became apparent that the thieves were commemorating the convicts. Instead of opposing the political, the thieves agreed with them. The revolt was brutally suppressed only on June 25. In the autumn of 1955, there was a closed trial of the leaders. And in Kengir, self-financing flourished, there were no bars on the windows and barracks were not locked. Introduced parole and even released at will half-dead. And in 1956 this zone was liquidated.
Part 6. Reference
And the bones are crying at home.
Russian proverb
Chapter 1. The reference of the first years of freedom
In the Russian Empire, the reference was legitimately approved under Aleksei Mikhailovich in 1648. Peter exiled hundreds, and Elizabeth replaced the execution with a reference to Siberia. In the 19th century, half a million people were exiled. The Soviet Republic also could not do without a link. On October 16, 1922, the NKVD established a permanent Commission for the expulsion of “socially dangerous persons, leaders of anti-Soviet parties.” The most common period was -3 years. Since 1929, they began to develop a link in conjunction with forced labor. At first the Soviet treasury paid its political exiles, but soon the exiles lost not only a monetary allowance, but also all their rights. By 1930 the remaining SRs still referred to, but more numerous were the Georgian and Armenian Dashnaks exiled after the seizure of their republics by the Communists. In 1926, the Socialist Zionists were exiled, who created agricultural Jewish communes in the Crimea. The exiles were weakened by unfriendly relations between the parties, the alienation of the local population and the indifference of the country. The whole party answered for the escape of one person, and the exiles themselves forbade themselves to flee.
The link had many gradations. Until the 1930s, the easiest form remained-minus: the repressed did not specify the exact place of residence, but were allowed to choose a city minus some. Under the amnesty, by the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, the exiled began to drop a quarter of the term, but then the next court day came. Anarchist Dmitry Venediktov was arrested again and sentenced to death by the end of the three-year Tobolsk exile. The reference was a sheep’s pen for all assigned to the knife.
Chapter 2. The Peasant Plague
In the Second World War, we lost twenty million people, and by 1932, 15 million peasants were exterminated, and 6 million were extinct during the famine. The destructive peasant plague was prepared from November 1929, when the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party forbade the admission of wealthy peasants to the collective farms. In July 1929, seizures and evictions began, and on January 5, 1930, the Central Committee issued a decree on the acceleration of collectivization. The Kuban village of Urupinskaya was evicted from the old man to the baby. In 1929, all residents of the village of Dolinka were dekulakized and evicted. Under the dekulakization necessarily fell rural millers and blacksmiths. Sometimes he stayed at home someone who quickly joined the collective farm, and the persistent poor who did not submit the application, was sent. It was the Great Fracture of the Russian ridge.
They were carrying them by train. If in the summer, then on carts, and in winter, in severe frost – on open sleigh, with infants. At the approach of the Plague, in 1929, all churches were closed in Arkhangelsk: now dispossessed people were placed in them. They buried them without coffins, in common pits. The way of the rest lay further – on Onega, on Pinega and up along Dvina. From all subsequent references, the peasant woman differed in that they were exiled not to a settled place, but to the wilderness, to a primitive state. For special settlements, the Chekists chose places on rocky slopes. Sometimes it was explicitly forbidden to sow bread. In 1930, 10 thousand families were thrown in the upper reaches of Vasyugan and Tara, leaving no food or tools for them. Machine-gun posts never let anyone out of the gas vat. All died out. In their special settlements, the deceased lived as prisoners in camps. Sometimes it happened that the dekulakized were taken to the tundra or taiga and forgotten there. Such settlements not only survived, but were strong and rich. Until the 1950s the special settlers had no passports.
Chapter 3. The link thickens
In the 1920s, the exile was a trans-shipment base before the camp. Since the late 30-ies it has acquired an independent meaning as a kind of isolation. Since 1948, the link has turned into a place where the waste of the Archipelago fell. In the spring of 1948, after the expiry of the term, the 58th was released into exile, which served as a layer between the USSR and the Archipelago. One of the capitals of the exile was Karaganda. In the village of Taseevo of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, exiles were forbidden to marry, and in Northern Kazakhstan, on the contrary, they forced to marry within two weeks in order to tie the exile more tightly. In many places exiles did not have the right to file complaints with Soviet institutions – only in the commandant’s office. The exile was to appear for any summons from the commandant. Up to 1937 for an escape from exile they gave 5 years of camps, after the 37th-10 years, after the war-20 years of hard labor. The second landing in the link,
Chapter 4. The reference of peoples
Until the very expulsion of peoples, our Soviet reference was not compared to the camps. The first experience was cautious: in 1937 several tens of thousands of Koreans were transferred from the Far East to Kazakhstan. In 1940, Prileeningsrad Finns and Estonians resettled deep into the Karelian-Finnish Republic. The scale gradually increased. In July 1941, the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans were deported to the east of the country. Here, for the first time, the method of linking whole nations was applied. Then Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmucks, Kurds, Crimean Tatars, Caucasian Greeks were Chechens. The criminal nation was surrounded by a ring of machine guns and given 12 hours to gatherings. He readily and reliably referred to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia, the Northern Urals and the North of the European part of the USSR were not deprived. The Baltics began to be cleaned back in 1940, as soon as our troops entered. But it was not a link, but camps. The main references of the Baltic people occurred in 1948, 49 and 51 years. In the same years, evacuated and Western Ukraine. Grief was the exile, who was written down in the artillery artels. For non-entrance to work – a court, 25% of forced labor, and they earned 3-4 gold rubles a month, a quarter of the subsistence minimum. In some mines, exiles received not money, but booms. Even worse was the one sent to the collective farms. For the first year of work on the collective farm, Maria Sumberg received 20 grams of grain and 15 cents per workday. In some mines, exiles received not money, but booms. Even worse was the one sent to the collective farms. For the first year of work on the collective farm, Maria Sumberg received 20 grams of grain and 15 cents per workday. In some mines, exiles received not money, but booms. Even worse was the one sent to the collective farms. For the first year of work on the collective farm, Maria Sumberg received 20 grams of grain and 15 cents per workday.
Chapter 5. Ending the term
From the very first investigative prisons, the prisoner does not leave a dream of exile. In me, this dream has become especially strong. After the end of the term, I was only detained for a few days in the camp, and the shipments again flashed. Destination – Kok-Terek district, a piece of desert in the center of Kazakhstan. We drove under escort, only we did not give rations: we are already free. The next day, upon arrival in the village of Aydarly, we are not allowed to leave private apartments. My hostess is a Novgorod exile grandmother of Chadova. They did not take me to work in the school. By some miracle, I managed to get a job in the raipo as a planning economist.
Chapter 6. Exalted welfare
Soon the young head teacher of the school managed to arrange me as a mathematics teacher. I taught special children – children of exiles. Each of them always felt his collar. Their self-esteem was saturated only in study. After the XX Congress I wrote an application for a review of my case. In the spring they began to remove the link from the whole of the 58th, and I went to a troubled world.
Chapter 7. The prisoners at liberty
Term is from a call to a call; liberation is from zone to zone. Passport is extinguished by the 39th passport article. It is not prescribed anywhere, not recruited. Deprived of links – that’s how these unfortunate people should be called. In the Stalin years after liberation they remained right there, in the camp zone where they took to work. On the Kolyma, there was no choice at all. Released, the zek immediately signed a “voluntary” commitment: to work in Dalstroy and beyond. The permission to go to the mainland was harder to obtain than liberation. Rehabilitation did not help: from old prisoners even old friends turned away. Voldemar Zarin, 8 years after his release, told his colleagues that he was sitting. He was immediately investigated. Every person experienced liberation in his own way. Some have put too much energy to survive, at will they relax and burn in a few months. Others – on the contrary, after liberation are younger, straightened. I belong to the second category. For some, liberation is like a kind of death. Such people do not want anything for a long time: they remember how easy it is to lose everything. Many in the wild are beginning to catch up – who are in ranks and positions, who are in earnings, who are in children. But most of all those who try to forget as soon as possible. And the ex-convicts are coming to meet with their wives, husbands, children. They do not always manage to get back together: their life experience is too different. Many in the wild are beginning to catch up – who are in ranks and positions, who are in earnings, who are in children. But most of all those who try to forget as soon as possible. And the ex-convicts are coming to meet with their wives, husbands, children. They do not always manage to get back together: their life experience is too different. Many in the wild are beginning to catch up – who are in ranks and positions, who are in earnings, who are in children. But most of all those who try to forget as soon as possible. And the ex-convicts are coming to meet with their wives, husbands, children. They do not always manage to get back together: their life experience is too different.
Part 7. There is no Stalin
And they did not repent of their murders…
Apocalypse, 9, 21
Chapter 1. How it is now over the shoulder
We did not lose hope that we will be told about us: sooner or later the whole truth about everything that happened in history is told. I fell out this happiness: stick the iron cloths into the solution, before they slam shut again, the first handful of truth. The letters flowed. I keep these letters. Breakthrough has taken place. Yesterday we had no camps, no archipelago, but today the whole world saw – there is. Masters of eversion first poured into this gap, so that the joyous flapping of wings to close from the astonished viewers of the Archipelago. So cleverly they flapped their wings that the Archipelago, when it first appeared, became a mirage.
When Khrushchev gave permission to “Ivan Denisovich,” he was firmly convinced that it was about Stalin’s camps that he did not have such. I also sincerely believed that I was talking about the past, and did not expect a third stream of letters – from the current prisoners. I sent my objections and the wrath of today’s Archipelago. In a rare camp, my book got legally, it was withdrawn from libraries and parcels. The zeks hid it in the afternoon, and read at night. In some North Ural camp she was made a metal binding – for durability. So the prisoners read the book, “approved by the party and the government.” We have a lot of talk about how important it is to punish escaped Zapadno-German criminals, only you do not want to judge yourself. Therefore, in August 1965, from the rostrum of a closed ideological meeting, it was proclaimed: “
Chapter 2. Rulers change, Archipelago remains
The fall of Beria sharply accelerated the collapse of the Special Camps. Their separate history ended in 1954, they were no longer distinguished from the ITL. From 1954 to 1956, the Archipelago established preferential time – the era of unprecedented indulgences. The ruthless blows of liberalism undermined the system of camps. The camps of the facilitated regime were arranged. They began to come to the camps of the Supreme Council Commission, or “unloading”, but they did not lay new moral foundations of public life. They tended to the fact that before being released, the prisoner must admit his guilt. This exemption did not exacerbate the system of camps and did not interfere with new receipts, which were not stopped even in 56-57. Those, the cat refused to plead guilty, were set aside to sit. Nevertheless, 955-56 years have become fatal for the Archipelago, and could be the last for him, but did not. Khrushchev never finished anything. In 1956, the first restrictive orders on the camp regime were published and continued in 1957. In 1961, a death penalty was issued in the camps “for terror against the reformed and against the supervision”, and four camp regimes were approved – now no longer Stalin, but Khrushchev’s. Since then, these camps are worthwhile. They differ from Stalin’s only in the composition of prisoners: there is not a multimillion-fifty-eighth, but also helpless victims of injustice are sitting. The archipelago remains because this state regime could not stand without it.
We traced the history of the Archipelago from the scarlet volleys of his birth to the pink mist of rehabilitation. On the eve of the new Khrushchev hardening of the camps and the new criminal code, we will consider our story over. There will be new historians, those who know Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev camps are better than us. The novelty of the Khrushchev camps is that there are no camps, instead of them – colonies, and the Gulag turned into GUITK. The modes introduced in the 61st are: general, reinforced, strict, special. The choice of the regime is made by the court. Parcels are allowed only to those who have served half the time. Our compatriots are still corrected by hunger. Particularly well educated is a special regime, where a striped “uniform” is introduced.
Empedeshniki – power. They survived in 1956, it means that they will stand still. I was sent to them by these unexpected letters from the modern natives. To look more solid, I choose the time when I’m nominated for a Lenin prize. It turns out that the Commission for Legislative Assumptions has already been busy with the drafting of a new Correctional Labor Code for the first time, instead of the 1933 Code. I’m satisfied with the meeting. I leave them tired and broken: they are not at all shaken. They will do everything in their own way, and the Supreme Council will approve unanimously. With the Minister of Public Order Protection Vadim Stepanovich Tikun, I have been talking for a long time, about an hour. He left in a tired conviction that there were no ends, that I did not move anything by the hair. At the Institute for the Study of the Causes of Crime, I was introduced to the Director. His face is full of well-being, hardness and disgust. And then I suddenly get answers, for which he walked for so long. Raising the standard of living of prisoners is impossible: the camp is not to bring them back to life. The camp is a punishment. The archipelago was, the Archipelago remains, the Archipelago will be. Otherwise, there is no one to remove the miscalculations of the Advanced Teaching – that people do not grow up as they are intended.
Chapter 3. The Law Today
In our country has never been political. And now the outside is clean and smooth. Most of our fellow citizens have never heard of the events in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962. On June 1, a decision was issued to raise the price of meat and butter, and the next day the whole city was covered by strikes. The party’s gorkom was empty, and all the students were locked up in dormitories. By the evening, a rally was assembled, which they tried to disperse with tanks and armored personnel carriers with submachine gunners. On June 3, the wounded and killed were missing, the families of the wounded and the dead were deported to Siberia, and stores were enriched with scarce food. A series of closed and open vessels passed. At one 9 men were sentenced to be shot, and two women – to 15 years of age under article on banditry. Political was not, but still flows that flow, which has never dried up in the USSR. Under Khrushchev, believers began to persecute with new frenzy, but they are not political either, they are “religious”, they must be educated: dismissed from work, forced to attend anti-religious lectures, destroy temples and disperse old women from the fire-gut. From 1961 to June 1964, 197 Baptists were convicted. Most were given 5 years of exile, some -5 years of strict security camp and 3-5 years of exile.
The flow of political forces is now incomparable with Stalin’s time, but not because the law has been amended. It just changed the direction of the ship for a while. As previously shredded in the 58th, so now they are shredding in criminal articles. The dull, deaf, investigative-judicial carcass of that also lives, that she is sinless. So she is strong, that she never revises her decisions, and every judge is sure that nobody will correct him. This stability of justice allows the police to use the “trailer” or “bag of crimes” technique – when one person is hung up with all the crimes that have not been solved for a year. You could do it as if there was no criminal offense at all. Even more strengthened justice in the year when it was ordered to grab, judge and evict the parasites. All the same gloom is wrong in our air.
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