Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

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.

Solzhenitsyn’s work presents to a great extent a powerful attack on the Soviet system from inside. He constantly calls into question the morality of the Soviet leaders and their institutions, both high and low. The stress is on ethical rather than socialist principles: Solzhenitsyn’s views are basically moral rather than political, except insofar as ethics are ancillary to politics. As we will observe, Solzhenitsyn is more obsessed by the problem of man’s evil and goodness than he is by the political ramifications of those ethical considerations.

Solzhenitsyn is unable to uncover the roots of evil or of goodness by tracing them to the social system and its production and class relations, by employing the orthodox and vulgar Marxist analysis of base and superstructure.

Prior to examining the question of resistance as encountered in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle, it is imperative that we first come to appreciate how the Russian, generally speaking, perceives ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’. Materialism, too, indubitably plays a role here. As we will see soon, materialism served as a catalyst to certain forms of resistance manifested in the Gulag camps.

One finds no deep-rooted tradition of and love for personal freedom per se, but there does exist a profound commitment to “justice”; it is from this commitment that Solzhenitsyn truly speaks for his people. Andrei Amalrik writing in his Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970) may be correct in maintaining that for most Russians “freedom” is synonymous with disorder, that “individual” and “personal” human personality has no particular value, and thus must be considered subordinate to the “communal” interest. He may even be accurate in contending that Russian love of justice is far less vigorous than Russian respect for brute force, and that in practice, what passes for love of justice is simply a kind of equalitarianism which says that no one should live better than the next person.

This idea of justice is motivated by hatred of everything outstanding which we (Russians) make no effort to imitate, but, on the contrary, try to bring down to our level, by hatred of any sense of initiative, of any higher or more dynamic way of life than the life we live ourselves. This psychology is, of course, most typical of the peasantry and least typical of the “middle class.” However, peasants and those of peasant origin constitute the overwhelming majority of our country.[22]

Yet Solzhenitsyn’s position is inimical to that which has been expressed by Amalrik. For Solzhenitsyn is convinced, that his stubborn insistence on justice may find more fertile ground in the Russian spirit, than his equally stubborn concern for freedom and the individual personality. Because Solzhenitsyn earnestly believes that the urge to justice is inherent, in the spirit of men, everywhere.

Justice has been the common patrimony of humanity throughout the ages. It does not cease to exist for the majority even when it [is] twisted in some (“exclusive”) circles. Obviously it is a concept which is inherent in man, since it cannot be traced to any other source. Justice exists even if there are only a few individuals who recognize it as such. The love of justice seems to me to be a different sentiment from the love of people (or at least the two only coincide partially). And in periods of mass decadence, when the question is posed, “Why bother? What are the sacrifices for?” it is possible to answer with certainty: “for justice.” There is nothing relative about justice, as there is nothing relative about conscience. Indeed, justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually also recognizes the voice of justice. I consider that in all social or historical questions (if we are aware of them, not from heresay or books, but are touched by them spiritually), justice will always suggest a way of action (or thinking) that is not in conflict with one’s conscience.[23]

But Solzhenitsyn and the remainder of that courageous band of dissidents and reformers in the Soviet Union, are living in a period and a society of mass decadence, and despite their intrepidity and moral courage, their prospects are surely bleak. Their numbers are small, their power is extremely limited, and they are trapped between a hostile regime and an indifferent populace. This represents a precarious position to say the least.

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

In The First Circle we are witnessing a penal society throwing into dramatic relief the basic human condition: the trivial becomes tragic; the absurd becomes profound; weakness becomes strength and unseasoned faith gives life its only logic. Solzhenitsyn sets his story in a few fleeting hours from December 24th