February 1918

*Wrestling with Darkness*

Somewhere, too, the planes were fighting forward; the night flights went on and on like a persistent malady, and on them watch must be kept. Help must be given to these men who with hands and knees and breast to breast were wrestling with the darkness, who knew and only knew an unseen world of shifting things, whence they must struggle out, as from an ocean. And the things they said about it afterwards were--terrible!

"I turned the light on to my hands so as to see them." Velvet of hands bathed in a dim red dark-room glow; last fragment that must be saved of a lost world. (p. 38-39):

1:Vol de Nuit (Night Flight)

Dark Lightning: Shattering

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great Iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?” (qtd. in Smit).  ~C.S. Lewis

1918: to Alessandra

"Only those can understand us who ate from the same bowl with us." -Quotation from a letter of a Hutzul* girl. a former zek ~Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Destructive Labor Camps’, Gulag Archipelago II

There is no limit to what should be included in this part. To attain and encompass its savage meaning one would have to drag out many lives in the camps--the very same in which one cannot survive for even one term without some special advantage because they were invented for destruction.

And from this it follows that all those who drank of this most deeply, who explored it most fully, are already in their graves and cannot tell us. No one now can ever tell us the most important thing about these-camps.

And the whole scope of this story and of this truth is beyond the capabilities of one lonely pen. All I had was a peephole into the Archipelago, not the view from a tower. But, fortunately, several other books have emerged and more will emerge. In the Kolyma Stories of Shalamov the reader will perhaps feel more truly and surely the pitilessness of the spirit of the Archipelago and the limits of human despair.

To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp…

The Fingers of Aurora

Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the Archipelago.

When our compatriots heard via the BBC that M. Mihajlov claimed to have discovered that concentration camps had existed in our country as far back as 1921, many of us (and many in the West too) were astonished: That early really? Even in 1921?

Of course not! Of course Mihajlov was in error. In 1921, in fact, concentration camps were already in full flower (already even coming to an end). It would be far more accurate to say that the Archipelago was born with the shot of the cruiser Aurora. *

And how could it have been otherwise? Let us pause to ponder.

Didn't Marx and Engels teach that the old bourgeois machinery of compulsion had to be broken up, and a new one created immediately in its place? And included in the machinery of compulsion were: the army (we are not surprised that the Red Army was created at the beginning of 1918); the police (the militia* was inaugurated even sooner than the army); the courts (from November 22, 1917); and the prisons. How, in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, could they delay a new type of prison?

That is to say that it was altogether impermissible to delay in the matter of prisons, whether old or new. 

In the first months after the October Revolution Lenin was already demanding "the most decisive, draconic measures to tighten up discipline."! And are draconic measures possible-without prison?

What new could the proletarian state contribute here? Lenin was feeling out new paths. In December, 1917, he suggested for consideration the following assortment of punishments ---confiscation of all property ... confinement in prison, dispatch to the front and forced labor for all who disobey the existing law."2  Thus. we can observe that the leading .idea of the Archipelago-forced labor-had been advanced in the first month after the October Revolution.

And even while sitting peacefully among the fragrant hay mowings of Razliv* and listening to the buzzing bumblebees, Lenin could not help but ponder the future penal system. Even then he had worked things out and reassured us: ''The suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that it is going to cost much less in blood ... will be much cheaper for humanity" than the preceding suppression of the majority by the minority.³

According to the estimates of emigre Professor of Statistics Kurganov, this "comparatively easy" internal repression cost us, from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of ... sixty-six million-66,OOO,OOO-lives. We, of course, cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official.

And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons.

It. is interesting to compare other figures. How large was the total staff of the central apparatus of the terrifying Tsarist Third Department, which runs like a strand through all the great Russian literature? At the time of its creation it had sixteen persons, and at its height it had forty-five'. A ridiculously small number for even the remotest Cheka provincial headquarters in the country. Or, how many political prisoners did the February Revolution find in the Tsarist "Prison of the Peoples"? All these figures do exist somewhere ... In all probability there were more than a hundred such prisoners in the Kresty Prison alone, and several hundred returned from Siberian exile and hard labor, and…

The February Revolution, which 'opened wide the doors of the Tambov Prison, found there political prisoners in the number of seven (7) persons. And there were more than forty provinces. (It is superfluous to recall that from February to July, 1917, there were no political arrests, and after July the number imprisoned could be counted on one's fingers.)

Here, however, was the trouble: The first Soviet government. was a coalition government, and a portion of the people's commissariats had to be allotted, like it or not, to the Left SR's, including, unhappily, the People's Commissariat of Justice, which fell to them. Guided by rotten petty bourgeois concepts of freedom, this People's Commissariat of Justice brought the penal system to the verge of ruin[sic]. The sentences turned out to be too light, and they made hardly any use at all of the progressive principle of forced labor. 

In February, 1918, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Comrade Lenin, demanded that the number of places of imprisonment be increased and that repression of criminals be intensified,⁴ and in May, already going' over to concrete guidance, he gave instructions⁵ that the sentence for bribery must be not less than ten years of prison and ten years of forced labor in addition, i.e., a total of twenty years. This scale might seem pessimistic at first: would forced labor really still be necessary after twenty years? But we know that forced labor turned out to be a very long-lived measure, and that even after fifty years it would still be extremely 'popular.'

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: 5:00 AM.

Outside a loud hammer bangs on a rail, repeatedly.

The man awakens on a filthy, sawdust mattress.

A lurid yellow light.

Two men carry a barrell of shit out of the barracks.

A blast of bitter cold air.

The warden barks and the man rises and dresses, fast.

Crunching of snow beneath their feet.

A door opens with a merciful rush of warm air.

~Alexandr Solzhenitsyn