*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):
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
Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned
in Homer and called Aurora
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
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