The Gulag Archipelago, ch. 2

[packbat]

Chapter 2, pgs. 24 to 92, down. With a clever eye for analogy, A. Solzhenitsyn titled this chapter (or rather, Thomas P. Whitney translated his title) "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System". It describes the constitutions of the many waves of arrests that fed the Russian jails, and some of the motivations behind them.

Paradoxically enough, every act of the all-penetrating, eternally wakeful Organs, over a span of many years, was based solely on one article of the 140 articles of the nongeneral division of the Criminal Code of 1926. One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiformed, wide-sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation.

[...]

Article 58 consisted of fourteen sections.

In Section 1 we learn that any action (and according to Article 6 of the Criminal Code, any absence of action) directed towards the weakening of state power was considered to be counterrevolutionary.

Broadly interpreted, this turned out to include the refusal of a prisoner in camp to work when in a state of starvation and exhaustion. This was a weakening of state power. And it was punished by execution. (The execution of malingerers during the war.)

[...]

Section 12 concerned itself closely with the conscience of our citizens: it dealt with the failure to make a denunciation of any action of the types listed. And the penalty for the mortal sin of failure to make a denunciation carried to maximum limit!

This section was in itself such a fantastic extension of everything else that no further extension was needed. He knew and he did not tell became the equivalent of "He did it himself"!

[... later, after the description of Article 58 ...]

Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred. A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with "stormy applause, rising to an ovation." For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the "stormy applause, rising to an ovation," continued. But palms were getting sore, and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare to be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who had been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till the fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretcher! And even then those who were left would not falter.... Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

"Don't ever be the first to stop applauding!"

Somehow, this chapter did not have the impact the first chapter did on me. Perhaps it is because it is so extreme that it begins to sound like propaganda, whether or not it is true. Also it may be because some aspects of it, like the story of the applause, have almost become jokes about despotic regimes.