Translated material
"Cursed Order" Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn and thieves
Print Mikhail Ryklin
On the last page of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic “The Gulag Archipelago” we read: “And to whom I offered to take individual chapters, they did not take them, but replaced them with a story, oral or written, at my disposal. I suggested to Varlam Shalamov that we write the entire book together, but he also rejected it” [1] .
It was no coincidence that Shalamov rejected this proposal - both writers understood the prisoner’s experience too differently. Solzhenitsyn sometimes attributes a moral purifying function to the camp, and this connects him with the tradition of Russian classics (traditional themes are intertwined in his prose: the theme of the “little man” and the theme of purification through suffering). Shalamov denied this possibility, seeing the experience in the camp as purely negative, which a person did not need to know about; an experience equally destructive for victims and executioners. Nevertheless, he considered it his moral duty to tell about his camp experience, and as immanently as possible, without placing it in a broader social and historical context, refusing an external point of view. The concept of “Kolyma Tales” is unprecedented in radicalism; its author seems to be walking through literary virgin soil, with difficulty making his way. Such self-restraint places special demands on the reader of these texts - he also faces a difficult path through literary virgin soil, a rejection of literary analogies, and a confrontation with the unimaginable.
Unlike Ivan Denisovich and other “little people” of Solzhenitsyn, the ordinary people from Shalamov’s stories do not evoke affection: they have nothing to learn, they are the same “camp dust” as all the other prisoners. Even human decency, the preservation of which in the Gulag required enormous, incomparable internal labor, is depicted in “Kolyma Tales” without pathos or moralization, as something ordinary and ordinary. Solzhenitsyn acts differently: on the one hand, he judges the Stalinist camp world, pronouncing a guilty verdict on it, and on the other, he finds in it heroes, bearers of resistance (believers, scientists, Trotskyists, etc.).
Shalamov’s prose is artistic and documentary, connected with personal experiences; hence his stories contain a large number of repetitions, which the author fundamentally does not want to eliminate [2] . Paradoxically linking artistry with the absence of fiction, he believes that it is better to describe the same real event several times than to invent something once [3] . At the same time, however, Shalamov does not want his prose to be identified with journalism: my stories, he repeats many times, are not essays [4] .
In his later text “On Prose,” a personal literary manifesto, Shalamov summed up his work:
“Author of “KR” [“Kolyma Tales.” - M.R.] considers the camp a negative experience for a person - from the first to the last hour. A person should not know, should not even hear about it. No person becomes better or stronger after camp. The camp is a negative experience, a negative school, corruption for everyone - for commanders and prisoners, guards and spectators, passers-by and readers of fiction.
“KR” contains people without a biography, without a past, without a future...
“KR” is the fate of martyrs who were not, who did not know how to [become. - M.R.] and did not become heroes.
The need for this kind of documents is extremely great" [5] .
In a country like the USSR, continues Shalamov, where the Gulag entered the lives of millions whose relatives, friends, acquaintances did not return from there, “the reader - and not only Russians - is waiting for an answer from us” [6] . In such conditions, the narrative of the camp experience not only acquires significance, but also becomes the writer’s duty.
It is not easy to understand why Shalamov considered those convicted under the famous Article 58 - he writes primarily about them and on their behalf - as martyrs. Traditionally, martyrdom was thought of as sacrificing oneself for the sake of something higher than life (primarily for the sake of the otherworldly). But the vast majority of those convicted under Article 58 did not suffer for the idea, their crimes were imaginary, and they did not consider themselves guilty at all. Why did these people suffer? Why did they want to biologically prolong a spiritually completed life?
Solzhenitsyn harshly condemns them for this, calling them “political punks” [7] . “How little is needed to fight and win,” he exclaims, “just not to value life? Life is already lost anyway” [8] . He cites the example of captured Japanese officers who, protesting against the lawlessness of thieves, threatened the camp authorities in turn to commit hara-kiri; Frightened, the administration improved their conditions of detention.
Shalamov looked at the behavior of such people completely differently. He respected in them the martyrdom of life, which strives to preserve itself at any cost. This is not religious martyrdom, sacrificing life to a value that is infinitely superior to it, and not even revolutionary martyrdom, whose goal is a changed life that has acquired the features of ideality. In Shalamov we are dealing with life beyond any spiritually transformed life, with its biological remnant.
Martyrs have long been considered people with the strongest religious motivation, who despised the laws of “this world” and reunited with the other world as with what was originally and consciously familiar; revolutionaries could be counted among martyrs only by analogy. In the Gulag there were religious ascetics, and “believing” revolutionaries, and people who died with the name of Stalin on their lips, and thieves who gave their lives for the “thieves’ law.” But the bulk of the prisoners suffered martyrdom “in Shalamov’s understanding,” that is, they died or survived without purpose. More precisely, preserving life remained an end in itself even for the “goons” who were unable to work. They preserved life beyond life, and this seemingly unheroic act in the face of the unique, unprecedented inhumanity of the camp is interpreted by Shalamov as an act of martyrdom.
The fundamental disagreements between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn begin here, in relation to the camp experience as such. Shalamov refused to pass judgment on its bearers; he knew: general work quickly turns any life into its biological remnant. One who preserves life beyond life is, according to Shalamov, a martyr in the new sense of the word.
Solzhenitsyn not only does not recognize the camp experience as consistently and radically inhuman, but subjects it to moralization and builds a hierarchy of those to whose lot it fell. He does not hide his contempt for the “pseudo-political” prisoners convicted under Article 58, contrasting them with traditional martyrs (believers, the old intelligentsia, Narodnaya Volya members) who are not content with preserving bare life. He wrote the history of the Gulag, attaching to it a measure of resistance to the inhumane regime, while Shalamov created not history, but a snapshot of the Gulag, illuminated by extreme inhumanity. He contrasted Solzhenitsyn’s moralism with surprise at the growing power of the inhuman, at the depth of its penetration into the very fabric of life. Against this and only against this background, biological survival became for him a feat of martyrdom. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov did not want to externalize camp existence. He met several real heroes in the Gulag, but he also looked at them from the standpoint of basic experience, the experience of preserving bare life [9] .
In “Kolyma Tales”, “Master of the Shovel”, “Left Bank”, “Resurrection of the Larch”, “The Glove” the writer created a poetics of hopelessness; through it, however, like a miracle, a ray of preserved human life broke through.
In addition to the listed five cycles of stories, Varlam Shalamov wrote one more: “Essays on the Underworld.” I would like to focus specifically on these, the least “artistic” texts of the writer and compare them with what Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the same topic - “Politics and the Underworld” in “The Gulag Archipelago”.
The author of “Kolyma Tales” reproaches world literature (primarily Russian classics) for idealizing the world of professional criminals, for excessive “sympathy” and even “servility” towards it [10] . He believes that writers judged this world by people who were not real thieves, thieves in law. As examples, Shalamov cites Hugo's Les Misérables, Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, Tolstoy's Resurrection, Chekhov's Sakhalin Island and Gorky's Chelkash. “...This is not at all the world of professional criminals, not the world of thieves. These are simply people who encountered the negative force of the law, who encountered it by accident, who crossed some line in the darkness... The criminal world is a world of a special law...” [11] Writers either did not know this world at all, or turned away from it .
Solzhenitsyn defines the “special” world of thieves in a similar way: “And what does their very word “fraer” mean? Fraersky means universal, like all normal people. It is this universal human world, our world, with its morality, habits of life and mutual treatment, that is most hated by the thieves, most ridiculed by them...” [12]
Both writers consider the criminal world to be very ancient, existing for centuries, and judge it on the basis of their camp experience, the experience of direct confrontation with professional criminals. Previous literature seems to them to be extremely unrealistic in describing this environment.
The romanticization of the criminal world reached its apogee during the Soviet period. “...It seems that all the writers [are named Babel, Leonov, Selvinsky, Inber, Kaverin, Ilf and Petrov. - M.R.], - writes Shalamov, - paid a frivolous tribute to the sudden demand for criminal romance. The unbridled poeticization of criminality presented itself as a “fresh stream” in literature and seduced many experienced literary pens. Despite an extremely weak understanding of the essence of the matter... they were successful with the reader, and therefore caused significant harm” [13] . It is clear that the idea of the possibility of “reforging” the criminals was generated by the official attitude towards them as “socially close”, which arose in the first years of Soviet power.
Both Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn see here a miscalculation, thoughtlessness, a mistake of Soviet literature, extremely harmful, but involuntary, explained by ignorance of the closed environment of professional criminals. They do not see the mass socialization of thieves as an integral part of the Soviet political project.
The lion's share of those convicted under Article 58 ended up in the camp, as it seemed to them at the time, due to a misunderstanding, and the fact that “socially close” thieves were placed over them, Soviet people, was perceived as a tragic absurdity, additional, unnecessary cruelty towards innocently injured people.
They were unable to look at themselves through the eyes of the new government and its main bodies - the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the prosecutor's office and, most importantly, the political police, the NKVD. If we use revolutionary optics, from this (to put it bluntly, monstrous) point of view, it was precisely the “ideological” crimes for which the new government prosecuted, fabricating charges, that really appeared more dangerous than ordinary criminal offenses. The situation turned out to be paradoxical. The bearers of the thieves' law hated the “universal” world and its laws, but the Soviet government declared them “socially close,” amenable to re-education (“reforging”) and therefore worthy of numerous privileges. And those convicted under various paragraphs of Article 58 paid an exorbitant price for the fact that the new government - arbitrarily, as it seemed to them at the time - labeled them as their political opponents.
Shalamov considers the absolutely inhumane (within the already inhumane camp world), “cursed order” of thieves to be very ancient. Solzhenitsyn proceeds from the fact that the mass socialization of the professional criminal environment, its transformation into an ally in the fight against “political opponents” fabricated on the conveyor belt of preventive terror, is a unique feature of Stalin’s time. That, he writes, was not the arbitrariness of the performers, but a “high theory.” “When this harmonious theory descended on the camp ground, this is what happened: the most inveterate, seasoned thieves were given unaccountable power on the islands of the Archipelago, on camp sites and camp points - power over their population [my italics. - M.R.] country, over the peasants, townspeople and intelligentsia, power that they had never had, in any state, which they could not even imagine in freedom - and now they were giving them all other people as slaves" [ 14] .
It is no accident that I italicized the word “my own”. The whole question is in what sense for the Bolsheviks-Stalinists, who set themselves the task of forging a new man, the old, inherited human material (peasants, townspeople, intelligentsia) was “theirs.” It seems that he was just the most alien to them, doomed to a radical alteration. Precisely because “ideological” crimes were more dangerous for the Stalinist regime than criminal ones, in the camps political and pseudo-political crimes were handed over to the power of criminals. And if the thieves enjoyed similar privileges in the wild, it was not at all because there was even a semblance of law, but because terror there was carried out by units of the secret political police led by the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) using no less radical methods. Naturally, there is nothing more relative and conditional than this Stalinist, “muzzled”, as Solzhenitsyn put it, “will.” In a deep sense, the party law, which abolished the written law, was not only criminal of thieves - it required the socialization of the latter’s bearers. The thieves, who lived under the antisocial thieves' law, could not only interfere with the basic, ideological competence of the Soviet government, and their crimes against life and property (especially private individuals) against the backdrop of large-scale preventive terror quite logically seemed insignificant.
In other words, throughout the entire Soviet period, but especially during Stalin’s time, there was a gigantic gap between how those convicted under the “political” Article 58 perceived themselves, and how they were seen by the then party and police machine. And although it was this machine that made the thieves “socially close” and gave the “fascists” (as other inhabitants of the Gulag called those convicted under Article 58) to their full power, its true repressive role was hidden from the vast majority of the “martyrs.” Therefore, what happened seemed to them to be an absurd misunderstanding that should soon be resolved. Most likely, this misunderstanding was a condition for the survival of people thrown beyond the bounds of life.
But in this case, it was impossible to avoid transferring onto the thieves the guilt of the regime itself, its indecipherable deep, unconscious logic, which eluded the understanding of not only the victims, but also many of the executioners. “The boss is rude and cruel,” we read in Shalamov’s story “The Red Cross,” “the teacher is deceitful, the doctor is unscrupulous, but all this is nonsense [my italics. - M.R.\ in comparison with the corrupting power of the thieves' world. They are still people, and no, no, yes, humanity can be seen in them. The thieves are not people.
The influence of their morality on camp life is limitless and comprehensive. The camp is a completely negative school of life...” [15]
So, Shalamov takes the thieves beyond the boundaries of the human world - they are “not people.”
But what then can be said about the party-police machine that makes this inhuman world possible? After all, it is not limited to the camp commander, teacher, doctor and even the “godfather” (an NKVD officer who recruits prisoners in the zone), but justifies itself in the highest spheres of theory, the doctrine of the infallibility of the party, which has mastered the only correct understanding of the laws of history (Lenin), the doctrine of exacerbation contradictions as socialism was built (Stalin), numerous illegal by-laws, decisions of the Politburo, etc., etc. The “damned order” in the form in which Shalamov and millions of other people encountered it , not only was not eternal, but was a product of the structure of power that finally emerged as a result of collectivization of 1929-1933 (some researchers rightly call it the second, “Stalinist” revolution).
The Stalinist government was not at all mistaken when it recruited its accomplices from among the thieves to deal with the “fascists,” and Soviet writers did not just naively sing of the virtues of thieves in law: without their socialization, preventive terror would not have reached universal proportions. There were no thieves - at least such as the Gulag prisoners found them - before the Soviet regime; From a historical distance, the relationship between the thieves' law and Stalin's law looks much more complex and intimate than it seemed even to such extraordinary victims and witnesses of this bond as Varlam Shalamov.
The author of “Sketches of the Underworld” portrays the thieves as separated from everything. Blatnoy is not someone who stole, killed or robbed; he is not a hooligan whom the average person is afraid of. Even the most terrible criminal may not be a criminal. Real thieves are, as the writer puts it, “Talmudists” [16] . Blatnoy, a full-fledged member of the “damned order”, lives in accordance with the thieves’ law (code of rules), and is able to apply it to changing circumstances. This is the one whose opinion is authoritative at the “rules” (meetings of experts in the thieves’ law). If you believe the writer, the thieves’ environment is endogamous, closed to outsiders, replenished almost exclusively by the relatives of thieves: “In order to be a “good”, a real thief, you need to be born a thief; only those who from a very young age are associated with thieves, and, moreover, with “good”, famous thieves, who have gone through the full many-year science of prison, theft and thieves’ education, get to solve the important issues of thieves’ life” [17] .
Cutting off the thieves from the outside world, it is difficult not to demonize them, not to give the word “order” a secret, esoteric meaning. Despite all his hatred, Shalamov many times uses the expressions “aristocracy”, “highest circles of thieves”, “top of the world of thieves”, etc. specifically in relation to thieves in law.
Another difficulty arises here. The criminal environment despises a woman, considers her a lower being; when a thief is imprisoned, his partner moves on to another “authoritative” thief. No emotional relationships between the sexes are possible among thieves, and therefore a family is also impossible. Even the cult of the mother that exists among thieves is exposed by Shalamov as obvious hypocrisy; It is impossible, he writes, to worship the mother and treat a woman as a lower being.
The thieves gather for “rules”, play cards, take money, food, things from the “political”; often they are homosexuals, sometimes bestialities. They are monstrously, incredibly cruel. “Everything fryer looks extremely chaste in comparison with the wild scenes of the criminal life,” we read in the essay “Rogue Blood” [18] . They do not work for the prison administration, do not go to the camp operative, do not “knock,” and punish traitors from among them.
We never find out what the positive essence of the thieves’ law is, and we can hardly find out, since beyond the human there is no law, but only natural manifestations. But at every step we are faced with the fact that the very antisociality of the criminal environment is used by the camp authorities as a social factor. Don’t the thieves collaborate with the authorities (i.e., break their own law) when, fulfilling their assigned role, they rob and steal from those against whom they are set? Did they, “not people”, accidentally turn out to be closer to this government than its own citizens? The thieves were not at all expected to “reforge”; it was just that their crimes seemed insignificant from the point of view of the self-preservation of this type of power. Moreover, the scale of the crimes she commits makes ordinary crimes seem insignificant. The total reworking of human material inherited from the tsarist past that followed the expropriation displaced all traditional ideas about crime.
The Stalinist world in many of its manifestations felt itself to be closer to the criminal world than to the world of ordinary citizens declared by its political opponents. The secret political police, we read in The Gulag Archipelago, learned a lot from the thieves: “...Who re-educated whom: were the security officers a lesson? or secret police officers? A urka who has accepted the Chekist faith is already a bitch, the urkas are killing him. A security officer who has mastered the psychology of a lesson is an assertive investigator of the 30s and 40s or a strong-willed camp commander, they are honored, they are promoted in the service" [19] .
Totalitarian power is united with criminals by the fact that both of them are hostile to the transcendent, radically this-worldly. And in this worldly world, both of them mercilessly destroy everything that unites people. After collectivization, the official ideology ossifies, becoming identified with the name of Stalin; Any possible deviation from it becomes the most dangerous crime. A mortally frightened society defends itself against the universal suspicion of sedition through denunciation; This epidemic is raging both “in the wild” and behind barbed wire. For the first time in European history, recruitment is becoming universal. All-powerful “authorities” receive sanction for the mass production of “enemies of the people.” “Recruitment,” we read in “Archipelago,” “is in the very air of our country... Recruitment is lacyly intertwined with ideology: after all, the Organs want, after all, those recruited should want only one thing: the successful movement of our country towards socialism... The poetry of recruiting sexots still waiting for its artist... Spider webs are stretched everywhere, and when we move we don’t notice how they entwine us.” [20] .
In one of his stories, Shalamov called snitching “the highest power of nature” and admitted his complete powerlessness in front of it: “...I am accustomed to pay little attention to conversations about informants and snitches. I am too powerless before this supreme power of nature” [21] . As soon as the hero of the story “Esperanto,” which is clearly autobiographical, says: “There is no difference between the thugs who rob us and the state for us” [22] - he is immediately reported (although this was said among those who were unconditionally trusted ).
The vast majority of victims of preventive terror did not understand the ruthless logic of their situation. The belief that they personally were victims of a fatal accident, I repeat, was a condition for their survival. It did not always extend to comrades in misfortune, to fellow prisoners - they were considered enemies and at the first opportunity (when they became foremen, work assistants, etc.) they were not spared, turning them into goons, into camp dust. Shalamov’s camp and literary feat lay in the fact that he categorically did not accept this logic and, in inhuman conditions, remained a decent (“honest”) person. The line between an honest person and a scoundrel passed, according to him, precisely here, in relation to one’s own and others’ guilt. “The difference between a scoundrel and an honest person is this: when a scoundrel goes to prison innocently, he believes that only he is not to blame, and everyone else is enemies of the state and the people, criminals and scoundrels. An honest man, having gone to prison, believes that since he could have been innocently put behind bars, then the same thing could have happened to his bunk neighbors.” [23] .
Below this distinction lies the world of thieves, which is inhuman by definition.
In the era of preventive terror, law plays a covering role and is part of conspiratorial strategies necessary, in particular, to legitimize the regime in the eyes of the “bourgeois” world. The thieves hate the law openly, they do not hide their hostility to society; the conductors of preventive terror need a fiction of legality; they create lawlessness in the name of law. The Stalinist repressive apparatus, on the one hand, was extremely ideologized, subordinated to the implementation of “higher” goals, and on the other hand, as a consequence of this, it was outwardly decriminalized and completely reoriented towards the fight against the crimes it synthesized. It was not the thieves who came up with a new structure of the law, but they integrated into it, that is, they socialized to some extent, agreeing to play the role of “socially close”. In comparison with the criminal demonism of the Bolsheviks from Lenin’s closest circle, staged and presented to the world at show trials, other crimes, primarily criminal ones, faded. The wine production line is in full swing. Its bearers were declared enemies of the new regime due to their “old regime,” simply because the logic of the new government had not yet been written on their bodies. For the thieves, the project of creating a “new man,” I think, was no less a surprise than for other “decrepit” people of that time, not tempered in the crucible of Stalinism. It was this project, unprecedented in scale, that made the law of thieves a lesser evil. The thieves turned out to be almost the only pre-revolutionary social group that Stalinism not only did not destroy, but strengthened, naturally, at the expense of all other groups.
(The new alliance of power and criminality survived the Soviet period. It is enough to remember with what respect thieves in law have been written about in the media since the times of “wild privatization”, what important functions they perform as “roofs” and consultants on business ethics. Another law was not in the country at that time. Shalamov’s “non-people” appear in modern media and popular culture as quite respectable persons.)
So, although the thieves in the short-term, camp perspective undoubtedly looked like beasts, the conditions and limits of their brutality were determined by an underground party law unknown to them, enforced by the political police of the Stalinist regime. The thieves' law became one of the transmission belts of a more powerful, conspiratorial and criminal law, which was handed over to the “sword of the party,” the NKVD, and was enforced with unprecedented cruelty.
Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn noticed the main paradox of the time of the Great Terror: while the thieves did not accept the world, which declared them socially close, people convicted under Article 58 continued to identify themselves with the system that declared them their sworn enemies (despite the fact that none of them considered himself guilty). The thieves in the camps were incomparably better organized and behaved like people who had something to die for, while the world around them - both free and forced - was focused on survival at any cost. It was a slave world in the Hegelian sense of the word, punishing for a great indefinite crime of which everyone is essentially guilty. All human material inherited from the past seemed to him unsuitable and subject to radical reshaping. The thieves despised all forms of human solidarity and fought against private property no less radically than the Soviet regime. They squandered it, squandered it, lost it at cards, bribed doctors and camp authorities with stolen goods. The rapprochement of Soviet ideology with this environment, the glorification of the world of thieves, is not a misunderstanding, not a mistake, it follows from its very essence, from the orientation towards total expropriation. The bourgeois world, built on property, naturally took up arms against those who misappropriate it and thoughtlessly squander it, but the government, which ruined even small owners (peasants), was not mistaken, seeing its allies in other expropriators, and its enemies in the bearers of traditional proprietary instincts.
According to Hegel, a master is one who, by putting his life at stake, risking it, subjugates another. The prospect of violent death for this other, the slave, is intolerable; under any circumstances, he works and strives to survive. The master is completely dependent on slave labor, which is the condition of his existence. History, as Hegel understands it, is the history of a toiling slave subjugating himself to a master; its natural result is the washing away of the remnants of sovereignty, the master's principle. Therefore, when Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Agamben and others write that the history recorded in books and on tablets is the history of the victors, that we do not have the history of the vanquished, we should not forget that the winner invariably became yesterday’s slave. By winning, the slave abolished himself as a slave and became a master, who, however, abandoned the previous principle of dominance. The Christian God placed slave and master on an equal footing; the main problems, insoluble on earth, were transferred to the sphere of pure hope, to the otherworldly. And if the truth of this religion, according to Hegel, had not been atheism, they would have remained walled up in the other world forever [24] .
When radical atheism is proclaimed and the otherworldly is abolished by decree, the vessel is sacralized, which contains the only true teaching, abolishing the commandments of God. After the October Revolution, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the order of the guardians of the teachings, became such a vessel. Despite the protests of Trotsky, Krupskaya and other old Bolsheviks, immediately after the death of the founder of the order, V.I. Lenin, his cult arose. “In Lenin’s mournful days... comrade. Stalin took a great oath on behalf of the party. He said:
“We communists are people of a special kind. We are cut from a special material. We are those who make up the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honor of belonging to this army...” [25] Like the “damned order,” the order of the guardians of the teachings understood itself as purely closed, elitist, militantly opposed to the ordinary world, as a refuge for the most worthy. The Bolsheviks worked underground; for years they were excluded from the scope of the law, drawn into a game without rules with the secret police of the tsarist regime [26] . And after taking power, they brought underground experience to their style of government, declaring the longest state of emergency in the 20th century. It is difficult to compare no matter how conservative, but, as they put it in the old days, “orderly” government, including an absolute monarchy, with revolutionary power. Numerous comparisons made by Solzhenitsyn naturally turn out to be in favor of old Russia. Shalamov understood the unprecedented nature of what happened and abandoned its immediate historical contextualization, or rather, placed its burden on the future reader. Solzhenitsyn wrote for his contemporaries, hence the enormous success of The Archipelago; Shalamov wrote for the future. The first had judgment, condemnation, teaching for everything, the second had only silence for the most important thing. Shalamov was surprised not only by the weight of his experience, but also by the miracle of the distance that made his letter possible. Disunited people, arbitrarily called political criminals, were not just killed by back-breaking labor, but were given over to the power of thieves who cynically pushed them to the last line. The life of the thieves themselves, states Shalamov, is short, so the formula that became their calling card in the Gulag - “you die today, and I die tomorrow” - was often realized literally: this became especially clear when the “bitch war” began, a bloody civil strife inside the criminal community, which Shalamov describes in detail in “Essays on the Underworld.” Just as prisoners of Nazi concentration camps hated their capos, and not Himmler or Eichmann, so prisoners convicted under Article 58 of Stalin’s time hated mainly thieves and their immediate superiors, and not Vyshinsky and Beria (not to mention Stalin). They thought least of all about the Soviet type of economic rationality, about the special status of the party and the structure of its punitive bodies. But what seemed like an unfortunate accident was, alas, a pattern. People who suffered from Stalin's rule traditionally still associated power with the law and wondered why it took the side of outright haters of the law.
In addition to the thieves, there was another order in the camp, bound by secret and mutual responsibility. I mean the detectives, in camp jargon - “godfathers”. They recruited informers and used all means to persuade them to inform, destroying the already weak ties between the “political” and undermining the foundations of their solidarity. The Party undoubtedly gave them instructions, but the methods for implementing them were in their hands. Exactly the same recruitment was used to forge a new person in the wild. If the Bolshevik party, ruling a huge country, never actually came out of hiding, did not give up its conspiratorial skills, then it handed over to its political police the keys to this secret, its true essence, which consisted in the impossibility of the new ideology to be embodied in legal institutions, to obey written law. The police carried out the messianic program of the party to forge a new man from old material, to subjugate the country to an ideology that remained fundamentally negative. Instead of flowing from the crime committed, guilt turns out to be written into people from the very beginning (hence Vyshinsky’s famous “presumption of guilt”). How much does an ordinary criminal offense mean against the background of such a messianic task?
For the Stalinist system to work, fear had to cease to be the fear of a specific punishable act, but become a comprehensive fear, acquiring an ontological character. For this purpose, a universal reporting system is being built. Operatives informally assure those recruited: it is enough that their reports contain five percent of the truth; the rest they are free to think out and invent themselves [27] . In such a situation, an attempt to prove the absurdity of the accusation through self-incrimination was doomed to failure simply because the difference between fact and fiction in the world of total investigation and total inquiry was fundamentally erased. The comic effect of false self-accusation does not work in it; it remains an empty phrase [28] . Based on the presumption of initial guilt, the order of security officers creates a crime out of any, even the most absurd, fantasies. The new person, who has completely internalized the request of the new government in his work, is not a recruited person (“informer”) who is afraid of exposure (Solzhenitsyn describes such situations in his novel “In the First Circle”), and not even a party member who, within modest limits, can allow himself the luxury of remaining an “ideological communist,” while he himself is a security officer. He carries out the plan, he is entrusted with the responsibility for the fullest possible recruitment of the socialist world under construction. Only the security officer himself knows that his methods are much more significant than the ideology that envelops them like a web. His time is a time of recruitment, bureaucratic suppression of the will of others. While recruiting, he lives in the time of the “new man.” The necessary underside of the propaganda glut of communist power is the cynicism of the new caste, which carried out state orders of unprecedented scale.
The only category of prisoners who, despite being recognized as “socially close”, in principle could not be recruited, were thieves, bearers of the law of thieves. This law, on pain of death, forbade them to cooperate with the authorities (how strictly it was implemented in the extreme conditions of Kolyma is another matter).
Here the paths of the two writer-witnesses diverge. If Shalamov’s slogan remains “Carthage must be destroyed! The criminal world must be destroyed!” [29] , repeated in every way both in stories and in “Essays on the Underworld,” then Solzhenitsyn, having branded “freedom of ghouls” in “Archipelago” [30] , concludes his notes about “socially close” with “a word in defense of thieves” [31] . What is said in their defense? Firstly, they have a “peculiar code” and a concept of honor, which, however, does not consist in the fact that they are patriots, as the Soviet regime wanted, “but in the fact that they are completely consistent materialists and consistent pirates. And although they were courted by the dictatorship of the proletariat, they did not respect it for a minute" [32] .
Secondly, they want to live, live at any cost. And since they spend half their lives in prison and in camps, they “even there want to pluck the flowers of life... enjoy the fruits of disobedience.” “...Why should they care about those who bend their backs and die as slaves?” [33] They need to eat - and they take away everything edible, they need to drink - and for vodka they sell to the convoy things taken from the “slaves”, etc., etc. Here an ethical abyss opens up between Shalamov’s position and the position Solzhenitsyn: the second is able to identify with the point of view of the thieves on “political punks”, calling prisoners under Article 58 “slaves”, while the first considers political ones exclusively “martyrs”, and their enemies - beasts, unworthy of any identification on the part of their victims.
Thirdly, they do not recognize the institution of property, and therefore “take as their own” everything that comes their way. And then they mindlessly lose what they stole at cards, after which they rob the “fraters” again. They do not like to work, so others must work for them, whose already backbreaking work as a result becomes doubly unbearable. It turns out that obvious predation (which Solzhenitsyn seemed to condemn in other contexts) can be turned “in defense of the criminals.”
And even though at the end of these reflections we learn that the thieves hate the entire “our, universal” world, we cannot escape the impression that the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” is often more impressed by the behavior of the thieves than the behavior of the “political punks”, that his sympathies (not without , I repeat, of a certain ambivalence) end up on the side of Shalamov’s “non-people”.
Moreover, the material on which Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn work is very similar, almost identical. It seems that they more than once discussed the problems of the “damned order” among themselves.
Solzhenitsyn denounced the universal system of denunciation created by the “authorities” on the instructions of the party. He did not spare her such words as “mass scab of souls” [34] and “cancer of the soul” [35] . “People,” he wrote, “lived in a field of betrayal - and the best arguments were used to justify it” [36] . One of four or five city residents, we read in Archipelago, was offered to be an informer. “Or even thicker,” adds the writer [37] . In conditions of total recruitment, every act of opposition to power required courage that was not commensurate with the essence of the matter (for example, under Stalin, according to Solzhenitsyn, sheltering an orphan was more dangerous than storing dynamite under Alexander III). Shalamov saw in denunciation the “highest power of nature,” that is, something obviously superior in its monstrosity to his ability to judge.
What conclusions follow from what has been said for our time?
In a sense, if not “reforging,” then the socialization of the thieves took place during the Soviet period; their language began to be used far beyond the criminal environment. It is also no coincidence that after the collapse of the USSR, the function of regulating relations in the business sphere for some time passed to the bearers of the law of thieves; There was no other law at hand at that moment. The thieves who survived the period of “wild privatization” disappeared into the business environment. The idea of an eternally existing “cursed order”, located beyond all that is human, is a thing of the past.
When the party law collapsed, it became clear that representatives of another all-powerful Soviet order, the Chekists, could exist autonomously and implement policies using methods developed during preventive terror and the fight against the dissident movement in the 60-80s.
The ability of these “new people” to get rich quickly turned out to be simply enchanting. The second round of privatization, which began in the 21st century, was successful for them because they were faced with familiar human material. The ability of post-Soviet people to put up with everything for the sake of a hypothetical “order” will not surprise those who know Soviet history. It is not difficult to declare a society accustomed to obedience as stable. Foreigners often write about the ability of Russian people to revolt (quoting Pushkin’s statement about “Russian revolt, senseless and merciless”), forgetting that the current authorities are dealing not with Russians, but with post-Soviet people, in whom for three generations the slightest an attempt to revolt. The Shalamov tree people were dying off, having exhausted their resources. The energy of rebellion behind the barbed wire was retained only by the “damned order,” the clan of thieves, although they used it very carefully, exclusively in the interests of the thieves’ law. Shalamov consistently denied the quality of humanity behind the thieves, but he refused to judge those who instructed the security officers to forge a “new man”, and about the security officers themselves. He condemned the romanticization of thieves in Soviet literature as a delusion, and not as part of a new social order.
Solzhenitsyn placed the thieves in a broader social context, connected the “muzzled will” and the camp and refused to unequivocally condemn the bearers of the thieves’ law.
But the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” was not only indignant at the project of educating the “new man” and its guides, security officers, NKVD officers, KGB officers, but realized the power of their influence on Soviet society as a whole and, most importantly, the longevity of this influence. So I would like to end it with these words:
“The NKVD is a force. And they will never give in to goodness... Because they are the backbone. The backbone of a lot.
But not only do they have strength, they also have arguments. It's not easy to argue with them.
I tried" [38] .
Sounds modern, doesn't it?
Moscow, February - April 2007
[1] Solzhenitsyn A. The GULAG Archipelago. 1918-1956: Experience in artistic research. M.: Book, 1990. T. 3. P. 548.
[2] Shalamov V. Kolymskie stories: В 2 vol. M.: Inform.-izd. Center "Nashe's Legacy", 1992. Vol. II. S. 417.
[3] “It is necessary and possible to write a story that is indistinguishable from a document.” - Right there.
[4] Shalamov V. Decree. op. P. 416.
[5] Ibid. P. 414.
[6] Ibid. P. 416.
[7] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 2. P. 284.
[8] Ibid. pp. 284-285.
[9] It is no coincidence that Shalamov compared the Gulag martyrs with dwarf dwarf, the most unpretentious northern plant. “It is courageous and stubborn, like all northern trees... The dwarf seems to me to be the most poetic Russian tree...” (Shalamov V. Op. T. I. pp. 116-117).
[10] Ibid. P. 336.
[11] Ibid. P. 337.
[12] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 2. P. 409.
[13] Shalamov V. Decree soch T. II. S. 338.
[14] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 2. P. 400.
[15] Shalamov V. Decree. op. T.I.S. 121.
[16] Shalamov V. Decree. op. P. 343.
[17] Ibid. P. 340.
[18] Ibid. P. 346.
[19] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 2. P. 393.
[20] Ibid. P. 328.
[21] Shalamov V. Decree soch T. II. S. 355.
[22] TaM same. P. 104.
[23] Ibid. T.I.S. 220.
[24] “The master relates to the slave through independent existence, for it is this that holds the slave; this is his chain, from which he could not abstract himself in the struggle, and therefore it turned out that he, being dependent, has his own independence in thinghood. Meanwhile, the master rules over this being, for he has proven in the struggle that it has meaning for him only as some kind of negative...” (Hegel. Works. Vol. IV. M.; Publishing House of Socio-Economic Literature, 1959. With 103).
[25] History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Short course. M.: State Publishing House of Political Literature, 1938. P. 256.
[26] Details can be found, for example, in the book: Simbirtsev I. Guarding the Throne. Political investigation under the last Romanovs. 1880-1917. M.: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006. Cm. also: Lurie F. Political investigation in Russia. 1649-1917. M.: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006.
[27] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 2. pp. 333-341.
[28] Thus, the writer Sergei Tretyakov, arrested in 1937, having been subjected to “physical pressure” (i.e. torture) at the Lubyanka, called himself a Japanese spy and composed a story telling how he was recruited, where he met with Japanese residents, and what tasks performed, etc. His story contained a huge number of absurd details; checking at least one of them would lead to his complete acquittal. But in 1937 no one checked anything. Immediately after the trial, the creator of the literature of fact was shot (see: Give me back my freedom! Workers of literature and art in Russia and Germany are victims of Stalin’s terror: Memorial collection of documents from the archives of the former KGB. M.: Medium, 1997. pp. 46-69).
[29] Shalamov V. Decree soch T. I.S. 435. 3 (1 Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. Soch. T. 2. S. 40.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid. pp. 403-404.
[33] Ibid. P. 404.
[34] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. P. 592.
[35] Ibid. P. 594.
[36] Ibid. P. 591.
[37] Ibid. P. 589.
[38] Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 3. P. 515.
Impact of prison on society (Polish context)* Gypsy affairs*