Solzhenitsyn on First Encounters with the Criminal Underworld

Jordan B. Peterson quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as saying that “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” After viewing the entirety of Peterson’s Biblical Series, I remembered that I had a copy of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago , which includes Parts I and II, and decided it was high time to read at least that much.

Here is a passage (from Part II, pp. 501-502; & pp. 505-506), in which Solzhenitsyn describes a first encounter with members of the criminal underworld, generally referred to as “thieves” (though they are obviously much more), with whom the political prisoners (“politicals”) would come into contact once their interrogations were finished and they were on their way to whichever camp or prison they were to serve out their sentences in:

“When you were jammed into a Stolypin compartment*, you expected that here, too, you would encounter only colleagues in misfortune.  All your enemies and oppressors remained on the other side of the bars, and you certainly did not expect to find them on this side.  And suddenly you lift your eyes to the square recess in the middle bunk, to that one and only heaven above you, and you see three or four — oh, no, not faces!  They aren’t monkey muzzles either, because monkeys’ muzzles are much, much decenter and more thoughtful!  No, and they aren’t simply hideous countenances, since there must be something human even in them.  You see cruel, loathsome snouts up there, wearing expressions of greed and mockery.  Each of them looks at you like a spider gloating over a fly.  Their web is that grating which imprisons you — and you have been had!  They squinch up their lips, as if they intend to bite you from one side.  They hiss when they speak, enjoying the hissing more than the vowel and consonant sounds of speech — and the only thing about their speech that resembles the Russian language is the ending of verbs and nouns.  It is gibberish.

“Those strange gorriloids were usually dressed in sleeveless undershirts.  After all, it is stuffy in the Stolypin* car.  Their sinewy purple necks, their swelling shoulder muscles, their swarthy tatooed chests have never suffered prison emaciation.  Who are they?  Where do they come from?  Ad suddenly you see a small cross dangling from one of their necks.  Yes, a little aluminum cross on a string.  You are surprised and slightly relieved.  That means there are religious believers among them.  How touching!  So nothing terrible is going to happen.  But immediately this “believer” belies both his cross and his faith by cursing (and they curse partly in Russian), and he jabs two protruding fingers spread into the “V” of a slingshot, right in your eyes — not even pausing to but starting to punch them out then and there.  And this gesture of theirs, which says, “I’ll gouge out your eyes, crowbait!” covers their entire philosophy and faith!  If they are capable of crushing your eyeballs like worms, what is ther eon you or belonging to you that they’ll spare?  The little cross dangles there and your still unsquashed eyes watch this wildest of masquerades, and your whole system of reckoning goes awry: Which of you is already crazy?  And who is about to go insane?

“In one moment, all the customs and habits of human intercourse you have lived with all your life have broken down.  In your entire previous life, particularly before your arrest but even to some degree afterward, even to some degree during interrogation, too, you spoke words to other people and they answered you in words.  And those words produced actions.  One might persuade, or refuse, or come to an agreement.  You recall various human relationships — a request, an order, an expression of gratitude.  But what has overtaken you here is beyond all these words and beyond all these relationships.  An emissary of the ugly snout descends, most often a vicious boy whose impudence and rudeness are thrice despicable, and this little demon unties your bag and rifles your pockets — not tentatively, but treating them like his very own.  From that moment, nothing that belongs to you is yours any longer.  And all you yourself are is a rubber dummy around which superfluous things are wrapped which can be easily taken off.  Nor can you explain anything in words, nor deny, nor prohibit, nor plead with that evil little skunk or those foul snouts up there.  They are not people.  This has become clear to you in one moment.[…]”

Solzhenitsyn goes on to explain the difference between the thieves and the politicals.  The thieves would go directly from a very brief interrogation and/or trial into jail – which was an integral part of their culture, anyway – so were in much better shape all around than the politicals, who were subjected to extremely long pressure-filled interrogations, often on near-starvation diets, before being thrust into the, for them, totally foreign environment of imprisonment and violence.  Thus the politicals became the prey of the thieves, and any political’s possessions were fair game.  In addition, the thieves were in league with the prison guards, who were themselves corrupt, so stolen items could be sold on the outside or exchanged for extra food, which the thieves kept for themselves, and thus the power balance spiraled always in favor of the thieves. 

Solzhenitsyn then addresses the long relationship between Stalin – and thus the entire régime – with the thieves: 

“And all that went very deep indeed.  In works of the last century, the lumpenproletariat was criticized for little more than a certain lack of discipline, for fickleness of mood.  And Stalin was always partial to thieves—after all, who robbed the banks for him?  Back in 1901 his comrades in the Party  and in prison accused him of using common criminals against his political enemies.  From the twenties on, the obliging term “social ally” came t be wisely used.  That was Makarenko‘s contention too: these could be reformed.  According to Makarenko, the origin of crime lay solely in the “counterrevolutionary underground.”  (Those were the ones who couldn’t be reformed—engineers, priests, SR’s [Socialist Revolutionaries], Mensheviks.)

“And why shouldn’t they steal, if there was no one to put a stop to it?  Three or four brazen thieves working hand in glove could lord it over several dozen frightened and cowed pseudo politicals.

“With the approval of the administration.  On the basis of the Progressive Doctrine .”

________

* Named after Pyotr Stolypin, a high-ranking minister under the Romanovs; the railroad cars that bear his name were originally intended for transport of people and livestock, though the Bolsheviks converted them for transport of prisoners (in the livestock sections, and very crowded) and guards (in the people sections, and reasonably comfortable), then attached to regular trains to get to their destinations.  Though it seems that the Bolsheviks also converted regular railroad cars for prisoner transport, while retaining the name and general principle of the original Stolypin cars.  From Solzhenitsyn’s description, a “Stolypin compartment” was much like a normal European railroad compartment, but with the window covered with a metal plate with only a barred slit left for light, and the normal the door and windows to the corridor replaced with metal grids; such grids also cover the corridor windows.  Generally between two and four times the normal number (six) of people would then be shoehorned in…

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