Gulag

After a period of wavering—a few arguments for, a few arguments against—the attacks on Solzhenitsyn started coming thick and fast. In earlier chapters, I have already described the angry reactions, of both prisoners and guards, to Ivan Denisovich’s many efforts to evade hard work. But there were more elevated criticisms too. Lydia Fomenko, the critic of Literaturnaya Rossiya, accused Solzhenitsyn of failing to “disclose the full dialectic of that time.” Solzhenitsyn had condemned the “cult of personality,” in other words, but had failed to point the way to the optimistc future, and had failed to include “good” communist characters who would triumph in the end. This kind of criticism was echoed by others, and some even tried to correct Solzhenitsyn’s mistakes in literary form. Boris Dyakov’s “A Story of Survival,” the “loyal” camp novel published in 1964, explicitly featured descriptions of hardworking, loyal Soviet prisoners.⁶⁸

As Solzhenitsyn’s novel was being considered for the Lenin Prize, the Soviet Union’s highest literary award, the insults grew worse. In the end— using tactics that would be repeated in later years—the establishment resorted to personal insults. At the Lenin Prize Committee meeting, the head of the Komsomol, Sergei Pavlov, stood up and accused Solzhenitsyn of having surrendered to the Germans during the war, and of having been convicted on criminal charges after that. Tvardovsky got Solzhenitsyn to produce his rehabilitation certificate, but it was too late. The Lenin Prize went to The Sheep Bell, a book best described as well-forgotten, and Solzhenitsyn’s official literary career was at an end.

He kept writing, but none of his subsequent novels appeared in print in the Soviet Union—or at least not legally—until 1989. In 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union, and eventually took up residence in Vermont. Until the Gorbachev era, only a tiny group of Soviet citizens—those who had access to underground, illegal typescripts or smuggled foreign copies— had read The Gulag Archipelago, his history of the camp system.

Yet Solzhenitsyn was not the only victim of this conservative backlash. For just as the debate about Ivan Denisovich was growing angrier, another literary drama was also unfolding: on February 18, 1964, the young poet Joseph Brodsky was put on trial for “parasitism.” The era of the dissidents was about to begin.

Chapter 26

THE ERA OF THE DISSIDENTS

Do not rejoice too early

And let some oracle proclaim

That wounds do not reopen

That evil crowds don’t rise again.

And that I risk seeming retarded;

Let him orate. I firmly know that

Stalin is not dead.

As if the dead alone had mattered

And those who vanished nameless in the North.

The evil he implanted in our hearts,

Had it not truly done the damage?

As long as poverty divides from wealth

As long as we don’t stop the lies

And don’t unlearn to fear

Stalin is not dead.

—Boris Chichibabin, “Stalin Is Not Dead,” 1967 ¹

THE DEATH OF STALIN really did signal the end of the era of massive slave labor in the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union’s repressive policies were to take some very harsh forms over the subsequent forty years, nobody ever again proposed to revive concentration camps on a large scale. Nobody ever again tried to make them a central part of the economy, or used them to incarcerate millions of people. The secret police never again controlled such a large slice of the nation’s productive capacity, and camp commanders never again found themselves acting as the bosses of enormous industrial enterprises. Even the Lubyanka building, the postwar KGB headquarters, ceased to be a prison: Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot whose spy plane was shot down over the USSR in 1960, was the last person to be incarcerated in its cells.²

Yet the camps did not disappear altogether. Nor did Soviet prisons become part of an “ordinary” penal system, organized for criminals alone. Instead, they evolved.