Great Escapes from the Gulag

By Patricia Blake

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, VOL. Ill by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Translated by Harry Willetts; Harper & Row; 558 pages; $16.95

After a two-year delay following its Russian-language publication in Paris, Gulag III has reached the U.S. It is the last volume of Solzhenitsyn's 1,800-page chronicle of the Soviet penal system, beginning with the Red Terror of 1918 and ending with the release of millions of political prisoners from slave labor camps in 1956. Up to now the narrative has been one of unrelenting horror, recounted at a high pitch of indignation modulated by black sarcasm.

America's tolerance for this tale has been lamentably low. Sales of Gulag II fell far behind the bestselling Gulag I. Many of the books' best-intentioned buyers have lacked the stamina to hear Solzhenitsyn out to the end. Harper & Row's postponement of further publication was apparently designed to provide readers with a respite before tackling the final volume.

Gulag III should prove less formidable than its predecessors. The bleak panorama of I (the prison system) and II (the labor camps) opens on to more heartening vistas of resistance and rebellion in III. The book is principally an enthralling account of the first postwar escapes and strikes in the camps that exploded into full-scale mutinies after Stalin's death. That heroic era coincided with Solzhenitsyn's own eight-year term, and its heady air still exhilarates him. The pride and zest with which he describes the convicts' resistance contrast sharply with the fury he expended on their earlier docility. In Gulag II he had thundered: "The strongest chains binding the prisoners were their own universal submission and total surrender to their situation as slaves." But writing from Vermont, where he now lives, Solzhenitsyn prefaces the English translation of Gulag III by saying: "To those readers who have found the moral strength to overcome the darkness and suffering of the first two volumes, the third volume will disclose a space ol freedom and struggle."

In Gulag III Solzhenitsyn abandons the thesis that Soviet totalitarianism could not have developed had there been resistance from below. "A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf," he once raged. "We didn't love freedom enough. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!" If only people had fended off their arresting officers with pokers instead of cowering "like rabbits in their warrens, paling with terror," then the cursed machine would have come to a halt," he added.

As it turns out, that hypothesis was mostly hyperbole, the outgrowth, perhaps, of fantasies spun by helpless Russians who in fact could scarcely utter a whisper against the system of mass police terror. Gulag HI marks a judicious turnabout: "The Communist regime has not been overthrown in sixty years, not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West."

The first acts of rebellion in the camps were made possible by a miscalculation of Stalin in 1948. Desirous of worsening thelot of political prisoners, he established the Special Camps described in Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For the first time, vast numbers of politicals (incorrigible "enemies of the people") were segregated from common criminals (redeemable "class allies"). Once free from the scourge of the murderers and thieves who terrorized them, the politicals gradually gained courage.

At the same time, the prewar prisoner population of 15 million was swollen by the arrival of millions of young Red Army veterans. Most were survivors of the Nazi P.O.W. camps whom Stalin had dispatched to the Gulag for the crime of having been captured. Though Solzhenitsyn had never been taken, he belonged to this new breed of camp rebels; a much decorated artillery captain, he had been arrested at the front for having written letters critical of Stalin. Leadership of the resistance movement was provided by prisoners from the western Ukraine, former guerrilla fighters who had alternately fought the Nazis and the Soviets in a desperate effort to gain their independence.

In most camps, resistance began with the killing of informers. First, there were strange accidents: a log would roll off a pile and cast a stoolie into the river. Then came apparent suicides. Finally, teams of masked men entered the barracks to stab informers with primitive knives. "This was a new period, a heady and spine-tingling period," Solzhenitsyn recalls. "Retribution was at hand--not in the next world, not before the court of history, but retribution live and palpable, raising a knife over you in the light of dawn. It was like a fairy tale: the ground is soft and warm under the feet of honest men, but under the feet of traitors it prickles and burns."

Gulag III's most riveting chapters describe the great escapes. Invariably, each ingenious attempt brought pride to the camp--even when the severed head and right arm (for fingerprints) of the escapee were brought back by the police and army units that had scoured desert, tundra and taiga for him. Those who survived capture were likely to try again, like the legendary Estonian Georgi Tenno. Between his ultimately unsuccessful breakouts, prisoners would wonderingly ask Tenno, "What do you expect to find on the outside?" His reply: "Freedom, of course! A whole day in the taiga without chains--that's what I call freedom!"

In 1952 Solzhenitsyn participated in one of the first prisoner strikes at Ekibastuz. In 1953 the death of Stalin, followed by the fall of the mighty emperor of Gulag, Lavrenji Beria, set off mutinies on many islands of the Archipelago. In Kengir, near Ekibastuz, 8,000 men and women prisoners liberated the camp for 40 days. Though ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks, this and other uprisings aroused hopes among prisoners that resistance to the regime would spread out side the camps. Instead, change was ordered from above. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev set out to disband most of the slave labor camps and release millions of prisoners. Solzhenitsyn hardly mentions this fateful event, stressing instead the legal, institutional and spiritual heritage of Stalinism in the present.

The author sorrowfully concludes that Soviet society was not prepared for the short-lived libertarian movement. The worst enemies of escaping prisoners were people -- their "fellow countrymen"-- who shot at them or joined the pack of police pursuers. (The penalty for helping an escapee was 25 years; the reward for catching one was a barrel of herring.) When the women prisoners who had survived the Kengir uprising were marched out of the camp at machine-gun point, jeering female inhabitants of the nearby settlement shouted "Dirty whores!" at them.

Beyond ignorance, fear and greed, such actions are emblematic of the moral degradation visited upon the Soviet people by the regime, Solzhenitsyn believes. It is scarcely surprising, then, that he experienced a stab of regret when he was re leased from the camp in 1953: "Only on the threshold of the guardhouse do you begin to feel that what you are leaving be hind you is both your prison and your homeland. This was your spiritual birthplace, and a secret part of your soul will remain here forever -- while your feet trudge on into the dumb and unwelcoming expanse of freedom. "

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