To draw a distinction between political prisoners and common criminals is the equivalent of showing them respect as equal opponents, of recognizing that people may have views of their own. Thus a political prisoner is conscious of political freedom even when under arrest .
But since the time when we all became KR’s and the socialists failed to retain their status as politicals, since then any protest that as a political you ought not to be mixed up with ordinary criminals has resulted only in laughter on the prisoners’ part and bewilderment on the part of the jailers. “All are criminals here,” the jailers reply—sincerely.
This mingling, this first devastating encounter, takes place either in the Black Maria or in the Stolypin car. Up to this moment, no matter how they have oppressed, tortured, and tormented you during the interrogation, it has all originated with the bluecaps, and you have never confused them with human beings but have seen in them merely an insolent branch of the service. But at the same time, even if your cellmates have been totally different from you in development and experience, and even if you have quarreled with them, and even if they have squealed on you, they have all belonged to that same ordinary, sinful, everyday humanity among which you have spent your whole life.
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 up there 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 that hissing more than the vowel and consonant sounds of speech—and the only thing about their speech that resembles the Russian language is the endings of verbs and nouns. It is gibberish.
Those strange gorilloids 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 tattooed chests have never suffered prison emaciation. Who are they? Where do they come from? And suddenly you see a small cross dangling from one of those 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 threaten you but starting to punch them out then and there. And this gesture of theirs, which says, “’Til gouge out your eyes, crowbait!” covers their entire philosophy and faith! If they are capable of crushing your eyeballs like worms, what is there on 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 easily be 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 above. They are not people. This has become clear to you in one moment. The only thing to be done with them is to beat them, to beat them without wasting any time flapping your tongue. Either that juvenile there or those bigger vermin up above.
But how can you hit those three up top from down below? And the kid there, even though he’s a stinking polecat, well, it doesn’t seem right to hit him either. Maybe you can push him away soft like? No, you can’t even do that, because he’ll bite your nose right off, or else they’ll break your head from above (and they have knives, too, but they aren’t going to bother to pull them out and soil them on you).
You look at your neighbors, your comrades: Let’s either resist or protest! But all your comrades, all your fellow Article 58’s, who have been plundered one by one even before you got there, sit there submissively, hunched over, and they stare right past you, and it’s even worse when they look at you the way they always do look at you, as though no violence were going on at all, no plundering, as though it were a natural phenomenon, as though it were the grass growing and the rain falling.
And the reason why, gentlemen, comrades, and brothers, is that the proper time was allowed to slip by! You ought to have got hold of yourselves and remembered who you were back when Struzhinsky burned himself alive in his Vyatka cell, and even before that, when you were declared “counterrevolutionaries.”
And so you allow the thieves to take your overcoat and paw through your jacket and snatch your twenty rubles from where it was sewn in, and your bag has already been tossed up above and checked out, and everything your sentimental wife collected for your long trip after you were sentenced stays up there, and they’ve thrown the bag back down to you with… your toothbrush.
Although not everyone submitted just like that, 99 percent did in the thirties and forties.[286] And how could that be? Men, officers, soldiers, front-line soldiers!
To strike out boldly, a person has to be ready for that battle, waiting for it, and has to understand its purpose. All these conditions were absent here. A person wholly unfamiliar with the thieves’—the blatnoi—milieu didn’t anticipate this battle and, most importantly, failed totally to understand its vital necessity. Up to this point he had assumed (incorrectly) that his only enemies were the bluecaps. He needed still more education to arrive at the understanding that the tattooed chests were merely the rear ends of the bluecaps. This was the revelation the bluecaps never utter aloud: “You today, me tomorrow.” The new prisoner wanted to consider himself a political—in other words, on the side of the people—while the state was against the people. And at that point he was unexpectedly assaulted from behind and both sides by quick-fingered devils of some kind, and all the categories got mixed up, and clarity was shattered into fragments. (And it would take a long time for the prisoner to put two and two together and figure out that this horde of devils were hand in glove with the jailers.)
286
6. I have heard of a few cases in which three seasoned, young, and healthy men stood up against the thieves—not to defend justice in general, but to protect, not those who were being plundered right next to them, but themselves only. In other words: armed neutrality.