To strike out boldly, a person has to feel that his rear is defended, that he has support on both his flanks, that there is solid earth beneath his feet. All these conditions were absent for the Article 58’s. Having passed through the meat grinder of political interrogation, the human being was physically crushed in body: he had been starved, he hadn’t slept, he had frozen in punishment cells, he had lain there a beaten man. But it wasn’t only his body. His soul was crushed too. Over and over he had been told and had had demonstrated to him that his views, and his conduct in life, and his relationships with people had all been wrong because they had brought him to ruin. All that was left in that scrunched-up wad the engine room of the law had spewed out into the prisoner transport was a greed for life, and no understanding whatever. To crush him once and for all and to cut him off from all others once and for all—that was the function of interrogation under Article 58. The convicted prisoner had to learn that his worst guilt out in freedom had been his attempt somehow to get together or unite with others by any route but the Party organizer, the trade-union organizer, or the administration. In prison this fear went so far as to become fear of all kinds of collective action: two voices uttering the same complaint or two prisoners signing a complaint on one piece of paper. Gun-shy now and for a good long time to come of any and every kind of collaboration or unification, the pseudo politicals were not prepared to unite even against the thieves. Nor would they even think of bringing along a weapon—a knife or a bludgeon—for the Stolypin car or the transit prison. In the first place, why have one? And against whom? In the second place, if you did use it, then, considering the aggravating circumstance of your malevolent Article 58, you might be shot when you were retried. In the third place, even before that, your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any better. But for you to have one was “terrorism.”
Finally, many of the people imprisoned under Article 58 were peaceful people (very often elderly, too, and often ill), and they had gotten along all their lives with words and without resorting to fisticuffs, and they weren’t any more prepared for them now than they had been before.
Nor had the thieves ever been put through the same kind of interrogation. Their entire interrogation had consisted of two sessions, an easy trial, and an easy sentence, and they wouldn’t have to serve it out. They would be released ahead of time: either they would be amnestied or else they would simply escape.[287] Even during interrogation, no one ever deprived a thief of his legitimate parcels—consisting of abundant packages from the loot kept by his underworld comrades who were still on the loose. He never grew thin, was never weak for a single day, and in transit he ate at the expense of the innocent nonthieves, whom he called, in his own jargon, the frayera[288]—“frayers,” or “innocents,” or “suckers.” Not only did the articles of the Code dealing with thieves and bandits not oppress the thief; he was, in fact, proud of his convictions under them. And he was supported in this pride by all the chiefs in blue shoulder boards and blue piping. “Oh, that’s nothing. Even though you’re a bandit and a murderer, you are not a traitor of the Motherland, you are one of our own people; you will reform.” There was no Section Eleven—for organization—in the thieves’ articles in the Code. Organization was not forbidden the thieves. And why should it be? Let it help develop in them the feelings of collectivism that people in our society need so badly. And disarming them was just a game. They weren’t punished for having a weapon. Their thieves’ law was respected (“They can’t be anything but what they are”). And a new murder in the cell would not increase a murderer’s sentence, but instead would bring him new laurels.
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 the 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 to be widely used. That was Makarenko’s contention too: these could be reformed. According to Makarenko, the origin of crime lay solely in the “counterrevolutionary underground.”[289] (Those were the ones who couldn’t be reformed—engineers, priests, SR’s, 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.
But even if they didn’t drive off the thieves with their fists, why didn’t the victims at least make complaints? After all, every sound could be heard in the corridor, and a convoy guard was marching slowly back and forth right out there.
Yes, that is a question! Every sound and every complaining cry can be heard, and the convoy just keeps marching back and forth—why doesn’t he interfere? Just a yard away from him, in the half-dark cave of the compartment, they are plundering a human being—why doesn’t the soldier of the government police interfere?
For the very same reason: he, too, has been indoctrinated.
Even more than that: after many years of favoring thieves, the convoy has itself slipped in their direction. The convoy has itself become a thief.
From the middle of the thirties until the middle of the forties, during that ten-year period of the thieves’ most flagrant debauches and most intense oppression of the politicals, no one at all can recall a case in which a convoy guard intervened in the plundering of a political in a cell, in a railroad car, or in a Black Maria. But they will tell you of innumerable cases in which the convoy accepted stolen goods from the thieves and, in return, bought them vodka, snacks (sweeter than the rations, too), and smokes. The examples are so numerous as to be typical.
The convoy sergeant, after all, hasn’t anything either: he has his gun, his greatcoat roll, his mess tin, his soldier’s ration. It would be cruel to require him to escort an enemy of the people in an expensive overcoat or chrome-leather boots or with a swag of luxurious city articles—and to reconcile himself to that inequality. Was not taking these things just one additional form of the class struggle, after all? And what other norms were there?
In 1945-1946, when prisoners streamed in not just from anywhere but from Europe, and wore and had in their bags unheard-of European articles, even the convoy officers could not restrain themselves. Their service had kept them from the front, but at the end of the war it also kept them from the harvest of booty—and, I ask you, was that just?
And so, in these circumstances, the convoy guard systematically mixed the thieves and the politicals in each compartment of their Stolypin, not through lack of space for them elsewhere and not through haste, but out of greed. And the thieves did not let them down: they stripped the beavers[290] of everything, and then those possessions migrated into the suitcases of the convoy.
But what could be done if the beavers had been loaded into the Stolypin cars, and the train was moving, and there simply weren’t any thieves at all—they simply hadn’t put any aboard? What if they weren’t being shipped out on prisoner transports that day, even from one of the stations along the way? This could and did happen—several such cases are known.
287
7. V. I. Ivanov (now from Ukhta) got Article 162 (thievery) nine times and Article 82 (escape) five times, for a total of thirty-seven years in prison—and he “served out” five to six years for all of them.
288
8. “Frayer” is a blatnoi—underworld—word meaning nonthief—in other words, not a Chelovek (“Human being,” with a capital letter). Well, even more simply: the frayera were all nonthief, nonunderworld mankind.
290
10. A beaver in the blatnoi—underworld—jargon was any rich zek who had “trash”—meaning good clothes—and “bacilli”—meaning fats, sugar, and other goodies.