Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [314]
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.
To begin with, the nature of the political prisoners evolved. In Stalin’s era, the repressive system had resembled a vast game of roulette: anyone could be arrested, for any reason, at any time—peasants, workers, and Party bureaucrats alike. After Khrushchev, the secret police still occasionally arrested people “for nothing,” as Anna Akhmatova had once put it. But most of the time, Brezhnev’s KGB arrested people for something— if not for a genuine criminal act, then for their literary, religious, or political opposition to the Soviet system. Usually called “dissidents,” or sometimes “prisoners of conscience,” this new generation of politicals knew why they had been arrested, identified themselves as political prisoners, and were treated as such. They were kept separate from criminal prisoners, given different uniforms, and were subjected to different regimes. They would also be marked as dissidents for the rest of their lives, subjected to discrimination at work, and mistrusted by their relatives and neighbors.
There were also far fewer political prisoners than there had been in Stalin’s time. In the middle of the 1970s, Amnesty International estimated that no more than 10,000 of the Soviet Union’s one million prisoners had political sentences, and most of them were incarcerated in the two “political” camp complexes, one in Mordovia, south of Moscow, and one in Perm, on the western edge of the Urals.3 In a given year, there were probably no more than a few thousand openly political arrests. Although this would have been a high number