Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behavior is it? Do such people really exist?
We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past -- Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens -- inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.
But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his action.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.
When Solzhenitsyn refers to the Archipelago he is referring to the chain of gulags that the ideology of the newly-birthed Soviet state embraced -- strung out across the landscape of mother Russia like a chain of islands in an archipelago. They resulted in the imprisonment and the death of millions, a scale of evil that cannot adequately be explained by a calculating Macbeth or even a scheming Iago.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Solzhenitsyn confronts this painful reality in vivid detail as he recounts his own arrest and imprisonment, and he is first introduced to the viciousness that ideology can either create or allow in his fellow men. For a time, he recounts, the political prisoner was held in a different position than the common criminal -- but that was a distinction that quickly evaporated under the ideology that said political prisoners were criminals, and should be treated as such.
This mingling, the first devastating encounter, takes place either in the Black Maria [a police van for transporting prisoners] or in the Stolypin car [a railroad carriage used for the same purpose]. Up to this moment, no matter how they have oppressed, tortured, and tormented you during the interrogation, it has all originated with the bluecaps [members of State Security responsible for the investigations, arrests and interrogations], 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.
In other words, there is a line -- a line between you and the State, and that line has somehow protected you, or at least given you some comfort, even as the State abused you.
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.
But now that line is gone. One has been thrown to the wolves -- the wolves of the State, even if they are fellow prisoners; like you, but also NOT like you.
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, “I’ll 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?
No, they are not you. But they are also not themselves. They are something different. Something you have never really encountered before. And you can’t make any sense of it.
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, and 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.
They are not people. But you haven’t yet realized that neither are you any more. There are no people here, no individuals. There are only the mechanized parts of a great tragic system, obeying its own commands for its own inscrutable reasons.
You look at your neighbors, your comrades: Let’s either resist or protest! But all your comrades, all your fellow Article 58’s [those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities], 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.
There is no hope for the individual here. One either becomes part of the machine, or one perishes. There is no other choice.
This is one of the many lessons a reader will find scattered throughout Solzhenitsyn’s text -- lessons drawn precisely from his lived experiences, but lessons applicable to us all and well worth noting.
Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of them have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy. Perhaps there is something to ponder here: Who was more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland? One cannot explain this treason biologically. It has to have had a social cause.
Because, as the old proverb says: Well-fed horses don’t rampage.
It is remarkable that, even in our modern world, this is a lesson we have yet come to learn. Feed the people. Give them what they need to have happy and productive lives. If they fall into starvation and desperation they will revolt -- and the revolt will be far worse than the more esoteric concerns associated with giving people things that they have not earned.
After all…
Do not pursue what is illusory -- property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -- don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -- and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!
Truly, words to live by.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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