Chapter 4 – The Bluecaps
This chapter discusses ‘the Bluecaps’, those members of State Security responsible for the investigations, arrests and interrogations. Throughout this chapter (and as with much of the book) A.S. discusses human nature and good vs evil with a tremendous nuance and depth which is one of the reasons I personally found this book very compelling, and is difficult to express in these simple notes.
Discussing those Bluecaps:
They understood that the cases were fabricated, yet they kept on working year after year. How could they? Either they forced themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a human being), … or it was a matter of the Progressive Doctrine [ie. means justify the ends]
(Page 145)
Why would someone have wanted to become a Bluecap? Throughout the time of the Gulags, to be a Bluecap meant essentially unlimited power over the lives of others, given the arbitrary nature of the arrests and how spurious the charges could be. A military leader or a factory manager may have power to control people’s duties, wages and reputations, but the Bluecaps control people’s very freedom. No one was exempt from a Bluecap checking up on them, while no one would dare to check up on what a Bluecap does. A.S. discusses various anecdotes about what this meant in practice (for example, how easy it was to take advantage of women, some of whom were drawn to them simply by their power, while others would give in out of fear. If there was a man in the picture, there was no problem about removing him). Given a near-total lack of accountability, the only rule that moderated the Bluecaps was that they remain loyal to their own organization. However, given Stalin’s endless paranoia, the Bluecaps themselves were subject to periodic purges, where enough arrests would need to be made to convince Stalin that his enemies had been removed.
A.S. speaks to how easy it is to judge those people as evil, or to feel a sense of moral superiority. He speaks of his own experience when they had tried to recruit him and his classmates in college. Despite good wages and the aforementioned power, he said there was simply a feeling in the gut which told him to steer clear. However if enough pressure was applied, almost anyone would join.
Let everyone ask himself: ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?’
(Page 160)
A.S. reflects on his time as an officer in the army, with the various petty demands and ego-stroking behaviors he engaged in against his subordinates, and how easily it had come to him.
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
(Page 168)
Considering the magnitude of the evil involved in this system (much of which we’ve not yet even touched on), A.S. contemplates just the nature of that evil and how it could come about.
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. . . 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 actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble-and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even lago 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. . .
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
(Page 173-174)
A.S. speaks finally to the fact that evil within the human mind seems to have a ‘threshold’ level. A man might bob back and forth between good an evil his entire life. But when, through the density of evil or the extremeness of his actions, that threshold is crossed, a man can leave humanity behind, perhaps without the possibility of return.
He discusses the need, at this time being in the 1960s-1970s, to keep a record of what had happened, to find those people who had been involved (now entering old age), to bring them to trial. Not even necessarily to punish them but simply to compel them to admit loudly that they had been involved, that they had been an executioner and a murderer. There are numerous instances throughout the book where A.S. expresses a real bitterness at the lack of justice applied to those who had participated in this system, either actively as a guard or Bluecap, or as one of those informants who used the system to make false accusations and settle personal scores. These were people who were now comfortably living out their pensions or were in leadership positions, never held to account for the lives they’d helped to destroy, all in the interest of not ‘stirring up the past’.
Chapter 5 – First Cell, First Love
Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.”
(Page 183)
The first cell is typically a prisoner’s first encounter with other prisoners. In this chapter A.S. describes in detail his own experiences in his cell, this taking place around the time of the end of WWII. The prisoners were kept on a very regimented schedule, for example only being allowed to the toilet at specific times (and how overlooked it is in freedom to be able to relieve yourself when you desire to). They needed to wake up promptly at 6AM each morning, with any oversleeping subject to punishment. Enforced wakefulness was an important part of the prison regime. Despite the day to day monotomy, A.S. describes thinking about his newfound imprisonment as an opportunity to re-examine his life and perhaps as an opportunity to gather more wisdom.
The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events, but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere sixteen minutes’ wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying glass.
(Page 202)
One of the recurring topics throughout the book is the scarcity of food available to prisoners, there never seemed to be enough to eat.
That pound of unrisen wet bread, with its swamplike sogginess of texture, made half with potato flour, was our crutch and the main event of the day. Life had begun! The day had begun-this was when it began! And everyone had countless problems. Had he allocated his bread ration wisely the day before? Should he cut it with a thread? Or break it up greedily? Or slowly, quietly nip off pieces one by one? Should he wait for tea or pile into it right now? Should he leave some for dinner or finish it off at lunch? And how much?
(Page 206)
This chapter is also A.S. first encounter with what he refers to as a ‘Stool Pigeon’, which is another recurring topic throughout the book. These are prisoners who have agreed to inform on their fellow cellmates in return for special privileges, and the practice was widespread throughout the Gulag. A.S. discusses how human beings have an internal ‘sensor relay’ to detect people who don’t mean you well, a sense which doesn’t frequently get used in modern society, and perhaps is an inheritance picked up by humans over the millennia of evolution. In the Gulag, where such things can be a matter of life or death, prisoners once again come to develop and rely on this intuition about other people, such that in many years of imprisonment A.S. notes that he had never made an error when deciding who he could safely confide in, versus who he needed to keep at bay.
A.S. gives us a description and background stories of some of his first cellmates, who include
- Fastenko, a former Social Democrat revolutionary who was in his 60’s at that time. He had experience in the Tsarist prisons and exile (from which he simply escaped to Europe without much trouble), and had traveled widely to Europe, Canada and America, including meeting and working with Lenin during his time in Paris. After the revolution, he felt called to return to Russia in order to participate. At that time he’d been encouraged to take a senior position, given his revolutionary credentials, but had instead been interested in keeping his head down and taking a simple job. It was an unlucky break that caused him to be arrested so many years later, after a gun was found in his neighbors apartment, and further investigation discovered his own background. This man brought a valued perspective to the cell since he could speak of prison traditions and had seen so much. He spoke in particular about how in Tsarist times, it had actually been an honor to be a political prisoner, and the public would send gifts of food for unknown prisoners.
Fastenko includes an anecdote I found interesting:
Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Potemkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm.
(Page 183)
- Another prisoner had been a leading engineer, responsible for building projects employing dozens of engineers and thousands of workers. He’d been a man with access to resources, with huge expense accounts and the ability to procure materials. He was fond of bragging in detail about the number of women he had been with (keeping in mind, this was during the war when many men had been taken to the front), and A.S. notes with distaste how this man had seemed almost to gouge himself with women, discarding them as soon as he’d gotten what he wanted. A.S. speaks with fondness of his memories of the engineers of the 1920’s, who had been intelligent men of varied interests and intellectual passions. He noted that the ‘old generation’ engineers had long been purged. The new class of engineers had come up after the revolution. As the old engineers were being herded into the Gulag, it became urgently necessary for those in power to produce their own class of engineers, who were politically loyal. So this man had rapidly advanced to the heights of industry, and had the brisk authority and impersonal tone of someone who doesn’t consider the possibility of a dissenting view. The man was full of energy. And yet he had forgotten one thing: the more success one gains, the more envy one arouses. So sure enough, a dossier against him had begun to accumulate going back for years. Nonetheless, he still may have survived had he not gotten overconfident and refused to supply building materials to a certain prosecutor’s dacha. This slip up is what caused the case against him to begin rolling. For this man, his fall was particularly harsh.
- Yuri was a former Russian officer. He had spent time in a German POW camp- and he experienced first hand the horrible conditions of those Soviet prisoners, who were practically starving to death. He himself worked as an artist for the German officers in order to remain fed and alive. Seeing how badly the Soviet prisoners fared in comparison to those of other nationalities (who had access to the Red Cross and food parcels from home), he gradually realized that the Soviet soldiers were intentionally abandoned if only to make the prospect of surrender terrifying for those soldiers still fighting. Able to speak German, he eventually joined the Germans in their scheme to develop Russians into spies. The Germans put no special trust in these spies, but from their perspective there was no harm in trying, and for the Russians involved it was a way to escape starvation in the POW camp. Yuri was promised forgiveness by the Soviet high command if he were to return and share his valuable knowledge of the German intelligence systems- and having returned, he was given 10 days to share everything he had learned. Upon conclusion, he was promptly arrested and sent to prison.
A.S. includes in this chapter various details of his day to day life in the prison. At some point, they hear a 40 gun salute ring out over Moscow, and realize that the second world war has come to an end.
Chapter 6 – That Spring
This chapter describes the spring after the war ended, with a focus on the fate of the returning POW’s. At that time there was a wave of former POW’s being swallowed up by the gulag. A.S. notes how these former soldiers had been deeply betrayed by their Motherland:
- First, by being thrown into a war that was incompetently executed, their lives simply thrown away.
- Second, by being abandoned to die in captivity without the slightest support or concern.
- By being coaxed home, only to be imprisoned and sent off to the gulag
In the Red Army, it was illegal to surrender- a solider was supposed to lie down and die rather than surrender. So any former POW had broken the law and was considered a traitor. Later, many soldiers realized they would have been better to desert prior to seeing any battle: they would have been punished, but a deserter was not regarded as an enemy or a traitor or a political prisoner.
In discussing the need to imprison these former prisoners, A.S. notes that one of the reasons was to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe, and to have belonged to a camp which was liberated by Americans or English was considered an aggravating factor. Another reason was that Stalin needed manpower for his massive construction projects – few young men would willingly volunteer for such projects so shortly after returning from war, instead wanting to be with their families.
There was also the fact that the Germans had implemented a systematic program to convert Russian POW’s into spies. The effort was half-baked, and the Russians themselves would pretend to be willing, knowing that as soon as they were sent back across the front lines they would abandon their explosives, go rejoin their former units and laugh together at the stupidity of the Germans. However, A.S. speculates that Hitler knew too well the spy-paranoia of Stalin, and implemented this procedure consciously, in order to stoke Stalin’s paranoia. This was a man who would rather 999 innocent men should rot then to miss one genuine spy. Sure enough, these POW’s would be arrested immediately upon their return.
And how it eased the burden for the MGB executioners when thousands of soldiers pouring in from Europe did not even try to conceal that they had voluntarily enlisted as spies.
(Page 247)
The Vlasov Men
In addition to enrolling as spies, another route for Russian POW’s to escape the horrific conditions of the POW camps was to enlist with the Russian Liberation Army. This was a scheme whereby the Germans created an army of Russian soldiers who would fight against the Soviets, and this was led by Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, a former Soviet general. Vlasov had, over his career, risen to become one of Russia’s most competent Generals. He was in command of the Second Shock Army which was meant to help lift the blockade of Leningrad in co-ordination with various other units. When the time came, the other units failed to advance- while Vlasov’s men were successful in their assault and before long were 46 miles deep inside the German lines. They gradually became thoroughly encircled, since the Russian command was unable to properly support them, and as winter had turned to spring the roads behind them became unusable. As they gradually starved, they were eventually forced to surrender, including Vlasov himself. Eventually, he was brought together with other officers who had purportedly also renounced their homeland.
From Vlasov’s perspective, he may not have felt he had much choice, considering what Stalin might do to him for losing his army and being forced to surrender. Having been witness over the course of the years to many of Stalin’s purges, he (as well as other captured officers) may have genuinely believed that it was best to work with the Germans to overthrow his regime.
In any event, Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army were caught without any good options. The Germans deeply distrusted them, happy to use them for cannon fodder, while the soldiers knew they could only face a traitors fate if they were ever to try to return home, now that they were fighting against the Red Army. Their only hope was for a German victory, and as a result they fought with desperation.
Near the end of the war, Vlasov’s men turned against the German SS who were in the process of destroying Prague. Whether this was a humanitarian instinct to save the city, or an opportunistic action to gain more favorable treatment from the advancing Red Army is hard to say. But regardless of the motivation, the Russian Liberation Army saved Prague from destruction, before needing to flee from the advancing Red Army shortly thereafter.
Vlasov tried to surrender to the allies, knowing that a dark fate awaited them if they were forced back to the Soviet Union. The Allies refused, not wanting to upset their uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union. In fact, A.S. points out the betrayal of the Allies of many Russians who they knew would face execution or prison upon their return to the Soviet Union, but did so nonetheless.
A.S. provides a few interesting anecdotes about how Russians ended up fighting each other.
Near Malye Kozlovichi, I was told, an interesting event took place. As the soldiers dashed back and forth among the pines, things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one another. No longer very accurately oriented, they kept shooting at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet automatic pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and together swore at the grease freezing on their automatic pistols. Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods -and at the same instant each saw the other’s cap … the eagle and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still refused to fire! Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging them like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if you will, was not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman distrust: If I take pity on him, he is going to kill me.
(Page 255)
He also notes that he himself came under fire from Vlasov men only a few days before his own arrest:
Pursued by their tracer bullets, our last little group ran almost two miles in fresh snow to the bridge across the Passarge River. And there they were stopped. Soon after that I was arrested. And now, on the eve of the Victory Parade, here we all were sitting together on the board bunks of the Butyrki [their prison].
(Page 260)
Here we learn also about the Russian Emigres, those who had opposed the Russian Revolution as White Guards and had been living in Europe. Now many of these people were gradually being picked up and sent to the Gulag, sometimes after being tricked into returning to Russia with offers of forgiveness.
Given the millions who were being picked up by the Gulag dragnet, many prisoners imagined an amnesty could be coming (and A.S. points out that the talk of amnesty is a recurring one during prison life, every time a major anniversary approaches). He tells the story of many prisoners being summoned in a group, and they are hoping they are about to be amnestied, but instead are handed out 5-15 year sentences.