Read Online The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Free Book Online
Authors: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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passing, as was the group of A. I. Abrikosova. And, of course, ordinary Roman Catholics—Polish Catholic priests, etc.—were arrested, too, as part of the normal course of events.
However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called "nuns" in transit prisons and in camps.
True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:
You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.
(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.)
A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda!
True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners , the longest term then given.
(In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the "nuns." Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three -year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)
As early as the early twenties, waves appeared that were purely national in character—at first not very large in proportion to the populations of their homelands, especially by Russian yardsticks: Mussavatists from Azerbaijan; Dashnaks from Armenia; Georgian Mensheviks; and Turkmenian Basmachi, who were resisting the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia. (The first Central Asian Soviets were Russian in makeup by an overwhelming majority, and were therefore seen as outposts of Russian power.) In 1926 the Zionist society of "Hehalutz" was exiled in toto—since it had failed to respond to the all-powerful upsurge of internationalism.
Among subsequent generations, a picture has evolved of the twenties as some kind of holiday of totally unlimited freedom. In this book we shall encounter people who viewed the twenties quite differently. The non-Party students at this time sought "autonomy for higher educational institutions," the right of assembly, and the removal from the curriculum of excessive political indoctrination. Arrests were the answer. These were intensified during holidays—for example, on May 1, 1924. In 1925, about one hundred Leningrad students were sentenced to three years in political detention for reading the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik —the organ of the Mensheviks abroad—and for studying Plekhanov. (In his youth Plekhanov himself had gotten off far more lightly
However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called "nuns" in transit prisons and in camps.
True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:
You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.
(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.)
A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda!
True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners , the longest term then given.
(In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the "nuns." Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three -year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)
As early as the early twenties, waves appeared that were purely national in character—at first not very large in proportion to the populations of their homelands, especially by Russian yardsticks: Mussavatists from Azerbaijan; Dashnaks from Armenia; Georgian Mensheviks; and Turkmenian Basmachi, who were resisting the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia. (The first Central Asian Soviets were Russian in makeup by an overwhelming majority, and were therefore seen as outposts of Russian power.) In 1926 the Zionist society of "Hehalutz" was exiled in toto—since it had failed to respond to the all-powerful upsurge of internationalism.
Among subsequent generations, a picture has evolved of the twenties as some kind of holiday of totally unlimited freedom. In this book we shall encounter people who viewed the twenties quite differently. The non-Party students at this time sought "autonomy for higher educational institutions," the right of assembly, and the removal from the curriculum of excessive political indoctrination. Arrests were the answer. These were intensified during holidays—for example, on May 1, 1924. In 1925, about one hundred Leningrad students were sentenced to three years in political detention for reading the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik —the organ of the Mensheviks abroad—and for studying Plekhanov. (In his youth Plekhanov himself had gotten off far more lightly
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