Submariner
11-10-08, 12:38
There are many types of fever. Gun fever. Magazine fever. Ammo fever.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,in his book The Gulag Archipelago, devotes a lengthy chapter to describing the waves of arrests which populated the gulags. He relates one of the efforts, referred to as 'Gold Fever', which occurred around the end of 1929:
Who was arrested in the “gold” wave? All those who, at one time or another, fifteen years before, had had a private “business,” had been involved in retail trade, had earned wages at a craft, and could have, according to the GPU's [Russian secret police] deductions, hoarded gold.
But it so happened that they often had no gold. They had put their money into real estate or securities, which had melted away or been taken away in the Revolution, and nothing remained. They had high hopes, of course, in arresting dental technicians, jewelers, and watch repairmen. Through denunciations, one could learn about gold in the most unexpected places: a veteran lathe worker had somewhere gotten hold of, and held on to, sixty gold five-ruble pieces from Tsarist times. The famous Siberian partisan Muravyev had come to Odessa, bringing with him a small bag full of gold. The Petersburg Tatar draymen all had gold hidden away. Whether or not these things were so could be discovered only inside prison walls. Nothing – neither proletarian origin nor revolutionary services – served as a defense against a gold denunciation. All were arrested, all were crammed into GPU cells in numbers no one had considered possible up to then – but that was all to the good: they would cough it up all the sooner! It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence – who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
People perish for cold metal.
This wave was distinguished from those that preceded and followed it because, even though fewer than half its victims held their fate in their own hands, some did. If you in fact had no gold, then your situation was hopeless. You would be beaten, burned, tortured, and steamed to the point of death or until they finally came to believe you. But if you had gold, you could determine the extent of your torture, the limits of your endurance, and your own fate. Psychologically, this situation was, incidentally, not easier but more difficult, because if you made an error you would always be ridden by a guilty conscience. Of course, anyone who had already mastered the rules of the institution would yield and give up his gold – that was easier. But it was a mistake to give it up too readily. They would refuse to believe you had coughed it all up, and they would continue to hold you. But you'd be wrong, too, to wait too long before yielding: you'd end up kicking the bucket or they'd paste a term on you out of meanness. One of the Tatar draymen endured all the tortures: he had no gold! They imprisoned his wife, too, and tortured her, but the Tatar stuck to his story: no gold! Then they arrested his daughter: the Tatar couldn't take it any more. He coughed up 100,000 rubles. At this point they let his family go, but slapped a prison term on him. The crudest detective stories and operas about brigands were played out in real life on a vast national scale.
Also from The Gulag Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps latter, thinking: What would things have been like if. during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those blue caps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur---what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more. We had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
How to deal with the State?
Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,in his book The Gulag Archipelago, devotes a lengthy chapter to describing the waves of arrests which populated the gulags. He relates one of the efforts, referred to as 'Gold Fever', which occurred around the end of 1929:
Who was arrested in the “gold” wave? All those who, at one time or another, fifteen years before, had had a private “business,” had been involved in retail trade, had earned wages at a craft, and could have, according to the GPU's [Russian secret police] deductions, hoarded gold.
But it so happened that they often had no gold. They had put their money into real estate or securities, which had melted away or been taken away in the Revolution, and nothing remained. They had high hopes, of course, in arresting dental technicians, jewelers, and watch repairmen. Through denunciations, one could learn about gold in the most unexpected places: a veteran lathe worker had somewhere gotten hold of, and held on to, sixty gold five-ruble pieces from Tsarist times. The famous Siberian partisan Muravyev had come to Odessa, bringing with him a small bag full of gold. The Petersburg Tatar draymen all had gold hidden away. Whether or not these things were so could be discovered only inside prison walls. Nothing – neither proletarian origin nor revolutionary services – served as a defense against a gold denunciation. All were arrested, all were crammed into GPU cells in numbers no one had considered possible up to then – but that was all to the good: they would cough it up all the sooner! It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence – who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
People perish for cold metal.
This wave was distinguished from those that preceded and followed it because, even though fewer than half its victims held their fate in their own hands, some did. If you in fact had no gold, then your situation was hopeless. You would be beaten, burned, tortured, and steamed to the point of death or until they finally came to believe you. But if you had gold, you could determine the extent of your torture, the limits of your endurance, and your own fate. Psychologically, this situation was, incidentally, not easier but more difficult, because if you made an error you would always be ridden by a guilty conscience. Of course, anyone who had already mastered the rules of the institution would yield and give up his gold – that was easier. But it was a mistake to give it up too readily. They would refuse to believe you had coughed it all up, and they would continue to hold you. But you'd be wrong, too, to wait too long before yielding: you'd end up kicking the bucket or they'd paste a term on you out of meanness. One of the Tatar draymen endured all the tortures: he had no gold! They imprisoned his wife, too, and tortured her, but the Tatar stuck to his story: no gold! Then they arrested his daughter: the Tatar couldn't take it any more. He coughed up 100,000 rubles. At this point they let his family go, but slapped a prison term on him. The crudest detective stories and operas about brigands were played out in real life on a vast national scale.
Also from The Gulag Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps latter, thinking: What would things have been like if. during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those blue caps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur---what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more. We had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
How to deal with the State?
Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them.