"'Kill the stoolie!' That was it, the vital link! A knife in the heart of the stoolie! Make knives and cut the stoolie's throats -- that was it!
"Now as I write this chapter, rows of humane books frown down at me from the walls, the tarnished gilt on their well-worn spines glinting reproachfully like stars through the cloud. Nothing in the world should be sought through violence! By taking up the sword, the knife, the rifle, we quickly put ourselves on the level of tormentors and persecutors. And there will be no end to it. ...
"There will be no end. ... Here, at my desk, in a warm place, I agree completely.
"If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground -- from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.
"There will be no end of it! ... But will there be a beginning? Will there be a ray of hope in our lives or not?
"The oppressed at least concluded that evil cannot be cast out by good."
The eradication of some snitches and intimidation of others transformed the camp. It was, Solzhenitsyn admits, an imperfect justice since there was no "documentary confirmation that a man was an informer." But, he noted, even this "improperly constituted, illegal, and invisible court was much more acute in its judgments, much less often mistaken, than any of the tribunals, panels of three, courts-martial, or Special Boards with which we are familiar."
"Of the five thousand men about a dozen were killed, but with every stroke of the knife more and more of the clinging, twining tentacles fell away," he wrote. "A remarkable fresh breeze was blowing! On the surface we were prisoners living in a camp just as before, but in reality we had become free--free because for the very first time in our lives we had started saying openly and aloud all that we thought! No one who has not experienced this transition can imagine what it is like!
And the informers "stopped informing."
The camp bosses, he wrote "were suddenly blind and deaf. To all appearances, the tubby major, his equally tubby second in command, Captain Prokofiev, and all the wardens walked freely about the camp, where nothing threatened them; moved among us, watched us -- and yet saw nothing! Because a man in uniform sees and hears nothing without stoolies."
The system of internal control in the camp broke down. Prisoners no longer would serve as foremen on work details. Prisoners organized their own self-governing council. Guards began to move about the camp in fear and no longer treated prisoners like cattle. Pilfering and theft among prisoners stopped. "The old camp mentality -- you die first, I'll wait a bit; there is no justice so forget it; that's the way it was, and that's the way it will be -- also began to disappear."
Solzhenitsyn concluded this chapter, "Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning," in Volume 3 of his book, with this reflection...
"Purged of human filth, delivered from spies and eavesdroppers we looked about and saw, wide-eyed that ... we were thousands! That we were ... politicals! That we could resist!
"We had chosen well; the chain would snap if we tugged at this link -- the stoolies, the talebearers and traitors! Our own kind had made our lives impossible. As on some ancient sacrificial altar, their blood had been shed that we might be freed from the curse that hung over us.
"The revolution was gathering strength. The wind that seemed to have subsided had sprung up again in a hurricane to fill our eager lungs."
Later in the book Solzhenitsyn would write, "Our little island had experienced an earthquake -- and ceased to belong to the Archipelago."
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