The Gulag Archipelago (59 page)

. . . How foul-smelling were the crimes of these bourgeois engi- neers? Here is what they consisted of. They planned to reduce the tempo of development, as, for instance, to an over-all annual increase in production of
only
20 to 22 percent, whereas the workers were prepared to increase it by 40 to 50 percent. They slowed down the rate of mining local fuels. They were too slow in developing the Kuznetsk Basin. They exploited theoretical and economic arguments —such as whether to supply the Donets Basin with electricity from the Dnieper power station or whether to build a supertrunk-line between Moscow and the Donbas—in order to delay the solutions of important problems. (The work stops while engineers argue!) They postponed considering new engineering projects (i.e., they did not authorize them immediately). In lectures on the
resistance of mate- rials
, they took an
anti-Soviet line
. They installed worn-out equipment. They tied up capital funds, for example, by using them for costly and lengthy construction projects. They carried out unnecessary (!) repairs. They misused metals (some grades of iron were wanting). They created an imbalance between the departments of a plant and between the supply of raw materials and the capacity for processing them industrially. (This was particularly notable in the textile industry, where they built one or two factories more than they needed to process the cotton harvest.) Then they leaped from minimal to maximal plans. And obvious wrecking began through the
accelerated
develop- ment of that same unfortunate textile industry. Most importantly, they planned sabotage in the field of electric power—even though none was ever carried out. Thus wrecking did not take the form of actual damage done but remained within the area of operational planning, yet it was intended to lead to a nationwide crisis and even to economic paralysis in 1930! But it didn't—and only because of the competitive industrial and financial plans of the masses (doubling the figures!). . . .

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," begins the skeptical reader.

What? That isn't enough for you? But if, at the trial, we repeat every point and chew it over five or eight times, then perhaps it turns out not to be so negligible?

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." The reader of the sixties nonetheless sticks to his own view. "Mightn't all that have happened precisely because of those competing industrial and financial plans? Aren't things bound to be out of balance if any union meeting, without consulting Gosplan, can twist the ratios around as it pleases?"

Oh, the prosecutor's bread is bitter! After all, they decided to publish every last word! That meant that engineers would read it too. "You've made your bed, now lie in it." And Krylenko rushed in fearlessly to discuss and to question and cross-question engineering details! And the inside pages and inserts of the enormous newspapers were full of small print about fine tech- nical points. The notion was that every reader would be over- come by the sheer mass of material, that he wouldn't have enough time, even if he used up all his evenings and his rest days too, and so he wouldn't read it all but would only notice the refrain following every few paragraphs: "We were wreckers, wreckers, wreckers."

But suppose someone did begin, and read every last line?

In that case, he would come to see, through the banality of self- accusations, composed with such ineptitude and stupidity, that the Lubyanka boa constrictor had gotten involved in something outside its competence, its own kind of work, that what breaks free of the crude noose is the strong-winged thought of the twentieth century. There the prisoners are: in the dock, submis- sive, repressed—but their thought leaps out. Even their terrified, tired tongues manage to name everything with its proper name and to tell us everything.

. . Here is the situation in which they worked. Kalinnikov: "Well, to be sure, a situation of technical distrust was created." Larichev: "Whether we wanted to or not, we still had to produce that 42 millions of tons of petroleum [i.e., it had been thus ordered from on high] . . . because, no matter what, 42 million tons of petroleum could not have been produced under any circumstances whatever."

All the work of that unhappy generation of our engineers was squeezed between two such impossibilities. The Thermal Engineering Institute was proud of its principal research achievement, which was the sharply improved coefficient of fuel consumption. On this basis, lower requirements for fuel production had been stipulated in the preliminary plan.
And that meant wrecking
—reducing fuel resources. In the transportation plan, they had provided for all freight cars to be equipped with automatic coupling.
And that meant wrecking
: they had tied up capital funds. After all, it takes a long time to intro- duce automatic coupling, and the capital investment involved in installing it can only be recouped over a long period, and we want everything immediately! In order to make more efficient use of single- track railroads, they decided to increase the size of the locomotives and freight cars. And was that considered modernization?
No, it was wreck- ing
. Because in that case it would have been necessary to invest funds in strengthening the roadbeds and the superstructures of the bridges.

From the profound economic consideration that in America capital is cheap and labor dear, and that the situation here is just the opposite, and that we therefore ought not to borrow things with monkeylike imitativeness, Fedotov concluded that it was useless for us to purchase expensive American assembly-line machinery. For the next ten years it would be more profitable for us to buy less sophisticated English machinery and to put more workers on it, since it was inevitable that in ten years' time whatever we had purchased would be replaced anyway, no matter what. And we could then buy more expensive machinery. So that, too, was
wrecking
. Alleging economy as his reason, what he really wanted, they charged, was to avoid having the most advanced type of machinery in Soviet industry. They began to build new factories out of reinforced concrete, instead of cheaper ordinary concrete, on the grounds that over a hundred-year period reinforced concrete would recoup the additional investment many times over. So that, too, was
wrecking
: tying up capital; using up scarce reinforcing rods when iron was in short supply. (What was it supposed to be kept for—false teeth?)

From among the defendants, Fedotov willingly conceded: Of course, if every kopeck must be counted today, then it could be considered wrecking. The English say: I'm not rich enough to buy cheap goods.

He tries softly to explain to the hardheaded prosecutor: "Theoreti- cal approaches of every kind project norms which in the final analysis are [they will be considered to be] wrecking. . . ."

Well, tell me now: how much more clearly could a frightened de- fendant speak out? What is theory to us is wrecking to you! Because you are compelled to grab today, without any thought for tomorrow.

Old Fedotov tries to explain where thousands and millions of rubles are lost in the insane rush of the Five-Year Plan: Cotton is not sorted where it is grown so that every factory can be sent that grade and kind of cotton it requires; instead, it is shipped any old way, all mixed up. But the prosecutor doesn't listen to him. With the stubbornness of a block of stone he keeps coming back again and again—ten times— to the more obvious question he has put together out of children's building blocks: Why did they begin to build the so-called "factory- palaces," with high ceilings, broad corridors, and unnecessarily good ventilation? Was that not the most obvious sort of
wrecking?
After all, that amounted to tying up capital irrevocably! The bourgeois wreckers explain to him that the People's Commissariat of Labor wanted to build factories for the workers in the land of the proletariat which were spacious and had good air. [That means there are also
wreckers
in the People's Commissariat of Labor. Make a note of that!] The doctors had insisted on thirty feet of space between floors, and Fedotov reduced it to twenty—so why not to sixteen? Now that was
wrecking!
(If he had reduced it to fifteen, that would have been flagrant wrecking: he would have wanted to create the nightmare conditions of a capitalist factory for free Soviet workers.) They ex- plain to Krylenko that in relation to the entire cost of the factory and its equipment, this difference accounted for 3 percent of the total— but no, again and again and again, he keeps on about the height of the ceilings! And how did they dare install such powerful ventilators? They took into account the hottest summer days. Why the hottest days? So what! Let the workers sweat a little on the hottest days!

And in the meantime: "The disproportions were inherent. . . . Bungling organization saw to that before there was any 'Engineers Center.'" (Charnovsky.) "No wrecking activities were ever neces- sary. . . . All one had to do was carry out the
appropriate actions
and everything would happen on its own." (Charnovsky again.) He could not have expressed himself more clearly. And he said this after many months in the Lubyanka and from the defendants' bench in court. The
appropriate actions
—i.e., those imposed by bungling
higher-ups
—were quite enough: carry them out and the unthinkable plan would destroy itself. Here was their kind of wrecking: "We
had the capability
of producing, say, 1,000 tons and
we were ordered
[in other words, by a nonsensical plan] to produce 3,000, so we took no steps to produce them." . . .

You must admit that for an official, double-checked, spruced-up stenographic record in those years, this is not so little.

On many occasions Krylenko drives his actors to tones of exhaustion, thanks to the nonsense they are compelled to grind out over and over again . . . like a bad play in which the actor is ashamed for the dramatist, and yet has to go on and on any- way, to keep body and soul together.

Krylenko: "Do you agree?"

Fedotov: "I agree . . . even though in general I do not think . . ,"

Krylenko: "Do you confirm this?"

Fedotov: "Properly speaking ... in certain portions . . . and so to speak, in general . . . yes."

For the engineers (those who were still free, not yet imprisoned, and who had to face the necessity of working cheerfully after the defamation at the trial of their whole class), there was no way out. They were damned if they
did
and damned if they
didn't
. If they went forward, it was wrong, and if they went backward, it was wrong too. If they hurried, they were hurrying for the pur- pose of wrecking. If they moved methodically, it meant wrecking by slowing down tempos. If they were painstaking in develop- ing some branch of industry, it was intentional delay, sabotage. And if they indulged in capricious leaps, their intention was to produce an imbalance for the purpose of wrecking. Using capital for repairs, improvements, or capital readiness was tying up capital funds. And if they allowed equipment to be used until it broke down, it was a diversionary action! (In addition, the interrogators would get all this information out of them by sub- jecting them to sleeplessness and punishment cells and then de- manding that they give convincing examples of how they might have carried on wrecking activities.)

"Give us a clear example! Give us a clear example of your wrecking activity!" the impatient Krylenko urges them on.

(They will give you outstanding examples! Just wait! Soon someone will write
the history of the technology
of those years! He will give you examples—and negative examples. He will evaluate for you all the convulsions of your epileptic "Five-Year Plan in Four Years." Then we will find out how much of the people's wealth and strength was squandered. Then we will find out how all the best projects were destroyed, and how the worst projects were carried out by the worst means. Well, yes, if the Mao Tse-tung breed of Red Guard youths supervise brilliant engineers, what good can come of it? Dilettante enthusiasts— they were the ones who egged on their even stupider leaders.)

Yes, full details are a disservice. Somehow the more details provided, the less the evil deeds seem to smell of execution.

But just a moment! We've not had everything yet! The most important crimes all lie ahead! Here they are, here they come, comprehensible and intelligible to every illiterate! The Promparty (1 ) prepared the way for the Intervention; (2) took money from the imperialists; (3) conducted espionage; (4) assigned cabinet posts in a future government.

And that did it! All mouths were shut. And all those who had been expressing their reservations fell silent. And only the tramp- ing of demonstrators could be heard, and the roars outside the window:
"Death! Death! Death!"

What about some more details? Why should you want more details? Well, then, if that's the way you want it; but they will only be more frightening. They were all acting under orders from the French General Staff. After all, France doesn't have enough worries, or difficulties, or party conflicts of its own, and it is enough just to whistle, and, lo and behold, divisions will march.

... Intervention! First they planned it for 1928. But they couldn't come to an agreement, they couldn't tie up all the loose ends. All right, so they postponed it to 1930. But once more they couldn't agree among themselves. All right, 1931 then. And, as a matter of fact, here's how it was to go: France herself would not fight but, as her commission for organizing the deal, would take the Ukraine right bank as her share. England wouldn't fight either, of course, but, in order to raise a scare, promised to send her fleet into the Black Sea and into the Baltic—in return, she would get Caucasian oil. The actual warriors would, for the most part, be the following: 100,000 émigrés (true, they had long since scattered to the four winds, but it would take only a whistle to gather them all together again immediately) ; Poland —for which she would get half the Ukraine; Rumania (whose brilliant successes in World War I were famous—she was a formidable enemy). And then there were Latvia and Estonia. (These two small countries would willingly drop all the concerns of their young governments and rush forth en masse to do battle.) And the most frightening thing of all was the direction of the main blow. How's that? Was it already known? Yes! It would begin from Bessarabia, and from there,
keeping to
the right bank of the Dnieper, it would move
straight
on Moscow.