Dear Editor,
The death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was recently reported in the press. I was very disappointed that persons qualified to write appropriate epitaphs for him and perhaps hold a seminar have not done so. I believe that his Gulag Archipelago should be required reading for all who value freedom. Even moreso at this time when events in Georgia and the two enclaves send shivers down the spine of former Soviet Republics and make the rest of us tremble in the face of the voluble impotence of the Western powers, ably led by the world’s only superpower.
Mr Editor, as my mark I would like to recount an incident from the book which I trust will illustrate a few points which I leave to the readers to figure out. We start at the point where, in the prison camp, he answered a questionnaire and listed himself as a nuclear physicist. He is now being processed for assignment to suitable facilities. But first we must understand a little of life in the Gulag. Life was short and nasty.
If you did not die from the food, or lack of it, some guard may shoot you at random and then report to his superiors that you were trying to escape. The guard’s reward was a weekend vacation in Moscow or similar place. Solzhenitsyn recalls an incident where a prisoner crew were given a clearly defined patch of land to weed or other thing which I cannot now recall.
A peasant, seeing a bit of grass outside the patch, stepped out of the patch to weed it and was immediately shot dead by the guards. So, if you were in the gulag, you followed the rules very precisely and never did anything unless you were so instructed, supervised and accompanied by the ever present guards. This attitude became second nature.
We pick up his story when his release papers had been processed. He was then instructed by the clerk to take the papers to another office located down the road where transportation to his final destination would be arranged. Mr Editor, I must tell you that I suffered his suffering with him, feared his fears, obeyed the laws he obeyed – in other words I became him when I was reading the book.
So when he was told to go down the street, before reading on, I said, “Impossible! There is no accompanying guard.” This is, of course what he said. He found it almost incom-prehensible that he should be allowed to leave that office without supervision, go onto the street without supervision, proceed a few blocks down the street without supervision and go into another office without supervision!
Freedom.
Yours faithfully,
Mujtaba Ahmad Nasir
