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Solzhenitsyn regards the brutal fate of these returned P.O.W.s as one of the most frightful of Stalin's crimes. "They were called traitors, " he writes of them, "but they did not betray the motherland. The motherland betrayed them, and betrayed them three times." The first betrayal was Stalin's bumbling strategy, which nearly lost the war and allowed the Germans to capture vast numbers of prisoners. Then these Soviet P.O.W.s were virtually abandoned by Stalin and left to die in Nazi camps. Finally the survivors were lured home by the oft-repeated promise of forgiveness.
Some of the repatriated Russians were, as Solzhenitsyn concedes, Nazi collaborators. He does not condone the fact that more than 500,000 Soviets served in the German army—mostly as noncombatants. But he also points out that this was the first tune in history that a nation had formally and officially renounced its P.O.W.s, refusing to sign the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war.
Since Stalin had written them off, Hitler treated the Russians far more cruelly than other Allied prisoners.
As a result, many felt compelled to serve the Germans in order to survive. Solzhenitsyn is careful to distinguish between degrees of collaboration. Some "scum" joined the Nazi polizei. Ukrainians, Latvians and other national groups, deeply embittered by Soviet persecution, joined Waffen SS divisions. The so-called "Russian Army of Liberation"* held the pitiful belief that a German victory would enable them to bring democracy to Russia. Other P.O.W.s escaped the Nazis to fight with the Soviet partisans or try to rejoin the Red Army. Whether scum or hero, all received the same sentence when they returned home: ten years.
As a former soldier, Solzhenitsyn deeply identifies with the plight of these wretched men. He records "with shame" an incident he witnessed at the front. A sergeant of the Soviet Secret police, on horseback, was using a knout on a captured Russian soldier who had served in a German unit. Staggering, the man was naked from the waist up, his torso covered with blood. Suddenly he cried out to Solzhenitsyn in agony: "Mister Captain!"
"Any officer in any army in the world should have put a stop to this act of torture without trial," he writes. "But I was a coward ... I said nothing and I did nothing... This picture has remained in my mind ever since. It is, after all, almost the symbol of the archipelago."
The passages in Gulag about the Russian P.O.W.s are the first accounts of their tragic fate to come out of the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities have used these chapters to portray the author as a Nazi traitor. Most of the official attacks on the book have included falsified quotations purporting to show that Solzhenitsyn called General Vlasov a "hero" and "mocked the sacrifices made by the Soviet people during the war."
Though utterly untrue, these allegations were shrewdly calculated to appeal to the citizenry of a nation that lost 20 million in World War II. This terrible memory has been kept alive by three decades of Soviet propaganda, presenting "the Great Patriotic War" as an unmitigated triumph for Communism. Any objective appraisal of wartime collaboration by Soviet citizens with the Germans is still forbidden.