You Are Under Arrest

A summary of Chapter 1

of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn's

Gulag Archipelago

Imagine you are a soldier, not just any soldier, but an officer, a captain in charge of 120 men and not just just in any Army but  the Soviet Army, the Soviet Army at war, not just any war, but the Great Patriotic War.  The Year is 1945, February.

Maybe you know that today is Chinese New Year - the year of the rooster.  You mail a letter to a friend, Sasha, he's on the Ukrainian front.  You lead a patrol behind enemy lines to reconnoiter the exact location of the enemy artillery battery and command post.  You have been wounded several times. You are decorated for bravery twice.   These thoughts occur to you after the mission just as you present your report to the Brigade Commander.   The self important twit  does not even bother to stand up as you make your report.

A thought flashes in your mind, your service revolver in your holster, "Shoot him!" You dismiss such thoughts.  He has never done you any harm.  He doesn't respect you, doesn't like you.  You tell yourself to that you should rest.  You think about the brutality of the consequences, arrest, a firing squad, and your wife in poverty.  You shift back on to one foot and begin a sentence with "The Germans."  But what about the rooster?  What does a rooster do? Cocks and crows.  By the time the cock crowed, Peter had denied his Lord three times.  But you will never deny your country.  You are a patriot.  You are a socialist.  You believe in the rightness of your cause and the fidelity of your country.  Yet the word 'Traitor' has invaded your mind like a burglar in the night.

Your orderly, a think be-speckeled man with a round face hands you a letter.  Nina, your wife, reminded you of that couple with no children, the older man who had a wife, twenty years his junior - Yaroslav?  Or was it Yakov.  Arrested!  What?  Nina, she writes, "He was Burgermeister for the Germans."  Everyone in the battery relaxes to eat and one of the enlisted men makes a joke about Stalin  and the universal laughter of all follows.

Your thoughts return to Nina, the war would soon be over, it is a question of months and not years now, even the Germans know that.  Nina, my sweet Nina, I should give you a child, maybe two, you wanted that.  I should have listened to you.  I am sorry.

You think about the house you will build her with your own two hands and all the good things in life you want to give a woman, a woman who has been so faithful in your long almost three year absence.

The first sergeant yells at the platoon sergeants, fun's over and everyone returns to their trucks laden with katusha rockets.  You too, climb into your jeep.  You will be passing through the Warmian forrest near the old city of Allenstein.  Allenstein, wasn't that the place where Old General Samsonov blew his brains out over the loss of the Tsar's Army?  "Aleksandr Vassilievich, was the weight on your shoulders so great that you were reduced to such an un-Christian fate?  Did General Varus kill himself after seeing his Army slaughtered by Germans?"

The darkness of the wood overtakes you.  "Shoot the bastard!"

"You are under arrest."

"Traitor"

"I'm sorry."

"Rooster."

At dusk, the convoy stops.  You step out of your jeep and walk toward the vista of Allenstein burning, the city of Copernicus' birth and Napoleon's visit burns under Soviet bombs as Nazi rubble.  Your men take your positions designated by your amiable friend Battalion Commander - Petro Poverpaltinik.  "The Brigade Commander wants to see you."  Colonel   Poverpaltinik's blonde face shines like a candle in the darkness.

"What does that fat bastard want now?"  You think.

Allenstien on Zepplin Street

You saunter toward the hastily constructed Command Tent.  You enter and you salute the Brigadier Yuri Obyknovenky is standing.  "The fat bastard is standing."  He returns the salute with parade formality.  He looks as if he could have been in the Czar's Army.

"Your pistol, Captain."

You place your service revolver on the table.  It rests like a paper weight over the maps, field orders and manuals.

Two blue boarded counter intelligence  officers dart from behind the darkness and seize you.  "You are under arrest!"  They rip off your rank and shoulder boards and grab your arms.


Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

NKVD Officers - SMERSH men

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer­sault from one state into another.

. . . 

four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none­theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

That's all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?"

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.

You resist them and shake one of them to the ground and punch the other one in the face.  Before you can grab your pistol, a father voice shouts, "Alexander Isayevich!"

You turn and it is your Brigadier Commander.  He offers you his hand.  "Your letters to your friend on the Second Ukrainian Front."

And you remember.  Your deflate like a sail cut loose from its yard arm.  The Brigadier shakes your hand.  "Good luck my son."

And like that they take you away.

Philip Orlik

While in Kiev, I took pictures of things I did not understand, but liked and thought was cool.  I lived in 2-room Soviet Style apartment.  I rented a 64 square meter in the Lipki, Kostya Hordijenka Ln, 1А, Kiev, Kiev City 02000, Ukraine from Valentine of Airbnb.  On my walk toward the Pinchuk Art center.  I passed by a curious monument.  I later did the research and submitted for your approval, offerings from my collection. 

On June 16, 2010, the people of Ukraine erected a monument to Philip Orlik, an 18th century Ukrainian freedom fighter. Following the defeat at the Battle of Poltava, Orlik organized Mazepa's forces and gave the people of  a democratic Constitution - one of the the first Constitutions in Europe.

Philip Orlik was born on the 11th of October 1672 to Stephen and Irina Orlik. His father, a Catholic noble of Czech extraction serving at the Grand duchy of Lithuania married an Orthodox woman, Iryni Malachowski from Belorussian and Ukrainian nobility. Stephen Orlik died one year after Philip was born under the banner of the Polish king fighting the muslim Turk at the battle of Khotin.

The sculpture is the work of Anatoliy Kush (born 1945).  Well respected and famous, Mr. Kush's works, such as the Monument of Independence, the sculpture of the legendary founders of Kiev and the bust of Lenin in the Kiev Metro)  dot many of the national monuments across Ukraine.  Mr. Kush is a member of the National Union of  Ukrainian Artists and a 1972 alumni of the Kiev State Art Institute.  His awards include Honored Artist of Ukraine (1979) and People's Artist of Ukraine (1996).

Jesuit educated in Vilnius and at the Kiev Mohyla Academy.  In 1698, he served as secretary of the kiev Metropolia.  Sweden, Poland and the Turks went war with Peter the Great of Russia.  In 1699, he joined Ivan Mazepa;s General Military chancellory and organized anti-Russian resistance.


The 38 year old Philip Orlik offered the first free Ukrainian Constitution to Europe following the Battle of Poltava. The Constitution often called the Cossack Social Contract, set up three branches and limited the powers of the executive in terms of taxation, foreign policy and the execution of justice.  Historians sometimes refer to the Constitution as the Bender's Constitution as Philip Orlik composed the Constitution in exile in Bender, Moldalvia.  Orlik spent the rest of his life in the courts of France, England and all over Europe championing the cause of a free Ukraine, but the Constitution met to entice free Ukrainian patriots would have to wait three centuries to carry the weight of the law. 

The Monument to Philip Orlik stands at the intersection of Orlik and Lipsky* Street. Considered one of the most prestigious places to stay in Kiev. Plans for settlement began in the 18th century when the military governor of kiev subdivided the land around Klovsky Place - the current site of the Ukrainian Supreme Court. Construction did not begin until the 1830s. Many mansions dot the boulevard.

Built in 1911, architect I. Belyaev designed House number 3 in the neoclassical style. Across the street sits house number 4, a sumptuous mansion built in 1908 in the Renaissance style.

This area of town was badly damaged in the Russian Civil War. Reconstruction begin in 1930. From 1930 to 1950, new buildings mark the Soviet period where NKVD employees lived.

*Lipsky means lime.