The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published:Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956; Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya, parts 1-2, 1973; parts 3-4, 1974; parts 5-7, 1975 (English translation, 1974-1978)

Type of work: Memoir

Type of Ethics: Modern history

Significance: Examined the history of the penal system established in the Soviet Union by the Communist Party after the 1918 revolution and the cruelties inflicted upon millions of political prisoners

The Work

GULAG is the Russian abbreviation for the Chief Administration of Collective Labor Camps, which was established in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) after the Russian Revolution of 1918. An archipelago is an extensive group of islands, such as exists in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Siberia. It is in these bitterly cold regions that collective labor camps were built to house more than ten million inmates. In 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist, began publishing a three-volume history of those camps called The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Though banned in his own homeland, Solzhenitsyn’s work was smuggled to the West, was translated, became a best-seller, and led to the author’s expulsion from Soviet territory in 1974. The three published volumes were based on letters, documents, and the experiences of 227 eyewitnesses, including those of the author, who spent eight years in the camps.

History

Soviet labor camps were first established by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Communists during the revolution, to reeducate and punish enemies of the Communist Party. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took power and sent millions of Soviet citizens to the camps for “crimes against the state.” In a chapter called “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System,” Solzhenitsyn explores Stalin’s legal and ethical motivations for carrying out a reign of terror that lasted from 1927 to the dictator’s death in 1953. Under the Soviet constitution, written by the dictator himself, any “counterrevolutionary” activity was punishable by ten years of slave labor and even death. Any actions “injurious to the military might” of the Soviet Union, any “intention” to do injury, and any “attempt to weaken state power” could get a citizen thrown into the Gulag. Other crimes included attempts at armed rebellion, providing aid to the “international bourgeoisie” or capitalist class, espionage, suspicion of espionage, and contacts “leading to suspicion to engage in espionage,” including more easily witnessed criminal acts such as “subversion of industry, transport, and trade” by failing to achieve and produce as much as was expected of loyal citizens. One could also be punished for failing to denounce people that one suspected of having committed any of these crimes. Solzhenitsyn received an eight-year sentence for violating the law against weakening the state by criticizing its leaders. He had criticized Stalin’s military leadership in a “private” letter to a fellow army officer, but since all mail was opened and read by secret police agents, nothing was truly private. The Communist judge sent Solzhenitsyn to a labor camp in Siberia. While in the Gulag, he heard many stories of suffering, death, and other horrors, and he pledged to write about those experiences so that they would never be forgotten.

Ethical Principles

Inside the camps, the most vicious criminals were in charge. According to Stalinist ethics, political prisoners had no human rights because they were inferior beings and enemies of the state. Refusal to obey orders or attempts to avoid work meant immediate death. Millions died from twenty-hour days in gold mines or in clearing forests in 60-degrees-below-zero weather. Inmates were not expected to survive, so they were fed inadequate, miserable food, frequently nothing more than watery potato or “fish” soup and a moldy crust of bread once a day.

The camps were built and maintained according to the ethics of pure force. Stalin’s word became law and his only motive became increasing his own power. “To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world,” he wrote. The methods of force that he used included torture and psychological terror. The only way to avoid immediate death at the hands of the police was to confess to everything and to submit to the absolute power of the torturers. Stalinist ethics were based on one principle: Stalin and the Party were right, and everything else was wrong. Even children as young as twelve could be executed for crimes against the state, usually upon no more proof than a confession elicited after the child had been subjected to days of continuous questioning, without sleep, in an isolated cell.

The ethics of the Gulag inmates demanded the destruction of all human feeling and trust. Survival depended upon finding meaning in circumstances that evoked only horror, hatred, and degradation. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn discovered, many inmates did survive. He attributed survival inside the camps to a prisoner’s strength of character before he entered the system. The people who surrendered and died or became informers were those who “before camp had not been enriched by any morality or by any spiritual upbringing.” Survival demanded a “steadfast faith” in the human spirit or in some religious ethic. People who had found meaning in life before becoming victims of the terrorists could put up with the worst conditions, while those without a philosophy of life surrendered to despair and died horrible deaths. For Solzhenitsyn, this was the lesson of the Gulag: Know how to live and you will survive any conditions within or without the camps.

Bibliography

Bond, Anatole. A Study of the English and the German Translations of Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” Vol. 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1983. In a work chiefly of value to the student interested in languages, Bond explains numerous inadequacies in translations available in 1982.

Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Carter, Stephen. The Politics of Solzhenitsyn, 1977.

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Conquest, Robert. Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Dunlop, John B., Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff, eds. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, 1975 (second edition).

Dunlop, John B., Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson, eds. Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1985. Includes three critical essays on The Gulag Archipelago. Susan Richards’ “The Gulag Archipelago as Literary Documentary” argues that the work transcends the genre of history by means of the voice of Solzhenitsyn the narrator. John B. Dunlop’s “The Gulag Archipelago: Alternative to Ideology” discusses the positive social implications of the many examples of Soviet citizens rebelling against the system. Elisabeth Markstein’s “Observations on the Narrative Structure of The Gulag Archipelago” argues that the interweaving of different zeks’ narratives and styles gives the work a highly complex narrative structure.

Feuer, Kathryn, ed. Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Includes “On Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago,” a historian’s assessment of Solzhenitsyn’s factual accuracy by Marxist writer Roy Medvedev. “On Reading The Gulag Archipelago” is an argument for Solzhenitsyn’s literary skill, by Victor Erlich.

Fireside, Harvey. Soviet Psychoprisons. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

Kennan, George. “Between Earth and Hell.” The New York Review of Books, March 21, 1974, 3. Insightful review of The Gulag Archipelago (parts 1 and 2) with commentary on Solzhenitsyn’s politics and philosophy.

Kodjak, Andrej. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Commentary on The Gulag Archipelago. Kodjak argues that Solzhenitsyn’s narrative style transforms the work from mere documentation to artistic investigation.

Loewen, Harry. “Solzhenitsyn’s Kafkaesque Narrative Art in The Gulag Archipelago,” in Germano-Slavica. III, no. 1 (1979), pp. 5-15.

Malia, Martin. “A War on Two Fronts: Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago,” in The Russian Review. XXXVI, no. 1 (1977), pp. 46-63.

Matual, David. “The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno to Paradise,” in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature. VII, no. 1 (1982), pp. 35-43.

Medvedev, Roy A. Let History Judge. Rev. and exp. ed. Edited and translated by George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Monas, Sidney, and John B. Dunlop. “GULag and Points West,” in Slavic Review. XL, no. 3 (1981), pp. 444-463.

Pernoud, Mary-Anne. An Investigation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” According to Various Themes and Types Found Through Literature History, 1983.

Scammell, Michael. Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 1984.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1974-1978.

Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Vroon, Ronald. “Literature as Litigation: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago,” in Russian History. VII, nos. 1/2 (1980), pp. 213-238.

Wood, Alan. “Solzhenitsyn on the Tsarist Exile System: A Historical Comment,” in Journal of Russian Studies. XLII (1981), pp. 39-43.