The first thing to note, I did the unimaginable and listened to the abridged version. Am I not hardcore enough for the full three volumes? In a word, no. This was still a 22-hour read and only demanded 1 audible credit though, so I feel somewhat justified. Moreover, this abridgment was authorized by Solzhenitsyn specifically for a western audience. This book is something like a blend between Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, Victor Frankl’s “Man’s search for meaning” and a ‘from the belly of the beast’ diagnosis of Marxism. I will depart from my usual short-form analysis because this book hasn’t been treated with the attention it deserves. It’s due a long-form summary and analysis.
During his time in the gulag, Solzhenitsyn composed 10’s of thousands of lines drawing from his own experience and the stories he exchanged with other prisoners. Lacking the ability to write anything meaningful down, he devised a system using prayer beads to memorize the content as he composed it in verse. Upon returning to freedom, Solzhenitsyn received 1000’s of additional letters and verbal stories from former political gulag prisoners (Zeks). The Gulag Archipelago is the condensation of those experiences in something like encyclopedic form with a personal narrative connecting it. The reference book is marred by vast swaths of proverbial missing pages, where the expected entries were destroyed in truly Orwellian fashion.
The first part of the book parallels Dante’s inferno. Solzhenitsyn describes in gory detail how innocent and guilty alike were swept into the gulags, primarily by using torture to get Russians to admit to crimes they did not commit. This section can further be divided into who the Zeks were, and what was done to them
The following four quotes, in rapid succession, give a general feel for where the Zeks came from and why they were taken:
- “And finally there was the very expansive category of ‘CHS: Member of a family of a person convicted under one of the foregoing letter categories.’ It has to be remembered that these categories were not applied uniformly and equally among different groups and in different years, but as were the articles of the code and the sections and decrease they broke out in sudden epidemics”
- A child asked her gulagged mother if she was guilty of the crime she was accused of, telling her that if she wasn’t she would never forgive the soviets and if she was, she would “not write (her) anymore and will hate (her)”. her mother, wondering how could her daughter live without the soviet power wrote, “I am guilty”.
- “The presidium issued a clarification to the supreme court. Children must be sentenced and the full measure of punishment applied… even in cases where crimes were committed not intentionally, but as a result of carelessness.”
- “True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: ‘You can pray freely, but just so God alone can hear.'”
- “Nowadays it is quite convenient to declare that arrest was a lottery, yes, it was a lottery alright, but some of the numbers were fixed. they threw out the general dragnet in accordance with assigned quota figures, yes. But every person who objected publicly, they grabbed that very minute, and it turned into a selection on the basis of the soul… all those who were pure and better could not stay in that society, and without them, it kept getting more and more trashy.”
- Finally, Solzhenitsyn states that the gulags were needed to support communism. Making specific reference to the criminal slaves of Thomas Moor’s Utopia, Solzhenitsyn says “The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform”
I did not highlight anything from the chapters on the torture they experienced. It’s a long, and horridly unspeakable section. I won’t (and can’t) quote it here. Suffice it to say, this section describes the torture of Hell.
Another section of the book deals with what the gulags did to the people’s souls. Who were they when they entered and how did different people change? This section roughly parallels Frankl’s beloved masterpiece. Perhaps, if this section were further abridged to include just these inspiring stories and philosophies, then it would be as widely read as Man’s search for meaning. Here are several quotes that roughly describe Solzhenitsyn’s perspective:
- “Yes, camp corruption was a mass phenomenon, but only because the camps were awful but in addition, we soviet people stepped upon the soil of the archipelago spiritually disarmed, long since prepared to be corrupted.”
- “among both prisoners and camp jailors, it was possible to find human beings, in an officer it was virtually impossible.”
- “In the archipelago, the kids saw the world as it is seen by quadrupeds; only might makes right; only the beast of prey has the right to live.”
- “The concept that only the material result counts, has become so much a part of us, that when some [Tukhachevsky] was proclaimed a traitor… people only exclaimed in a chorus of astonishment “what more could he want?” … since he had a belly full of chow and 20 suits… and fame, what more could he want? Millions of our compatriots find it unthinkable that a human being might have been motivated by something other than material gain.”
- A strong theodicy succinctly expressed from a vantage point of clarity “And what would one then have to say about our so evident torturers? Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper? The only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.”
- “Isn’t it, all the same, the kind of work you do? But no, it turned out that it was not at all the same to him. How many times did he select the worst and hardest lot, just so as not to have to offend against conscience? … Because of the astounding influence on his body of his bright and spotless human spirit… The organism of [the old man] grew stronger in camp.”
- “Does God who is perfect, love allow this bodily imperfection in our lives? The world must suffer first to know the perfect bliss of paradise. harsh is the law but for weak men the only way to win eternal peace.”
- “The social temperature on this plot of land had risen so high that if souls were not transmuted they were purged of dross, and the sorted laws saying ‘we only live once’ that ‘being determines consciousness’ and that ‘every man is a coward when his neck is at stake’ ceased to apply for that short time in that circumscribed place.”
The book also deals with the beast that gave rise to the hell earlier described.
- “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations…. Without evildoers, there would have been no Archipelago”
- In one chapter, Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a lifelong thief who began at the age of 9, stole through his adolescence and up to the occupation of his town (Kiev) by the Germans. The thief (who Solzhenitsyn described with the utmost respect) explicitly stated his intention to go on robbing once he got out of the archipelago as a prestigious and lucrative carrier. When asked “why didn’t you continue to steal under the germans?” “He shook his head, ‘under the germans I worked. What do you think? that I could have gone on stealing under the germans? They shot you on the spot for that.'”
- “The main problem was the lack of conscientiousness of those stupid slaves! not only couldn’t you expect any socialist self-sacrifice of them, but they didn’t even manifest simple capitalist diligence. All they were on the lookout for was ways to spoil their footgear and not go out to work: anything for a pretext to sit down and smoke.” He then goes on to describe the worthlessness of their products. claiming you could “break a brick they made with your bare hands”
- Speaking of Dekulakization, intended to remove the “parasites” from the Russian working class “But if they had cleansed the peasantry of heartless bloodsuckers with their fine-toothed iron comb, cheerfully sacrificing 15 millions for the purpose, whence all those vicious fat-bellied rednecks who preside over collectivized villages and district party committees today?”
- “This is surely the main problem of the 20th century is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one’s conscience to someone else’s keeping? can a man do without his own ideas of good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed words and verbal instructions of his immediate superiors?”
The book is of course, more complex than that. To give a smattering of the other material available here are two more quotes.
- “and our strike had the bitter tang of hopelessness. But there was a sort of satisfaction with this feeling of hopelessness. We had taken a futile, a desperate step, that could only end badly, and that was good.”
- “In world war II the west kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in even more hopeless slavery