The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books I-II

Chapter 3: The Interrogation
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or fourty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. (p 93)


...until, in the fourth month, all the notebooks of my "War Diary" were cast into the hellish maw of the Lubyanka furnace, where they burst into flame - the red pyre of one more novel which had perished in Russia - and flew out of the highest chimney in black butterflies of soot. (p 136)


Chapter 5: First Cell, First Love
What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are you really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers - is that really a Motherland? (p 219-20)


Chapter 10: The Law Matures
One little note on eight-year-old Zoya Vlasova. She loved her father intensely. She could no longer go to school. (They teased her: "Your papa is a wrecker!" She would get in a fight: "My papa is good!") She lived only one year after the trial. Up to then she had never been ill. During that year she did not once smile; she went about with head hung low, and the old women prophesied: "She keeps looking at the earth; she is going to die soon." She died of inflammation of the brain, and as she was dying she kept calling out: "Where is my papa? Give me my papa!" When we count up the millions of those who perished in the camps, we forget to multiply them by two, by three. (p 431)


Chapter 12: Tyurzak
When, in 1960, Gennady Smelov, a nonpolitical offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad prison, the prosecutor went to his cell for some reason (perhaps he was making his regular rounds) and asked him: "Why are you torturing yourself?"

And Smelov replied: "Justice is more precious to me than life."

This phrase so astonished the prosecutor with its irrelevance that the very next day Smelov was taken to the Leningrad Special Hospital (ie, the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor there told him:

"We suspect you may be a schizophrenic." (p 473)


Chapter 1 (Part II): The Ships of the Archipelago
The painting by Yaroshenko which everyone knows, Life Is Everywhere, shows a fourth-class passenger car re-equipped in every naive fashion for prisoner transport... (p 491)


Chapter 3 (Part II): The Slave Caravan
In Orel in 1938 you could hardly hide the fact that there was no home in the city where there hadn't been arrests, and weeping women in their peasant carts blocked the square in front of the Orel Prison just as in Surikov's painting, The Execution of the Streltsy. (p 567)

Let history say how true or untrue that reproach is. However, no one paid for hunger strikes so much and so grievously as the Trotskyites. (We will come to their hunger strikes and their strikes in camps in Part III.)

The preparation of the train has been completed -- and ahead lies the complicated combat operation of loading the prisoners into the cars. At this point there are two important and obligatory objectives:
1. to conceal the loading from ordinary citizens
2. to terrorize the prisoners

To conceal the loading from the local population was necessary because approximately a thousand people were being loaded on the train simultaneously (at least twenty-five cars), and this wasn't your little group from a Stolypin that could be led right past the townspeople. Everyone knew of course, that arrests were being made every day and every hour, but no one was to be horrified by the sight of large numbers of them together. In Orel in 1938 you could hardly hide the fact that there was no home in the city where there hadn't been arrests, and weeping women in their peasant carts blocked the square in front of the Orel Prison ... But you don't need to show our Soviet people an entire trainload of them collected in one day.