The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

this outcome wasn’t the result of the initially pristine Marxist doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent and present at the very beginning of the Soviet state itself.

We learn, as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly insists, that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

This is not least because we all benefit unfairly (and are equally victimized) by our thrownness, our arbitrary placement in the flow of time.

the newly-minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue.

Why, for example, is it still acceptable—and in polite company—to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx?

Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically.

Perhaps our tendency toward compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its inability to scale, and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor, rather than allegiance with the oppressed.

If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 (and both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied well before then that there would be hell to pay for that doctrine) there is absolutely and finally no excuse now.

Thank Heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage, and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth.

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

This foreshortened century, running from 1914–1917 to 1989–1991, was the era when utopian dreams rooted in Enlightenment optimism came to rely on brute force to make ideological schemes prevail.

The twentieth century has proven, in quantitative terms at least, the most murderous in human history, as governments killed their subjects at record rates.

“absolutely convinced that Communism will go”;

His writings delegitimized Communism in his homeland and discredited it abroad.

“to some extent, you have to credit the literary works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with helping to bring down the last empire on earth.”

In Solzhenitsyn’s case, the moral vision grows organically from a religious commitment. Passages in Gulag describe his move from Marx to Christ during his years of incarceration, a change of heart amplified in subsequent writings. Because religious faith is his bedrock conviction, the greatest impediment to appreciating and appropriating Solzhenitsyn has been the error of listening to his sad music of Russia with ears attuned solely to secular wavelengths.

considers himself “an unshakable optimist.” As he wrote to me in a letter of advice about my work of abridging, “the main goal, the main sense of Archipelago [is] a moral uplifting and catharsis” (emphasis his).

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.”

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

“We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of red terror.”

Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!

There was nothing to be compared with it in all Russian history. It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe.

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

The grass has grown thick over the grave of my youth.

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”

Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble.

Only the man who has renounced everything can w...

Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering—and that is what they do and what they are. We who have passed through their hands feel suffocated when we think of that legion, which is stripped bare of universal human ideals.

Either they forced themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a human being), and simply accepted that this was the way it had to be and that the person who gave them their orders was always right …

But most often it was merely a matter of cynicism. The bluecaps understood the workings of the meat grinder and loved it.

For Stalin could never be convinced that in any district, or city, or military unit, he might suddenly cease to have enemies.

And there they were possessed and directed by the two strongest instincts of the lower sphere, other than hunger and sex: greed for power and greed for gain. (Particularly for power. In recent decades it has turned out to be more important than money.)

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years.

But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher s...

Here attraction is not the right word—it i...

let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.

lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task.

It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “You must!” And your own head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not to be stirred up.”

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.

But a spiritual relay, a sensor relay, had clicked inside me, and it had closed him off from me

I became aware of the work of this internal sensor relay as a constant, inborn trait.

And always that secret sensor relay, for whose creation I deserved not the least bit of credit, worked even before I remembered it was there, worked at the first sight of a human face and eyes, at the first sound of a voice—