The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It seems to me that such spiritual sensors exist in many of us, but because we live in too technological and rational an age, we neglect this miracle and don’t allow it to develop.)

(Thus, very early and very clearly, I had this consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.)

One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters our ears penetrates our consciousness. Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost.

To understand the Revolution I had long since required nothing beyond Marxism. I cut myself off from everything else that came up and turned my back on it.

They passed through the prisons of the Soviet Union in vast dense gray schools like ocean herring.

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 an even more absolute and hopeless slavery.

In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced:

The English turned over to the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with a perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition.

In those same days, just as treacherously and mercilessly, the British extradited to the Yugoslav Communists thousands of their regime’s enemies who had been Great Britain’s allies in 1941! They, too, were to be shot and exterminated without trial.

It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of

We are required to concretize the eventuality: in the interest of discrediting for the future any idea of opposition, we are required to accept as having taken place what could only theoretically have taken place. After all, it could have, couldn’t it?” “It could have.” “And so it is necessary to recognize as actual what was possible; that’s all.

we have derived a naïve faith in the power of a hunger strike. But the hunger strike is a purely moral weapon. It presupposes that the jailer has not entirely lost his conscience. Or that the jailer is afraid of public opinion. Only in such circumstances can it be effective.

But outside your window even less trace of the grief which has flashed past is left in the air than fingers leave in water.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.

Look around you—there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you’ll hear.

In 1937 there were no latrine buckets in certain Siberian prisons, or there weren’t enough. Not enough of them had been made ahead of time—Siberian industry hadn’t caught up with the full scope of arrests.

That is how the millions of peasants were transported in 1929–1931. That is how they exiled Leningrad from Leningrad. That is how they populated the Kolyma in the thirties: every day Moscow, the capital of our country, belched out one such train to Sovetskaya Gavan, to Vanino Port. And each provincial capital also sent off red trainloads, but not on a daily schedule. That is how they removed the Volga German Republic to Kazakhstan in 1941, and later all the rest of the exiled nations were sent off in the same way.

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: to conceal the loading from ordinary citizens to terrorize the prisoners

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.

Therefore it was done only at night—and every night, too, each and every night, and that was the way it went for several months.

And the main thing was to undermine, to crush the prisoner’s will power so he wouldn’t think of trying to escape,

all string, cord, twine, belts, and straps because they could all be used in escaping (and that meant all kinds of straps! and so they cut off the straps which held up the artificial limb of a one-legged man—and the cripple had to carry his artificial leg on his shoulder and hop with the help of those on either side of him).

Naked prisoners approach, carrying their possessions and the clothes they’ve taken off. A mass of armed soldiers surrounds them. It doesn’t look as though they are going to be led to a prisoner transport but as though they are going to be shot immediately or put to death in a gas chamber—and in that mood a human being ceases to concern himself with his possessions.

When they unloaded a trainload from the Leningrad prisons (1942) in Solikamsk, the entire embankment was covered with corpses, and only a few got there alive.

There were many occasions when they found out who was still alive and who was dead only when they opened up the car after arriving at the Sukhobezvodnaya (Unzhlag) Station. Those who didn’t come out

And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be … worse.

“Why? Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?” And that is all that was said! But what a direction the attack had come from! To hear such words from someone born in 1923? I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside. And because of this I was unable to reply to him, and I merely asked him: “Do you believe in God?” “Of course,” he answered tranquilly.

Thus we can observe that the leading idea of the Archipelago—forced labor—had been advanced in the first month after the October Revolution.

“The suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that it is going to cost much less in blood … will be much cheaper for humanity” than the preceding suppression of the majority by the minority.

from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of… sixty-six million—66,000,000—lives.

Only on September 5, 1918, ten days after this telegram, was the Decree on the Red Terror published. In addition to the instructions on mass executions, it stated in particular: “Secure the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.”

by unloading prisons, sinking barges, and other types of mass annihilation the figure had often begun with zero and been reduced to zero over and over,

VRIDLO (an acronym meaning a “Temporary Replacement for a Horse”).

But why like this? Couldn’t they have done it at night—quietly? But why do it quietly? In that case a bullet would be wasted. In the daytime crowd the bullet had an educational function. It, so to speak, struck down ten with one shot.

“We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months—after that we don’t need him any more.”

On June 23 Gorky left Solovki. Hardly had his steamer pulled away from the pier than they shot the boy.

In other words, putting it simply, it was proposed that more camps be prepared in anticipation of the abundant arrests planned.

Nonetheless, Frenkel really did become the nerve of the Archipelago. He was one of those successful men of action whom History hungrily awaits and summons to itself. It would seem that there had been camps even before Frenkel, but they had not taken on that final and unified form which savors of perfection. Every genuine prophet arrives when he is most acutely needed. Frenkel arrived in the Archipelago just at the beginning of the metastases.

The purchasing operation came to an end, and, in gratitude, the GPU arrested him. Every wise man has enough of the simpleton in him.

his famous thesis about using up the prisoner in the first three months.

The camp as a torch of progress—

The collective authors do not simply keep silent about the deaths on the Belomor Canal during construction. They do not follow the cowardly recipe of half-truths. Instead, they write directly that no one died during construction.

They find in forced labor one of the highest forms of blazing, conscientious creativity.

“Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work than wood.”

No, it would be unjust, most unjust, unfair, to compare this most savage construction project of the twentieth century, this continental canal built “with wheelbarrow and pick,” with the Egyptian pyramids; after all, the pyramids were built with the contemporary technology!! And we used the technology of forty centuries earlier!

“And this means the maximum strengthening of corrective-labor institutions.” Entry into socialism via the maximum strengthening of prison! And this was not some satirical magazine cracking a joke either, but was said by the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union!

Just as every point is formed by the intersection of at least two lines, every event is formed by the intersection of at least two necessities—and so although on one hand our economic requirements led us to the system of camps, this by itself might have led us to labor armies, but it intersected with the theoretical justification for the camps, fortunately already formulated.

It was possible to obtain such manpower only by swallowing up one’s own sons.

The theoretical justification could not have been formulated with such conviction in the haste of those years had it not had its beginnings in the past century. Engels discovered that the human being had arisen not through the perception of a moral idea and not through the process of thought, but out of happenstance and meaningless work (an ape picked up a stone—and with this everything began). Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time (“Critique of the Gotha Program”), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred here to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructure!)—but productive labor.

Oh, “what an intelligent, farsighted humane administration from top to bottom,” as Supreme Court Judge Leibowitz of New York State wrote in Life magazine, after having visited Gulag. “In serving out his term of punishment the prisoner retains a feeling of dignity.” That is what he comprehended and saw.