The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering.

Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws. But… before your own conscience? But… in relation to other individuals?

Why do they prosper?

(And 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.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!”

I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

In the camp situation human beings never remain human beings—the camps were created to this end. All human emotions—love, friendship, envy, love of one’s fellows, mercy, thirst for fame, honesty—fell away from us along with the meat of our muscles…. We had no pride, no vanity, and even jealousy and passion seemed to be Martian concepts…. The only thing left was anger—the most enduring of human emotions.

But in camp, it would appear, you do not have that path. Bread is not issued in equal pieces, but thrown onto a pile—go grab! Knock down your neighbors, and tear it out of their hands! The quantity of bread issued is such that one or two people have to die for each who survives.

You hate labor—it is your principal enemy. You hate your companions—rivals in life and death.

Camp life was organized in such a way that envy pecked at your soul from all sides, even the best-defended soul.

After all, this was one of the main streams of camp corruption: the enlistment of prisoners in the trusty guards!

Why repeat about each and every house that in subzero weather it loses its warmth? It is much more surprising to note that there are houses which retain their warmth even in subzero weather. And how is it that genuine religious believers survived in camp

They died—most certainly, but … they were not corrupted.

And how can one explain that certain unstable people found faith right there in camp, that they were strengthened by it, and that they survived uncorrupted?

And even more: because of the astounding influence on his body of his bright and spotless human spirit (though no one today believes in any such influence, no one understands it) the organism of Grigory Ivanovich, who was no longer young (close to fifty), grew stronger in camp; his earlier rheumatism of the joints disappeared completely, and he became particularly healthy after the typhus from which he recovered: in winter he went out in cotton sacks, making holes in them for his head and his arms—and he did not catch cold!

Those people became corrupted in camp who before camp had not been enriched by any morality at all or by any spiritual upbringing.

“In camp, existence did not determine consciousness, but just the opposite: consciousness and steadfast faith in the human essence decided whether you became an animal or remained a human being.”

Yes, the camps were calculated and intended to corrupt. But this didn’t mean that they succeeded in crushing everyone.

(though it did not constitute even one-half of one percent of my body, whereas within the country as a whole the Archipelago constituted 8 percent).

But the horrifying thing was not that this tumor pressed upon and displaced adjacent organs. What was most terrifying about it was that it exuded poisons and infected the whole body.

And in this same way our whole country was infected by the poisons of the Archipelago. And whether it will ever be able to get ...

For this reason I consider that literature did not exist in our country in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Because without the full truth it is not literature.

1. Constant Fear.

But any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.

Once people had invented a false life story for these questionnaires, they had to try not to get tangled up in it.

Peace of mind is something our citizens have never known.

2. Servitude.

3. Secrecy and Mistrust.

4. Universal Ignorance.

5. Squealing

6. Betrayal as a Form of Existence.

And it turned out that the least dangerous form of existence was constant betrayal.

The mildest and at the same time most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbor, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed.

And one who concealed an enemy was also an enemy! And one who abetted an enemy was also an enemy! And one who continued his friendship with an enemy was also an enemy. And the telephone of the accursed family fell silent. And in the hustle of a big city people felt as if they were in a desert.

one has to admit that this was the particular year that broke the soul of our freedom and opened it wide to corruption on a mass scale.

Every act of resistance to the government required heroism quite out of proportion to the magnitude of the act.

You would not notice these quiet departures at all. But they were, in fact, the dying of the soul of the people.

7. Corruption.

In a situation of fear and betrayal over many years people survive unharmed only in a superficial, bodily sense. ...

during the war the death rate there was running one percent per day—

at least every third or at least every fifth case was the consequence of somebody’s denunciation and that somebody was willing to provide evidence as a witness! All of them, all those murderers with ink, are still among us today. And most often they are prospering.

8. The Lie as a Form of Existence.

They have to talk! And what else but a lie?

The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie.

There is no man who has typed even one page… without lying. There is no man who has spoken from a rostum … without lying. There is no man who has spoken into a microphone … without lying.

And if the children were still little, then you had to decide what was the best way to bring them up; whether to start them off on lies instead of the truth (so that it would be easier for them to live)

9. Cruelty.