The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This action was, in fact, explained openly (Latsis, in the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918): “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.”

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 sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.

he made existence contingent on consciousness, thereby violating all the Marxist-Leninist rules!).

“In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline of the stick on which serfdom was based, nor the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based.”

But as one of his eternal, disastrous traits the human being is incapable of grasping the ratio of an object to its price.

Work well and you, too, will be buried in a wooden coffin.

Vyshinsky: “work, the miracle worker which transforms people from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes”? If there were a crane … then what about the miracle worker? If there were a crane … then these women would simply wallow in insignificance!

Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window, or slitting a pocket, or your neighbor’s suitcase being ripped open—shut your eyes! Walk by! You didn’t see anything! That’s how the thieves have trained us—the thieves and our laws! There is one more important feature of our public life which helps thieves and bandits prosper—fear of publicity. Our newspapers are filled with reports on production victories which are a big bore to everyone, but you will find no reports of trials or crime in them. (After all, according to the Progressive Doctrine, criminal activity arises only from the presence of classes; we have no classes in our country, therefore there is no crime and therefore you cannot write about it in the press! We simply cannot afford to give the American newspapers evidence that we have not fallen behind the United States in criminal activity!)

The result is what counts, and the result is not in your favor.

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. 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.

Tolstoi came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom.

Jazdik, a Polish driver from the Anders army (he vividly summarized his life story with the help of his unmatching boots—“one from Hitler, one from Stalin”);

The old camp mentality—you die first, I’ll wait a bit; there is no justice, so forget it; that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it will be—also began to disappear. A bold thought, a desperate thought, a thought to raise a man up: how could things be changed so that instead of us running from them, they would run from us? Once the question was put, once a certain number of people had thought of it and put it into words, and a certain number had listened to them, the age of escapes was over. The age of rebellion had begun.

The kites were also shot at, but holing was less damaging to them than to the balloons. The enemy soon discovered that sending up counter-kites to tangle strings with them was cheaper than keeping a crowd of warders on the run. A war of kites in the second half of the twentieth century! And all to silence a word of truth.

Our country as well as our European neighbors keep silent about the six million people who were subsequently starved to death during the famine artificially brought about by the Bolsheviks.

Adamova-Sliozberg has a moving story about meeting a girl called Motya, who was jailed in 1936 for leaving her place of banishment without permission to go to her native village, Svetlovidovo near Tarussa, two thousand kilometers on foot! Sportsmen are given medals for that sort of thing. She had been exiled with her parents in 1929 when she was a little schoolgirl, and deprived of schooling forever. Her teacher’s pet name for her was “Motya, our little Edison”: the child was not only an excellent pupil, but had an inventive turn of mind, had rigged up a sort of turbine worked by a stream, and invented other things for the school. After seven years she felt an urge to look just once more at the log walls of her unattainable school—and for that “little Edison” went to prison and then to a camp.

Many of the children had already died a wretched death on the cruel journey. This was the nub of the plan: the peasant’s seed must perish together with the adults. Since Herod was no more, only the Vanguard Doctrine has shown us how to destroy utterly—down to the very babes. Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all. It

“It’s your fatherland—you defend it, you dung-eaters! The proletariat has no fatherland!” Marx’s exact words, I believe.

freedom and ran with it to some lonely place. “While in the camp almost all my closest comrades thought, as I did, that if ever God allowed us to leave the camp alive, we would not live in towns, or even in villages, but somewhere in the depths of the forest. We would find work as foresters, rangers, or failing that, as herdsmen, and stay as far away as we could from people, politics, and all the snares and delusions of the world.” (V. V. Pospelov)

History is forever springing surprises even on the most perspicacious of us.

one of the Kengir Camp Divisions was compelled to deliver the following address from the platform: “Men!” (In those few short years, from 1954 to 1956, they found it possible to call the prisoners “men.”) “You hurt the feelings of the supervisory staff and the convoy troops by shouting ‘Beria-ites’ at them! Please stop it.” To which the diminutive V. G. Vlasov replied: “Your feelings have been hurt in the last few months. But I’ve heard nothing but ‘Fascist’ from your guards for eighteen years. Do you think we have no feelings?” And so the major promised to cut out the abusive word “Fascist.” A fair trade.

I must explain that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time! In September, 1965, when work on the Archipelago was at its most intensive, I suffered a setback: my archive was raided and a novel impounded. At this point the parts of the Archipelago already written, and the materials for the other parts, were scattered, and never reassembled: I could not take the risk, especially when all the names were given correctly. I kept jotting down reminders to myself to check this and remove that, and traveled from place to place with these bits of paper. The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature. Take the book for what it is.