The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For a long time I’ve been hanging on to a theme for a story to be called “The Spoiled Wife.” But it looks as though I will never get the chance to write it, so here it is. In a certain Far Eastern aviation unit before the Korean War, a certain lieutenant colonel returned from an assignment to find his wife in a hospital. The doctors did not hide the truth from him: her sexual organs had been injured by perverted sexual practices. The lieutenant colonel got in to see his wife and wrung from her the admission that the man responsible was the osobist in their unit, a senior lieutenant. (It would seem, by the way, that this incident had not occurred without some cooperation on her part.) In a rage the lieutenant colonel ran to the osobist’s office, took out his pistol, and threatened to kill him. But the senior lieutenant very quickly forced him to back down and leave the office defeated and pitiful. He threatened to send the lieutenant colonel to rot in the most horrible of camps, where he’d pray to be released from life without further torment, and he ordered him to take his wife back just as he found her—with an injury that was to some extent incurable—and to live with her, not to dare get a divorce, and not to dare complain. And all this was the price for not being arrested! The lieutenant colonel did just as he was ordered. (I was told the story by the osobist’s chauffeur.) There must have been many such cases, because the abuse of power was particularly attractive in thi...