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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Spy mania was one of the fundamental aspects of Stalin’s insanity. It seemed to Stalin that the country was swarming with spies. All the Chinese who lived in the Soviet Far East were convicted as spies—Article 58-6—and were taken to the northern camps, where they perished. The same fate had awaited Chinese participants in the Soviet civil war—if they hadn’t cleared out in time. Several hundred thousand Koreans were exiled to Kazakhstan, all similarly accused of spying. All Soviet citizens who at one time or another had lived abroad, who at one time or another had hung around Intourist hotels, who at one time or another happened to be photographed next to a foreigner, or who had themselves photographed a city building (the Golden Gate in Vladimir) were accused of the same crime. Those who stared too long at railroad tracks, at a highway bridge, at a factory chimney were similarly charged. All the numerous foreign Communists stranded in the Soviet Union, all the big and little Comintern officials and employees, one after another, without any individual distinctions, were charged first of all with espionage.6