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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Revolution had hastened to rename everything, so that everything would seem new. Thus the death penalty was rechristened “the supreme measure”—no longer a “punishment” but a means of social defense. From the groundwork of the criminal legislation of 1924 it is clear that the supreme measure was introduced only temporarily, pending its total abolition by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. And in 1927 they actually did begin to abolish it. It was retained solely for crimes against the state and the army—Article 58 and military crimes—and, true, for banditry also. (But the broad political interpretation of “banditry” was as well known then as it is now: from a Central Asian “Basmach,” right up to a Lithuanian forest guerrilla, every armed nationalist who doesn’t agree with the central government is a “bandit,” and how could one possibly get along without that article? Similarly, any participant in a camp rebellion and any participant in an urban rebellion is also a “bandit.”) But where articles protecting private individuals were concerned, capital punishment was abolished to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. And for the fifteenth anniversary, the law of Seven-eighths was added to the roster of capital punishment—that law so vitally important to advancing socialism, which guaranteed the Soviet subject a bullet for each crumb stolen from the state’s table. As always happens at the start, they hurried to apply this law in 1932–1933 and shot peop...