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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

M. Latsis, in his popular review of the Cheka’s activity,2 gives us material for only a year and a half (1918 and half of 1919) and for only twenty provinces of Central Russia (“The figures presented here are far from complete,”3 in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389 persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine);4 counterrevolutionary organizations uncovered—412 (a fantastic figure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization throughout our history and also the general isolation of individuals in those years and the general psychological depression); the total of those arrested—87,0005 (and this figure smells of understatement). What comparison is available for purposes of evaluation? In 1907 a group of leftist leaders published a collection of essays entitled Against Capital Punishment,6 in which are listed by name all those sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia from 1826 to 1906. The editors qualify their findings with the statement that there were some additional victims, whose names remain unknown, and that the list is incomplete. (However, it is certainly not so incomplete as Latsis’ materials compiled during the Civil War.) The list totals 1,397—from which 233 persons have to be deducted because their death sentences were commuted, as do an additional 270, who were sentenced in absentia and never caught (for the most part Polish rebels who had fled to the West). That leave...