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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Since that time ten years have passed; then fifteen. The grass has grown thick over the grave of my youth. I served out my term and even “eternal exile” as well. And nowhere—neither in the “cultural education” sections of the camps, nor in district libraries, nor even in medium-sized cities, have I seen with my own eyes, held in my own hands, been able to buy, obtain, or even ask for the Code of Soviet law!21 And of the hundreds of prisoners I knew who had gone through interrogation and trial, and more than once too, who had served sentences in camp and in exile, none had ever seen the Code or held it in his hand! It was only when both codes were thirty-five years old and on the point of being replaced by new ones that I saw them, two little paperback brothers, the UK or Criminal Code, and the UPK or Code of Criminal Procedure, on a newsstand in the Moscow subway (because they were outdated, it had been decided to release them for general circulation). I read them today touched with emotion. For example, the UPK—the Code of Criminal Procedure: “Article 136: The interrogator does not have the right to extract testimony or a confession from an accused by means of compulsion and threats.” (It was as though they had foreseen it!) “Article 111: The interrogator is obliged to establish clearly all the relevant facts, both those tending toward acquittal and any which might lessen the accused’s measure of guilt.”