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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In a...

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

So many proposed remedies s to evil or perceived injustices or claimed inequities is to separate people or exclude people or idengify just the bad ones.

The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

for mercy one must have wisdom.

One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly.

And this meant that “it was not the leaders who were to blame. . . . Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had refigured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan”—which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones who calculated! If the planning turned out to be inflated, the spetsy were the ones to blame. Because the figures did not jibe, “this was the fault of the spetsy, not of the Council of Labor and Defense” and “not even of the responsible men in charge of Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee.”

called him an enemy of the people. Let us note that this term already existed.

Our favorite prosecutor pulled out his canonical weapon of last resort: “Ultimately, failure to denounce is a category of crime applying to all the defendants without exception, and it must be considered as having been proved.”29

We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the arguments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.

(That was the classic formula of the philistine in those years: “There was probably something to it. . . . In our country they don’t arrest people for nothing.”

The Revolution had hastened to rename everything, so that everything would seem new.

They suffered from being in stuffy, overcrowded cells. Into a cell intended for solitary confinement they would shove seven (never fewer), sometimes ten, fifteen, even twenty-eight prisoners awaiting execution. (Strakhovich in Leningrad, 1942.) And they remained packed in this way for weeks or even months! What kind of nightmare was your seven to be hanged? People in these circumstances don’t think about execution, and it’s not being shot they worry about, but how to move their legs, how to turn over, how to get a gulp of air.

It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.

“General-assignment work—that is the main and basic work performed in any given camp. Eighty percent of the prisoners work at it, and they all die off. All. And then they bring new ones in to take their places and they again are sent to general-assignment work. Doing this work, you expend the last of your strength. And you are always hungry. And always wet. And shoeless.

“Where are our things?” they cried. “Your things you left at home!” some chief or other bellowed at them. “In camp nothing belongs to you. Here in camp we have communism! Forward march, leader!” And if it was “communism,” then what was there for them to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.