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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!

if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?

“They are executing bishops, priests, monks, and nuns who are guilty of nothing, on the basis of indiscriminate charges of indefinite and vaguely counterrevolutionary offenses.”

“Propaganda is an attempt to prepare a mood preliminary to preparing a revolt in the future.”

Terror is a method of persuasion.

From this fourth charge a fifth followed inexorably: the SR’s had intended to procure the technical equipment for such an explosion with money received from Allied representatives. (They had wanted to take money from the Entente in order not to give gold away to Kaiser Wilhelm.) And this was the extreme of treason!

Why shouldn’t the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity? (And, excepting only the question of the moral leadership of society, is not this precisely where all social cybernetics is leading today? Is it not true that professional politicians are boils on the neck of society that prevent it from turning its head and moving its arms?) And why shouldn’t engineers have political views? After all, politics is not even a science, but is an empirical area not susceptible to description by any mathematical apparatus; furthermore, it is an area subject to human egotism and blind passion.

sentenced him in broken Russian: “To be shot within twenty-four hours.” There was a stir in the hall: But it has been abolished! Prosecutor Krylenko explained: “What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.” And they did shoot him.)

“For myself, I’ve decided one thing only. I’m going to tell the executioner: ‘You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren’t for you willing executioners, there would be no death sentences!’ So then let him kill me, the rat!”

“It is strange. I was condemned for lack of faith in the victory of socialism in our country. But can even Kalinin himself believe in it if he thinks camps will still be needed in our country twenty years from now?”