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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For a contemporary reader, the book brilliantly evokes a mentality which no longer exists, and which is increasingly difficult to describe or explain: the atmosphere of constant fear; the constant temptation of betrayal; the ubiquity of secret police; the reversal of “normal” values; the generalized cruelty that permeated the culture of the Gulag, and of the Soviet Union itself.

Except of course in Communist China, Notth Korea and Cuba (oh, and modern Russia these days)

Now that’s what Darwin’s natural selection is. And that’s also how to grind people down with stupidity.

As the folk saying goes: If you speak for the wolf, speak against him as well. Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is our own. And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.

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?

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.

The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice. With Communist greetings, LENIN17