The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Let none at this festive table forget that political prisoners are on hunger-strike this very day in defence of rights that have been curtailed or trampled underfoot.”

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how

many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible e...

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.

That’s what arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.

The “jurists” dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.

And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain

they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

They had a total plan which had to be fulfilled in a hurry, and there was no one available to send out into the city—and here was this woman already in their hands!

The majority sit quietly and dare to hope.

Since you aren’t guilty, then how can

they arrest you? It’s ...

You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.

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

we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse.)

They were three honest, openhearted soldiers—people of a kind I had become attached to during the war years because I myself was more complex and worse.

“We are

not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of red terror.”

In May, 1920, came the well-known decree of the Central Committee “on Subversive Activity in the Rear.” We know from experience that every such decree is a call for a new wave of widespread arrests; it is the outward sign of such a wave.

These arrests were not even reported in the press.

A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda!

(Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.)

All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given.

It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe.

Like raging beasts, abandoning every concept of “humanity,” abandoning all humane principles which had evolved

through the millennia, the authorities began to round up the very best farmers and their families, and to drive them, stripped of their possessions, naked, into the northern wastes, into the tundra and the taiga.

There was no section in Article 58 which was interpreted as broadly and with so ardent a revolutionary conscience as Section 10. Its definition was: “Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet power . . . and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content.”

Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like an epidemic. Just as people transmit an epidemic infection from one to another without knowing it, by such innocent means as a handshake, a breath, handing someone something, so, too, they passed on the infection of inevitable arrest by a handshake, by a breath, by a chance meeting on the street. For if you are destined to confess tomorrow that you organized an underground group to poison the city’s water supply, and if today I shake hands with you on the street,

that means I, too, am doomed.

In 1941 the Germans went round Taganrog, cutting it off so swiftly that prisoners were left in freight wagons at the railway station where they had been brought to be evacuated. What should one do with them? Certainly not set them free nor leave them to the Germans. Oil tank trucks were rushed to the station, and the wagons were drenched with oil and set on fire. All the prisoners were burned alive.

(Some of them were not arrested immediately. Entire families were encouraged to return to the homeland as free persons, but once back in Russia they were separated and sent into exile or taken to prison.)

this massive handing over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death.

The American authorities did the same: in Bavaria as well as on the U.S. territory, they delivered tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to a cruel fate, turning them over to the Soviets against their will.

At war’s end and for many years after, there flowed uninterruptedly an abundant wave of Ukrainian nationalists.

one tragicomedy hitherto unheard of even in Stalinist antijustice—that of the repeaters.

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been

told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s

plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone...

As long ago as 1919 the chief method used by the interrogator was a revolver on the desk.

through subordinate clauses and minor paragraphs of newspaper articles, which treated the subject as if it had long been widely known to all.

Like medieval torturers, our interrogators, prosecutors, and judges agreed to accept the confession of the accused as the chief proof of guilt.

Thus, like a jackal, he left himself an escape hole, so that he could, if he wanted, beat a retreat and write about “dizziness from success.” After all, for the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken, and, even with all his strength and power, Stalin could not be absolutely sure of success.

Under the “harsh laws” of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse to testify. And even if they gave testimony at a preliminary investigation, they could choose to repudiate it and refuse to permit it to be used in court. And, curiously enough, kinship or acquaintance with a criminal was never in itself considered evidence.

One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved. (Oh, how foresighted was the saying: “A man’s family are his enemies.”)

The fact is that the interrogators like some diversion in their monotonous work, and so they vie in thinking up new ideas.

Those first hours are passing when everything inside him is still ablaze from the unstilled storm in his heart.