The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

By and large, the Organs had no profound reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and whom not to arrest. They merely had over-all assignments, quotas for a specific number of arrests. These quotas might be filled on an orderly basis or wholly arbitrarily.

Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are crying to be uttered aloud; and where would the uninvolved, peaceable average man come by such slogans? He simply does not know what to shout.

For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot.

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.

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!

In the Finnish War we undertook our first experiment in convicting our war prisoners as traitors to the Motherland. The first such experiment in human history; and would you believe it?—we didn’t notice!

Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.

In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke with anger here. We do not hesitate to devote to the subject page after newspaper page and hour after hour of radio time. We even stay after work to attend protest meetings and vote: “Too few! Eighty-six thousand are too few. And twenty years is too little! It must go on and on.” And during the same period, in our own country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court) about ten men have been convicted.

To stand up for the truth is nothing! For truth you have to sit in jail!

The only soldier in the world who cannot surrender is the soldier of the world’s one and only Red Army. That’s what it says in our military statutes.

For not wanting to die from a German bullet, the prisoner had to die from a Soviet bullet for having been a prisoner of war!

this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.

The West simply had to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind. But the West did not understand at all.

If you are dissatisfied with Stalin, go back home and, in the first subsequent election, do not re-elect him.

this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy.

In 1948–1949, the former Far Eastern émigrés who had until then managed to stay out of camps were scraped up to the last man.

In olden times they used to beat the drums and assemble a crowd when a person was given a life sentence. And here it’s like being on a list for a soap ration—twenty-five years and run along!”

The OSO did not claim to be handing down a sentence. It did not sentence a person but, instead, imposed an administrative penalty.

The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it.

if the actions of the accused are not covered by the Code, he can still be convicted: By analogy (What opportunities!) Simply because of origins (7-35: belonging to a socially dangerous milieu) For contacts with dangerous persons (Here’s scope for you! Who is “dangerous” and what “contacts” consist of only the judge can say.)

hunger strikes are a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and must be punished with a new prison term.

Didn’t Marx and Engels teach that the old bourgeois machinery of compulsion had to be broken up, and a new one created immediately in its place?

the machinery of compulsion were: the army (we are not surprised that the Red Army was created at the beginning of 1918); the police (the militia was inaugurated even sooner than the army); the courts (from November 22, 1917); and the prisons.

In the first months after the October Revolution Lenin was already demanding “the most decisive, draconic measures to tighten up discipline.”

“The suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that it is going to cost much less in blood . . . will be much cheaper for humanity” than the preceding suppression of the majority by the minority.

How large was the total staff of the central apparatus of the terrifying Tsarist Third Department, which runs like a strand through all the great Russian literature? At the time of its creation it had sixteen persons, and at its height it had forty-five.

The February Revolution, which opened wide the doors of the Tambov Prison, found there political prisoners in the number of . . . seven (7) persons.

In August, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in a telegram to Yevgeniya Bosh and to the Penza Provincial Executive Committee (they were unable to cope with a peasant revolt): “Lock up all the doubtful ones [not “guilty,” mind you, but doubtful—A.S.] in a concentration camp outside the city.” (And in addition “carry out merciless mass terror”—this was before the decree.)

“In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline of the stick on which serfdom was based, nor the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based.”

There is no one to tell about it either. They all died.

In the autumn of 1941, Pechorlag (the railroad camp) had a listed population of fifty thousand prisoners, and in the spring of 1942, ten thousand.

The children in a collective farm club got out of hand, had a fight, and accidentally knocked some poster or other off the wall with their backs. The two eldest were sentenced under Article 58. (On the basis of the Decree of 1935, children from the age of twelve on had full criminal responsibility for all crimes!) They also sentenced the parents for having allegedly told them to and sent them to do it.

“You today, me tomorrow!”

the Presidium issued a clarification to the Supreme Court: Children must be sentenced and the full measure of punishment applied (in other words, “the whole works”), even in cases where crimes were committed not intentionally but as a result of carelessness.

Dr. Usma knew a six-year-old boy imprisoned in a colony under 58. But that, evidently, is the record!

the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.

Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia.

The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform.

80 miles of canal were dug to a depth of over sixteen feet and a top width of 280 feet. And almost all of it with pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow.

The first and principal cause was the lack of conscientiousness of the prisoners, the negligence of those stupid slaves. Not only couldn’t you expect any socialist self-sacrifice of them, but they didn’t even manifest simple capitalist diligence.

Comrade Lenin said: Only the person who does nothing makes no mistakes.

How well we used to live! (Even if we lived badly.) But how many unused opportunities there were! When will we now make up for it? If I only manage to survive—oh, how differently, how wisely, I am going to live! The day of our future release? It shines like a rising sun! And the conclusion is: Survive to reach it! Survive! At any price!

if the children were still little, then you had to decide what was the best way to bring them up; whether to start them off on lies instead of the truth (so that it would be easier for them to live) and then to lie forevermore in front of them too; or to tell them the truth, with the risk that they might make a slip, that they might let it out, which meant that you had to instill into them from the start that the truth was murderous, that beyond the threshold of the house you had to lie, only lie, just like papa and mama.

The soul must suffer first, to know The perfect bliss of paradise. . . .

“I can’t go on anyway. Cut my throat and drink my blood.”

In the first wood they reached they found a dugout and set up house in it. They couldn’t bring themselves to leave this land of plenty. That they settled in such surroundings, that their native places did not call to them or promise them a more peaceful life, meant that their escape lacked a goal and was doomed to fail.

the ground is soft and warm under the feet of honest men, but under the feet of traitors it prickles and burns.

Lenin received (and did not refuse) his 12 rubles a month, and prices in Siberia were one-half or one-third those in Russia, so that the state’s maintenance allowance for exiles was in fact overgenerous. It enabled Lenin to spend three whole years comfortably studying the theory of revolution, not worrying at all about the source of his livelihood.

Our country as well as our European neighbors keep silent about the six million people who were subsequently starved to death during the famine artificially brought about by the Bolsheviks.