The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The hostility of the surrounding population, encouraged by the authorities, became the prin...

Beat up your submissive enemies one at a time! Somehow this is a very familiar law. It is what Hitler did. It is what Stalin did.

Our newspapers are filled with reports on production victories which are a big bore to everyone, but you will find no reports of trials or crime in them. (After all, according to the Progressive Doctrine, criminal activity arises only from the presence of classes; we have no classes in our country, therefore there is no crime and therefore you cannot write about it in the press! We simply cannot afford to give the American newspapers evidence that we have not fallen behind the United States in criminal activity!)

It was the same with criminal activity as it was with malaria. It was simply announced one day that it no longer existed in our country, and from then on it became impossible to treat it or even to diagnose it.

the children were softheartedly left in their own homes and on their own farms. The children looked after the orchards and vegetable gardens themselves, milked their goats, assiduously studied at school, and sent their school grades to their parents on Solovki, together with assurances that they were prepared to suffer for God as their mothers had. (And, of course, the Party soon gave them this opportunity.) Considering the instructions to “disunite” exiled children and their parents, how many of these kids must there have been even back in the twenties? And who will ever tell us of their fate? . . .

Comrade Molotov, once the second-ranking man in the state, declared at the Sixth Congress of the Soviets of the U.S.S.R.: “We did this earlier. We are doing it now. And we are going to go on doing it in the future. It is profitable to society. It is useful to the criminals.”

“There were many prisoners prepared to grovel for a bread ration or a puff of makhorka smoke. I was dying, but I kept my soul pure: I always called a spade a spade.”

But from the screen they kept drumming into the audience the moral of the film: The result is what counts, and the result is not in your favor.

The Nuremberg Trials have to be regarded as one of the special achievements of the twentieth century: they killed the very idea of evil, though they killed very few of the people who had been infected with it.

All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I . . . have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!” (And from beyond the grave come replies: It is very well for you to say that—when you came out of it alive!)

And how is it that genuine religious believers survived in camp (as we mentioned more than once)?

How could one not envy those people? Were circumstances more favorable for them? By no means! It is a well-known fact that the “nuns” were kept only with prostitutes and thieves at penalty camps. And yet who was there among the religious believers whose soul was corrupted? They died—most certainly, but . . . they were not corrupted.

He was subjected on all sides to the camp philosophy, to the camp corruption of soul, but he was incapable of adopting it. In the Kemerovo camps (Antibess) the security chief kept trying to recruit him as a stoolie. Grigoryev replied to him quite honestly and candidly: “I find it quite repulsive to talk to you. You will find many willing without me.”

So wouldn’t it be more correct to say that no camp can corrupt those who have a stable nucleus, who do not accept that pitiful ideology which holds that “human beings are created for happiness,” an ideology which is done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel?

But even when all the main things about the Gulag Archipelago are written, read, and understood, will there be anyone even then who grasps what our freedom was like? What sort of a country it was that for whole decades dragged that Archipelago about inside itself? It was my fate to carry inside me a tumor the size of a large man’s fist. This tumor swelled and distorted my stomach, hindered my eating and sleeping, and I was always conscious of it (though it did not constitute even one-half of one percent of my body, whereas within the country as a whole the Archipelago constituted 8 percent). But the horrifying thing was not that this tumor pressed upon and displaced adjacent organs. What was most terrifying about it was that it exuded poisons and infected the whole body. And in this same way our whole country was infected by the poisons of the Archipelago. And whether it will ever be able to get rid of them someday, only God knows.

You might almost think that it was by ordinary workers, by men who shift heavy loads, by collective farmers. Nobody has the courage to say: “The Party committed them! Our irremovable and irresponsible leaders committed them!”

How does Krylenko’s dictum go? “In our eyes every crime is the product of a particular social system!” In this case—of your system, comrades! Don’t forget your own doctrine!

This chapter, which touches on several themes, including Russian-Ukrainian relations, in the end focuses on the increasing spirit of resistance

Such were the circumstances in which Tolstoi came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom.

The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society.

I realized that I was not the only one, that I was party to a great secret, a secret maturing in other lonely breasts like mine on the scattered islands of the Archipelago, to reveal itself in years to come, perhaps when we were dead, and to merge into the Russian literature of the future.

“How beautiful are the grasses of the earth! But even these the Creator has given to man for a carpet under his feet. How much more beautiful, then, must we be than they!”

There is no room in this book for his complicated life story. But the urge to escape had been with him from birth. As a small boy he had run away from boarding school in Bryansk to “America”—down the Desna in a rowboat. He had climbed the iron gates of the Pyatigorsk orphanage in his underwear in midwinter, and run away to his grandmother.

“My wife and I had tickets for The Count of Monte Cristo and should be watching it right now. He fought for freedom, and I shall never accept defeat.”

Like all embarrassing events in our history—which means three-quarters of what really happened—these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join. Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes—so that the risings have already become a myth, although some of them happened only fifteen and others only ten years ago. (No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. There you’re dealing in thousands of years. . . .) When it can no longer disturb any living person,

Perhaps we (no, not we ourselves) shall learn at the same time about the legendary rising in 1948 at public works site No. 501, where the Sivaya Maska-Salekhard railway was under construction. It was legendary because everybody in the camps talked about it in whispers, but no one really knew anything. Legendary also because it broke out not in the Special Camp system, where the mood and the grounds for it by now existed, but in a Corrective Labor Camp, where people were isolated from each other by fear of informers and trampled under foot by thieves, where even their right to be “politicals” was spat upon, and where a prison mutiny therefore seemed inconceivable.

And the wolves understood that we were not the sheep we used to be.

Our little island had experienced an earthquake—and ceased to belong to the Archipelago.

A war of kites in the second half of the twentieth century! And all to silence a word of truth.

Some quietly calculated that they were not really involved, and need not be if they went on being careful. Some were newly married (what is more, with a proper religious ceremony—a Western Ukrainian girl, for instance, will not marry without one, and thanks to Gulag’s thoughtfulness, there were priests of all religions there). For these newlyweds the bitter and the sweet succeeded each other with a rapidity which ordinary people never experience in their slow lives. They observed each day as their last, and retribution delayed was a gift from heaven each morning.

Dying peasants roamed the town, but no one could take a single one of them into his home, feed him, or carry tea out to him: the militia seized local inhabitants who tried to do so and took away their passports. A starving man would stagger along the street, stumble, fall—and die. But even the dead could not be picked up (besides the militia, plainclothesmen went around on the lookout for acts of kindness).

“Instead of going to the cinema or to dances, I used to read the Bible and say my prayers—and just for that you are taking my freedom from me. Yes, to be free is a great happiness, but to be free from sin is a greater still.

In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others. And if there are not many such different scales of values in the world, there are at least several; one for evaluating events near at hand, another for events far away; aging societies possess one, young societies another; unsuccessful people one, successful people another. The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values.

Such people—and there are many in today’s world—elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today—and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)

quarter of a century ago, in the great hopes of mankind, the United Nations was born. Alas, in an immoral world, this too grew up to be immoral. It is not a United Nations organization but a United Governments organization where all governments stand equal; those which are freely elected, those imposed forcibly, and those which have seized power with weapons.

Relying on the mercenary partiality of the majority, the UN jealously guards the freedom of some nations and neglects the freedom of others. As a result of an obedient vote it declined to undertake the investigation of private appeals—the groans, screams and beseechings of humble individual plain people—not large enough a catch for such a great organization. The UN made no effort to make the Declaration of Human Rights, its best document in twenty-five years, into an obligatory condition of membership confronting the governments.

Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence.

Prussian Nights: A Poem