The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

the Gulag was not an incidental phenomenon, something which the Soviet Union could eventually eliminate or outgrow. Rather, the prison system had been an essential part of the Soviet economic and political system from the very beginning.

So threatening was the book to the French status quo that Jean-Paul Sartre himself described Solzhenitsyn as a “dangerous element.”

One has to give the Organs their due: in an age when public speeches, the plays in our theaters, and women’s fashions all seem to have come off assembly lines, arrests can be of the most varied kind.

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.

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!

Who was arrested in the “gold” wave? All those who, at one time or another, fifteen years before, had had a private “business,” had been involved in retail trade, had earned wages at a craft, and could have, according to the GPU’s deductions, hoarded gold.

Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58. . . .

The main waves came from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia; there were fewer from Austria and Germany. In the other countries of Eastern Europe, there were hardly any Russians.

But, having reached 1947, we cannot remain silent about one of the most grandiose of Stalin’s decrees. We have already mentioned the famous law of “Seven-Eight” or “Seven-eighths,” on the basis of which they arrested people right and left—for taking a stalk of grain, a cucumber, two small potatoes, a chip of wood, a spool of thread—all of whom got ten years.

A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood began to ooze through your pores.

And in Georgia in 1926 they used lighted cigarettes to burn the hands of prisoners under interrogation. In Metekhi Prison they pushed prisoners into a cesspool in the dark.

We are therefore forced to conclude that no list of tortures and torments existed in printed form for the guidance of interrogators! Instead, all that was required was for every Interrogation Department to supply the tribunal within a specified period with a stipulated number of rabbits who had confessed everything. And it was simply stated, orally but often, that any measures and means employed were good, since they were being used for a lofty purpose; that no interrogator would be made to answer for the death of an accused; and that the prison doctor should interfere as little as possible with the course of the investigation.

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.

You have a power over all the people in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater than that of the military commander, or factory director, or secretary of the district Communist Party.

Organs—that flexible, unitary organism inhabiting a nation as a tapeworm inhabits a human body.

The passion for gain was their universal passion. After all, in the absence of any checking up, such power was inevitably used for personal enrichment. One would have had to be holy to refrain!

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?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Do you think you can build a just society on a foundation of self-serving and envious people?

But no; that’s not the way it is! 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.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

That is the ultimate height a trial can attain: when evil is so utterly condemned that even the criminal is revolted by it.

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!

Spring promises everyone happiness—and tenfold to the prisoner. Oh, April sky! It didn’t matter that I was in prison. Evidently, they were not going to shoot me. And in the end I would become wiser here. I would come to understand many things here, Heaven! I would correct my mistakes yet, O Heaven, not for them but for you, Heaven! I had come to understand those mistakes here, and I would correct them!

I acquired a new capability from him: to accept patiently and purposefully things that had never had any place in my own plans and had, it seemed, no connection at all with the clearly outlined direction of my life.

What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers—is that really a Motherland?

And it was we who were now in disgrace, only because we had survived.

Sometimes we try to lie but our tongue will not allow us to.

“The Vlasov movement does not consider itself bound for life and for death to Germany; there are within it strong pro-English feelings, and they are thinking about a change of course. It is not a national socialist movement, and they simply do not recognize the existence of the Jewish problem.”

The hope kept glimmering, or rather burning high, that at this time, after the end of the war, the powerful English and American Allies would ask Stalin to change his domestic policy. The armies coming from the West and from the East were getting closer and closer; they might well clash over Hitler’s crushed remains, and that would be the time when the West could gain by saving and using the anti-Bolshevik Russians. The West simply had to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind.

Most of the American military commanders were amazed to learn about the existence of Russians who were not Soviets; they thought it quite natural to hand them all over to the Soviet state.

“The hunger strike as a method of resistance no longer exists,” they proclaimed to Yekaterina Olitskaya in 1932, and they said the same thing to many others.

All this is happening right next to you, you can almost touch it, but it’s invisible (and you can shut your eyes to it too).

Probably this type of railroad car really was first used under Stolypin, in other words before 1911.

when everything in our life became uniform.

So here’s the way it all works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet.

Own nothing! Possess nothing! Buddha and Christ taught us this, and the Stoics and the Cynics. Greedy though we are, why can’t we seem to grasp that simple teaching? Can’t we understand that with property we destroy our soul?

It is a rare zek who has not known from three to five transit prisons and camps; many remember a dozen or so, and the sons of Gulag can count up to fifty of them without the slightest difficulty.

You must realize, dear sir, that every town has to have its own transit prison.

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?

In the first months after the October Revolution Lenin was already demanding “the most decisive, draconic measures to tighten up discipline.” And are draconic measures possible—without prison?

According to the estimates of émigré Professor of Statistics Kurganov, this “comparatively easy” internal repression cost us, from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of . . . sixty-six million—66,000,000—lives. We, of course, cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official. And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons.

The sentences turned out to be too light, and they made hardly any use at all of the progressive principle of forced labor. In February, 1918, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Comrade Lenin, demanded that the number of places of imprisonment be increased and that repression of criminals be intensified, and in May, already going over to concrete guidance, he gave instructions that the sentence for bribery must be not less than ten years of prison and ten years of forced labor in addition, i.e., a total of twenty years. This scale might seem pessimistic at first: would forced labor really still be necessary after twenty years? But we know that forced labor turned out to be a very long-lived measure, and that even after fifty years it would still be extremely popular.

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.”