The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The collective authors do not simply keep silent about the deaths on the Belomor Canal during construction. They do not follow the cowardly recipe of half-truths. Instead, they write directly that no one died during construction.

In their opinion all those driven to work on the canal would never have found their paths in life if the employers had not assigned them to unite the White Sea with the Baltic. Because, after all, “Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work than wood.”

Deeply touched, Gorky shouted to them from the rostrum: “After all, any capitalist steals more than all of you combined!” The thieves roared with approval, flattered.

They say that in February-March, 1938, a secret instruction was circulated in the NKVD: Reduce the number of prisoners. (And not by releasing them, of course.)

Here’s what the wartime camp was: more work and less food and less heat and worse clothes and ferocious discipline and more severe punishment—and that still wasn’t all.

The camps are not merely the “dark side” of our postrevolutionary life but very nearly the very liver of events.

Engels discovered that the human being had arisen not through the perception of a moral idea and not through the process of thought, but out of happenstance and meaningless work (an ape picked up a stone—and with this everything began). Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time (“Critique of the Gotha Program”), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred here to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructure!)—but productive labor. He himself had never in his life taken a pick in hand.

And for his followers everything now fell into place: To compel a prisoner to labor every day (sometimes fourteen hours at a time, as at the Kolyma mine faces) was humane and would lead to his correction.

Philosophers, psychologists, medical men, and writers could have observed in our camps, as nowhere else, in detail and on a large scale the special process of the narrowing of the intellectual and spiritual horizons of a human being, the reduction of the human being to an animal and the process of dying alive.

And thus it is that I am writing this book solely from a sense of obligation—because too many stories and recollections have accumulated in my hands and I cannot allow them to perish. I do not expect to see it in print anywhere with my own eyes; and I have little hope that those who managed to drag their bones out of the Archipelago will ever read it; and I do not at all believe that it will explain the truth of our history in time for anything to be corrected.

We have to understand them, and we won’t scoff at them. It was painful for them to fall. “When you cut down trees, the chips will fly!” was the cheerful proverb of justification. And then suddenly they themselves were chopped off with all the other chips.

How could it be anything but hard! It was more than the human heart could bear: to fall beneath the beloved ax—then to have to justify its wisdom. But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.

But when this elegant theory came down to earth in camps, here is what emerged from it: The most inveterate and hardened thieves were given unbridled power on the islands of the Archipelago, in camp districts, and in camps—power over the population of their own country, over the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia, power they had never before had in history, never in any state in all the world, power which they couldn’t even dream of out in freedom.

This, properly speaking, was the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.

There was unfortunately no other Pobozhi to tell how before the war another railroad was built—from Kotlas to Vorkuta, where beneath each tie two heads were left. Now who would have done that without prisoners? And how on earth could the camps not be profitable?

suicide is always a bankrupt, always a human being in a blind alley, a human being who has gambled his life and lost and is without the will to continue the struggle. If these millions of helpless and pitiful vermin still did not put an end to themselves—this meant some kind of invincible feeling was alive inside them. Some very powerful idea. This was their feeling of universal innocence. It was the sense of an ordeal of the entire people—like the Tatar yoke.

But simply “to survive” does not yet mean “at any price.” “At any price” means: at the price of someone else.

Let us admit the truth: At that great fork in the camp road, at that great divider of souls, it was not the majority of the prisoners that turned to the right.

It has been known for many centuries that prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being.

Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience. You are ascending. . .

And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

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?

Revolution is often rash in its generosity. It is in such a hurry to disown so much.

Russia has stood for eleven centuries, known many foes, waged many wars. But—have there been many traitors in Russia? Did traitors ever leave the country in crowds? I think not. I do not think that even their foes ever accused the Russians of being traitors, turncoats, renegades, though they lived under a regime inimical to ordinary working people. Then came the most righteous war in our history, to a country with a supremely just social order—and tens and hundreds of thousands of our people stood revealed as traitors. Where did they all come from? And why?

Even in 1943 tens of thousands of refugees from the Soviet provinces trailed along behind the retreating German army—anything was better than remaining under Communism.

they quite blatantly borrowed from the Nazis a practice which had proved valuable to them—the substitution of a number for the prisoner’s name, his “I,” his human individuality, so that the difference between one man and another was a digit more or less in an otherwise identical row of figures.

Whether it is Ivan the Terrible, Alexis the Gentle, heavy-handed Peter, velvety Catherine, or even Alexander II—until the Great February Revolution, all the Tsars right up to the Crimean War knew one thing only—how to crush.

Seven attempts were made on the life of Alexander II himself.

Such were the circumstances in which Tolstoi came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom. Of course, no one is in need of freedom if he already has it. We can agree with him that political freedom is not what matters in the end. The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom.

But how could I write in a Special Camp? Memory was the only hidey-hole in which you could keep what you had written and carry it through all the searches and journeys under escort.

Until the end of my sentence (by which time I had accumulated 12,000 lines) and after that in my place of banishment, this necklace helped me to write and remember.

As for the theory of escape—it is very simple. You do it any way you can.

The wholesome universal rule “Don’t kick a man when he’s down” did not apply in Stalin’s katorga! If a man was down, that’s just what they did—kicked him. And if he was on his feet, they shot him.

Murders now followed one another in quicker succession than escapes in the best period.

Out of five thousand men about a dozen were killed, but with every stroke of the knife more and more of the clinging, twining tentacles fell away. A remarkable fresh breeze was blowing! On the surface, we were prisoners living in a camp just as before, but in reality we had become free—free because for the very first time in our lives, we had started saying openly and aloud all that we thought! No one who has not experienced this transition can imagine what it is like!

While in the other scale lay nothing but a single knife—but that knife was meant for you, if you gave in! It was meant for you alone, in the breast, and not sometime or other, but at dawn tomorrow, and all the forces of the Cheka-MGB could not save you from it!

Foremen started escaping into the Disciplinary Barracks—hiding behind stone walls! Not only they, but bloodsucking work assigners, stoolies on the brink of exposure or, something told them, next on the list, suddenly took fright and ran for it!

Purged of human filth, delivered from spies and eavesdroppers, we looked about and saw, wide-eyed, that . . . we were thousands! that we were . . . politicals! that we could resist!

We could now say out loud, without looking nervously around, whatever we liked—all those things which had seethed inside us (and freedom of speech, even if it was only there in the camp, even though it had come so late, was a delight!).

“Who’s doing the slashing?” This made the whole scheme as clear as daylight. They were using torture! Not the dog pack themselves—they probably had no authorization for it, and might run into trouble, so they had entrusted the stoolies with the job: find your murderers yourselves!

The food which we had refused, and which we had always thought so beggarly, was a mirage of plenty in the feverish dreams of famished men.

This was a hunger strike called by men schooled for decades in the law of the jungle: “You die first and I’ll die later.” Now they were reborn, they struggled out of their stinking swamp, they consented to die today, all of them together, rather than to go on living in the same way tomorrow.

This, too, is a phenomenon which has never been adequately studied: we do not know the law that governs sudden surges of mass emotion, in defiance of all reason.

In that fateful year, 1953, the fall of Beria made it urgent for the security ministry to prove its devotion and its usefulness in some signal way. But how? The mutinies which the security men had hitherto considered a menace now shone like a beacon of salvation.

Truth was unrecognizable and repulsive to them if it manifested itself not in secret instructions from higher authority but on the lips of common people.

Disciplinary officers, prosecutors, Party officials, and all the rest of them—Party members to a man, of course—laughed at the bizarre spectacle of the impassioned savages with pikes.

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.

The tanks crushed everyone in their way.

The number of those killed or wounded was about six hundred, according to the stories, but according to figures given by the Kengir Division’s Production Planning Section, which became known some months later, it was more than seven hundred.