The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But about the silent, treacherous Plague which starved fifteen million of our peasants to death, choosing its victims carefully and destroying the backbone and mainstay of the Russian people—about that Plague there are no books.

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.

The devastating peasant Plague began, as far as we can judge, in 1929—the compilation of murder lists, the confiscations, the deportations.

The point of it all was not to dekulakize, but to force the peasants into the kolkhoz.

It was a second Civil War—this time against the peasants. It was indeed the Great Turning Point, or as the phrase had it, the Great Break. Only we are never told what it was that broke. It was the backbone of Russia.

Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.

The plight of these peasants differed from that of all previous and subsequent Soviet exiles in that they were banished not to a center of population, a place made habitable, but to the haunt of wild beasts, into the wilderness, to man’s primitive condition.

And yet—exiles survived! Under their conditions it seems incredible—but live they did. True, when during the war there was a shortage of reckless Russian fighting power at the front, they turned among others to the “kulaks”: they must surely be Russians first and kulaks second! They were invited to leave the special settlements and the camps for the front to defend their sacred fatherland.

In 1937 some tens of thousands of those suspicious Koreans were swiftly and quietly transferred from the Far East to Kazakhstan.

This was the moment my friends and I had looked forward to even in our student days. The moment for which every zek in Gulag (except the orthodox Communists) had prayed! He’s dead, the Asiatic dictator is dead! The villain has curled up and died!

release is arrest all over again, the same sort of punishing transition from state to state, shattering your breast, the structure of your life and your ideas, and promising nothing in return.

The space between two arrests—that is what release meant throughout the forty pre-Khrushchev years.

Its physical effects, to begin with . . . Some had overstrained themselves in the fight to end their time in the camps alive. They had endured it all like men of steel, consuming for ten whole years a fraction of what the body requires; working and slaving; breaking stones half-naked in freezing weather—and never catching cold. But once their sentence was served, once the inhuman pressure from outside was lifted, the tension inside them also slackened. Such people are destroyed by a sudden drop in pressure.

If there is any happiness in the world at all, it is certainly that which comes to any zek in the first year of his life as a free man!”

Associations of former zeks gather once a year, varying the place from time to time, to drink and reminisce. “And strangely enough,” says V. P. Golitsyn, “the pictures of the past conjured up are by no means all dark and harrowing; we have many warm and pleasant memories.”

When Khrushchev, wiping the tear from his eye, gave permission for the publication of Ivan Denisovich, he was quite sure that it was about Stalin’s camps, and that he had none of his own.

When he climbed onto the Congress platform for another attack on Stalin’s tyranny, Nikita had only just allowed the screws of his very own system to be turned no less tight. And he sincerely believed that all this could be fitted together and made consistent! The camps today are as approved by the Party before the Twenty-second Congress. Six years later they are just as they were then.

We can say without exaggeration that this was a turning point in the modern history of Russia. If we leave out the Ivanovo weavers at the beginning of the thirties (theirs was a large-scale strike, but it ended without violence), the flare-up at Novocherkassk was the first time the people had spoken out in forty-one years (since Kronstadt and Tambov): unorganized, leaderless, unpremeditated, it was a cry from the soul of a people who could no longer live as they had lived.

Strike action of such boldness is unusual in the history of the Russian workers’ movement. Slogans appeared on the works building: “Down with Khrushchev!” “Use Khrushchev for sausage meat!”

“Enemies,” they say, and all is explained. In the Middle Ages it was “devils.”)

The wounded all vanished without trace; not one of them went home. Instead, the families of the wounded and the killed (who of course wanted to know what had become of their kin) were deported to Siberia.

On the Saturday following “bloody Saturday,” the town radio announced that the “workers of the Electric Locomotive Works have solemnly undertaken to fulfill their seven-year plan ahead of time.”