The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 Quotes

“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII

“We didn't love freedom enough. ”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books V-VII

“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.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII

“How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.

Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience,
can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and
millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer­sault from one state into another.

We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily
dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of
our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,
rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given
a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene­trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is
where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away
from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num­ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these
fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And
all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four
white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none­theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,
ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to
our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

That's all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike
bleat: "Me? What for?"

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which
shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into
omnipotent actuality.

That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day
will you be able to grasp anything else.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII

“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its subjects are free from all obligations to it.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness."
Krylenko,
speech at the Promparty trial”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism—no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“That's how the world is arranged: they can take anyone's freedom from him, without a qualm. If we want to take back the freedom which is our birthright—they make us pay with our lives and the lives of all whom we meet on the way.
They can do anything, but we cannot. That's why they are stronger than we.”
― Georgi Tenno, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“your punishment for having a knife when they
searched you would be very different from the thief's. For him to
have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn't know any
better. But for you to have one was "terrorism.”
― Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“L. Kopelev came back to Moscow in 1955 and made a discovery: 'I am I'll-at-ease with successful people! I keep up acquaintance only with those of my friends who are in some way unlucky.' But, then, only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Do not suppose, for example, that if you are an employee of the American Embassy by the name of Alexander Dolgun you cannot be arrested in broad daylight on Gorky Street, right by the Central Telegraph Office. Your unfamiliar friend dashes through the press of the crowd, and opens his plundering arms to embrace you: “Saaasha!” He simply shouts at you, with no effort to be inconspicuous. “Hey, pal! Long time no see! Come on over, let’s get out of the way.” At that moment a Pobeda sedan draws up to the curb.… And several days later TASS will issue an angry statement to all the papers alleging that informed circles of the Soviet government have no information on the disappearance of Alexander Dolgun.”
― Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“The West simply had to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind. But the West did not understand at all. The democratic West simply could not understand: What do you mean when you call yourselves a political opposition? An opposition exists inside your country? Why has it never publicly declared its existence? If you are dissatisfied with Stalin, go back home and, in the first subsequent election, do not re-elect him. That would be the honest course. But why did you have to take up arms, and, what is worse, German arms? No, we have to extradite you; it would be terribly bad form to act otherwise, and we might spoil our relations with a gallant ally. In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery.”
― Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“But there was a gap between the Russian and the Western conscience which exists to this day. The West was fighting only against Hitler, and for this purpose all means and all allies were good, the Soviets above all. Not only could the West not concede that the Soviet people might have their own purposes which did not coincide with the goals of the Communist government; it did not want to admit any such thought, because it would have been embarrassing and difficult to live with. It is a tragicomic fact that on the leaflets which the Western allies were distributing among the anti-Bolshevik volunteer battalions on the Western front, they wrote: “We promise all defectors that they will be immediately sent back to the Soviet Union (to prison.…).”
― Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Мы — всё забываем. Мы помним не быль, не историю — а только тот штампованный пунктир, который и хотели в нашей памяти пробить непрестанным долблением. Я не знаю, свойство ли это всего человечества, но нашего народа—да. Обидное свойство. Может быть, оно и от доброты, а — обидное. Оно отдаёт нас добычею лжецам.”
― Александр Солженицын, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Only those can understand us who ate from the same bowl with us.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III, Katorga: Exile; and Stalin is No More

“Terrorism is a condemnable tool, but in this case it was generated by forty years of unprecedented Soviet state terrorism, and this is a striking instance of evil generating evil. It shows that when evil assumes inhuman dimensions, it ends up by forcing people to use evil ways even to escape it.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Vol. 3, Parts 5-7

“This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend people against the evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of the evildoers and against the people!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Two Leningrad women were summoned to the police station. Had they been at a party with some men? Yes. Had sexual intercourse taken place? (This had already been established with the aid of a reliable informer.) Er—yes. Right, then, which is it: did you take part in the sexual act voluntarily or against your will? If voluntarily, we shall have to regard you as prostitutes, you will hand over your passports and get out of Leningrad in forty-eight hours. If it was against your will, you must bring a charge of rape! The women were not a bit anxious to leave Leningrad! So the men got twelve years each.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“It should be said that all these years, in all the Special Camps, orthodox Soviet citizens, without even consulting each other, unanimously condemned the massacre of the stoolies, or any attempt by prisoners to fight for their rights. We need not put this down to sordid motives (though quite a few of the orthodox were compromised by their work for the godfather) since we can fully explain it by their theoretical views. They accepted all forms of repression and extermination, even wholesale, provided they came from above—as a manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even impulsive and uncoordinated actions of the same kind but from below were regarded as banditry, and what is more, in its "Banderist" form (among the loyalists you would never get one to admit the right of the Ukraine to secede, because to do so was bourgeois nationalism). The refusal of the katorzhane to be slave laborers, their indignation about window bars and shootings, depressed and frightened the docile camp Communists.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“If you ever get twenty-five years [imprisonment] for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground—from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“A committed escaper! One who never for a minute doubts that a man cannot live behind bars—not even as the most comfortable of trusties, in the accounts office, in the Culture and Education Section, or in charge of the bread ration. One who once he lands in prison spends every waking hour thinking about escape and dreams of escape at night. One who has vowed never to resign himself, and subordinates every action to his need to escape. One for whom a day in prison can never be just another day; there are only days of preparation for escape, days on the run, and days in the punishment cells after recapture and a beating.

A committed escaper! This means one who knows what he is undertaking. One who has seen the bullet-riddled bodies of other escapers on display along the central tract. He has also seen those brought back alive—like the man who was taken from hut to hut, black and blue and coughing blood, and made o shout: "Prisoners! Look at what happened to me! It can happen to you, too!" He knows that a runaway's body is usually too heavy to be delivered to camp. And that therefore the head alone is brought back in a duffel bag, sometimes (this is more reliable proof, according to the rulebook) together with the right arm, chopped off at the elbow, so that the Special Section can check the fingerprints and write the man off.

A committed escaper! It is for his benefit that window bars are set in cement, that the camp area is encircled with dozens of strands of barbed wire, towers, fences, reinforced barriers, that ambushes and booby traps are set, that red meat is fed to gray dogs.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Can any work in a prison camp merge with your dreams, absorb your whole soul, rob you of sleep? It can—but only the work you do to escape!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Public opinion! I don't know how sociologists define it, but it seems obvious to me that it can only consist of interacting individual opinions, freely expressed and independent of government or party opinion.

So long as there is no independent public opinion in our country, there is no guarantee that the extermination of millions and millions for no good reason will not happen again, that it will not begin any night—perhaps this very night.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Nothing is easier than stamping your foot and shouting: "That's mine!" It is immeasurably harder to proclaim: "You may live as you please.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“To those readers who have found the moral strength to overcome the darkness and suffering of the first two volumes, the third volume will disclose a space of freedom and struggle. The secret of this struggle is kept by the Soviet regime even more zealously than that of the torments and annihilation it inflicted upon millions of its victims. More than anything else, the Communist regime fears the revelation of the fight which is conducted against it with a spiritual force unheard of and unknown to many countries in many periods of their history. The fighters' spiritual strength rises to the greatest height and to a supreme degree of tension when their situation is most helpless and the state system most ruthlessly destructive.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“A 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 his 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 the feeling of universal innocence. It was the sense of an ordeal of the entire people.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“I enjoyed not making use of my importunate camp experience. I loathed the thought of improvising some wretched poverty-stricken excuse. No human being can know the future. The greatest of disasters may overtake a man in the best of places, and the greatest happiness may seek him out in the worst.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII