The Gulag Archipelago at 50

    American diplomat George F. Kennan considered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation to be the “most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” In it, Solzhenitsyn exposed the vast underworld of forced labor camps stretching across the Soviet Union from Moscow to Magadan in Siberia. It is no exaggeration to say that the book was instrumental in the implosion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. It remains essential reading for our understanding of not just the murderous Soviet regime but of the good and evil that runs, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “right through every human heart.”

    The history of The Gulag Archipelago begins in the closing months of World War II when a decorated Soviet captain of artillery, corresponding with a childhood friend, criticized Stalin for “betraying the cause of the Revolution.” For “counter-revolutionary crimes,” Captain Solzhenitsyn was sentenced in July 1945 under Article 58 of the Criminal Code to eight years in the Gulag followed by “perpetual exile.”

    Solzhenitsyn spent three of those eight years in the forced labor camp of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan where he conceived the idea of portraying his experience by describing one day in the life of a typical prisoner. This idea lay dormant in his mind until May 1959 when he finally wrote a novella, in longhand, drawing on the thousands of words he had memorized while in the Gulag. According to his wife Natalia, he delayed offering it for publication for fear the KGB would seize all copies and send him back to the camps. He only sent the manuscript to the Moscow journal Novy Mir after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” at the 20th Party Congress had condemned Joseph Stalin’s “Personality Cult” and Khrushchev had overtly acknowledged Stalin’s countless victims to the 22nd Party Congress in 1961.

    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich focuses on the ordinary life of an ordinary prisoner in the Gulag using, as British historian and novelist John Bayley put it, a new amalgam of Russian narrative blended with “colloquialisms, pungent slang and prison-camp jargon.” Captivated, Novy Mir editor-in-chief Aleksandr Tvardovsky launched a campaign to secure publication. After prolonged negotiation with Communist censors, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in November 1962 with Khrushchev’s approval. The Soviet leader decided to use the book as part of his effort to distance himself from Stalin-style dictatorship.

    Readers of One Day were transported to the Gulag where they slept on wooden boards, hoarded worm-infested pieces of bread, and worked twelve to 14 hours a day, often in 30 degrees below freezing temperatures. Solzhenitsyn compared the publishing of his little 150-page book “to a phenomenon defying physical laws, something like objects falling upwards of their own accord or cold stones becoming red hot without any external stimulus.”

    He was inundated by “an explosion of letters” from former prisoners. One woman wrote: “My face was smothered in tears. I didn’t wipe them away because all this, packed into a small number of pages of the magazine, was mine, intimately mine, for every day of the fifteen years I spent in the camps.” Another letter directly addressed Solzhenitsyn as “Dear friend, comrade and brother…I remembered Sivaya Maska and Vorkuta…the frosts and blizzards, the insults and humiliations…I wept as I read—they were all familiar characters, as if from my own brigade…thank you once more! Please carry on in the same spirit—write, write.”

    As the historian Anne Applebaum has observed, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich infuriated party officials because Communism did not triumph in the end; God did. Each new printing of the novella sold out, finally forcing the Kremlin to ban it. But it was too late to close Pandora’s Box. The calculated cruelty that dominated the giant system of forced labor camps over the span of decades was revealed worldwide. Solzhenitsyn called the camp system an “archipelago”—a country within a country—comprising an estimated 476 camp complexes that included hundreds of individual camps. Each contained from a few hundred to thousands of prisoners. From 1929, the camps took on an economic significance when Stalin decided to use forced labor to speed up industrialization and excavate Russia’s natural resources. According to Ms. Applebaum, the Gulag reached its apex in the early 1950s, by which time the camps played a significant role in the Soviet economy.

    From 1929 until Stalin’s death in 1953, an estimated 18 million people—political prisoners and common criminals—passed through the camp system. Another six million were exiled to isolated towns in the Siberian forest, the Kazakh desert, or special settlements. The political camps were not closed altogether until the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev—grandson of Gulag prisoners—shut them down.

    For Solzhenitsyn, writing the Gulag Archipelago became an inescapable duty. He began it in longhand in 1958, much of it in “a hiding place” in Tartu, Estonia. He relied heavily on the eyewitness accounts of 257 camp survivors. As recounted by David Remnick, The Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent, Solzhenitsyn traveled “widely and furtively, visiting friends from his own [years] in the camps.” He was a man with a memory, Remnick wrote, in a country that lied about its past and present in the name of Utopia. Solzhenitsyn finished the book in 1968 but kept hidden a handful of copies typed by assistants and photographed for safekeeping.

    Life became more complicated for Solzhenitsyn in 1970 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Afraid that he might be exiled from Russia, he decided not to travel to Stockholm to accept the award. Instead, he wrote a provocative speech to be read at the awards ceremony in which he asserted that “it is within the power of writers and artists…to defeat the lie.” He insisted that “one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” He called on all Nobel Prize winners to recognize that the day of the Nobel presentations coincided with Human Rights Day. “Let none at this festive table,” he said, “forget that political prisoners are on hunger-strike this very day in defense of rights that have been curtailed or trampled underfoot.”

    When the KGB obtained a draft version of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, Solzhenitsyn delayed no longer and gave his Paris publisher permission to publish. The book shattered liberal assumptions about a “democratic” Lenin, the godfather of the Gulag, and exposed the chain-gang existence of the millions who had lived and died in the archipelago. Some reviewers described the Gulag as another holocaust.

    Russian historian Roy Medvedev was deeply moved: “No one will, I believe, rise from his chair after reading this book the same as he sat down to read it.” Novelist Doris Lessing said that the book “helped to bring down an empire.” “No one can deny,” asserted political scientist Daniel Mahoney, “that The Gulag Archipelago is the most powerful anti-totalitarian book ever written.”

    Not all reviewers were laudatory. UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote that The Gulag Archipelago was “of limited value to the serious student of the 1930s,” an incredibly childish judgment given the rigorous nature of Solzhenitsyn’s research. Few academics of any discipline devote ten years to researching and writing one of their works. The Russian historian and Trotskyist Vadim Rogovin argued that the book was “oral history,” a genre admittedly dependent on an individual’s slippery memory. But in the case of The Gulag Archipelago the eyewitnesses corroborate one another in telling the same story of deliberate dehumanization again and again...and again.

    It remains an international bestseller with more than 30 million copies sold, 3 million in the United States alone. Solzhenitsyn refused to accept royalties from the sale of the book, directing them to be given instead to what became the Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn Russian Social Fund. Thousands of former zeks—Russian slang for prisoner—continue to receive assistance from the fund not only in Russia but in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet republics.

    The Kremlin decided to act against so prominent an enemy of the regime. The KGB arrested and forcibly expelled Solzhenitsyn in February 1974—although hardline members of the Politburo likely preferred a more final solution. After two years in Switzerland, Solzhenitsyn settled in an isolated part of Vermont where he remained for the next 20 years, writing twelve hours every day, mostly a series of Tolstoy-like novels about the Bolshevik Revolution and post-World War I Russia. Each year, on the anniversary of his arrest, he ate like a prisoner: 650 grams of bread, two lumps of sugar, and hot water for breakfast. “By the end of the day,” he told an interviewer, “I am already picking up crumbs to put in my mouth and licking the bowl.”

    He broke public silence on two memorable occasions. The first was at a Washington, D.C., dinner in his honor hosted by George Meany, the anti-Communist head of the AFL-CIO trade union. Solzhenitsyn warned against those in America calling for a “senseless and immoral process of endless concessions to the aggressor.” Conspicuous by his absence was President Gerald Ford, who had been counseled by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, not to invite the Russian writer to the White House for fear of offending the Soviets. (According to historian Douglas Brinkley, Ford privately slammed Solzhenitsyn as “a goddamn horse’s ass.”)

    The second was at Harvard University, for its 1978 commencement exercises. Harvard and its lapdogs had never received such a tongue-lashing, upsetting some who had hailed Solzhenitsyn’s exposing of the Gulag. They welcomed his criticism of Stalin’s excesses, but not America’s.

    According to biographer Michael Scammell, 22,000 people stood or sat in the rain to hear Solzhenitsyn detail the decline of the West, the moral emptiness of modern society, the excesses of liberal democracy, and the moral threat of Communist domination. Though not presenting socialism as an alternative, said Solzhenitsyn, “I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours.”

    Beginning with the Renaissance, he said, man had turned his back on the Spirit and “embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal.” American democracy, Solzhenitsyn argued, depended on its people accepting, as its founders had, that “man is God’s creature.” All its technological achievements “do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.” We are approaching a major turn in history, declared the Nobel laureate, when we must rise to a new level of life where “our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.”

    As James Pontuso wrote (“The Most Dangerous Man in the World,” Spring 2019), liberal intellectuals in the West turned on Solzhenitsyn after his Harvard address. They took their lead from the Russian Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, who claimed that Solzhenitsyn opposed universal democratic ideals. The establishment branded Solzhenitsyn a Russian nationalist and a religious zealot, revealing their own overriding secularism. As to politics, Solzhenitsyn said that his model was the decentralized government of a Swiss village.

    At more than 1,800 pages, excluding notes and index, the full three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago present a challenge for any reader. I finally tackled this entire work about 6 or 7 years ago. And while I encourage everyone to read it, I am well aware that the entire work is not for everyone. You need a lot of time to devote and focus on such a project, and you need to prepare yourself for the banality of evil at every turning of the page. Think of it like watching Schindler's List...over and over and over again. Solzhenitsyn presents the life of a Gulag prisoner from a typical arrest in the early morning hours and the daily struggle to survive in a forced labor camp to years of internal exile in a country without laws. On the last page, Solzhenitsyn writes that as of 1973, 20 years after Stalin’s death, “the same treacherous secrecy, the same fog of injustice still hangs in our air, worse than the smoke of city chimneys.”

    Most readers will be satisfied with reading the abridged 50th anniversary edition with its eloquent introduction by Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia. The original abridged version was my introduction to The Gulag Archipelago in college in the early 1980s. It is not hyperbole when I tell you, dear reader, that it changed my life. It runs a mere 501 pages and includes the essential scenes and themes of the entire work. In an early chapter sardonically entitled “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System,” Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the Leninist origins of Soviet tyranny. He analyzes an essay written by Lenin in January 1918 that compares intellectuals and bourgeois who “malinger” at their jobs to “atrophied limbs” and “cancerous” growths that must be removed. All around him Lenin saw “harmful insects” who must be “purged”—with some to be imprisoned, some to be shot, others to be “re-educated.”

    Scattered from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus, writes Solzhenitsyn, are the thousands of islands of the Archipelago. “They are invisible. But they exist.” In the chapter “The Archipelago Metastasizes,” the reader works alongside the Gulag prisoner as the White Sea Canal is built:

At the end of the workday [writes a Solovetsky Islands veteran] there were corpses left on the work site. The snow powdered their faces. One of them was hunched over beneath an overturned wheelbarrow, he had hidden his hands in his sleeves and frozen to death in that position…. Two were frozen back to back leaning against each other…. At night the sledges went out and collected them.

    And in the summer bones remained from corpses which had not been removed in time, and together with the shingle they got into the concrete mixer. And in this way they got into the concrete of the last lock at the city of Belomorsk and will be preserved there forever.

    In one chapter, “The Peasant Plague,” Solzhenitsyn laments that there are no books about the millions of peasants who perished in a Stalin-directed war against the peasantry—the Holodomor. The nub of the Soviet plan was that “the peasant’s seed” [i.e., his children] “must perish with the adults.” Since Herod was no more, Solzhenitsyn writes sarcastically, only Marxism-Leninism “has shown us how to destroy utterly—down to the very babes.” “Hitler,” he continues, “was a mere disciple [of Lenin and Stalin], but he had all the luck, his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.”

    Solzhenitsyn traces the self-vindication of Marxist-Leninists to ideology. Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at a dozen corpses, he writes, “because they had no ideology…. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience villainy on a scale calculated in the millions.” Soviet Communism was a calamity for those outside the Gulag as well as those inside it. Lying became a way of life, betrayal of friends and family necessary for survival.

    But not all was despair and death in the camps. In the chapter “The Forty Days of Kengir,” Solzhenitsyn recounts how 8,000 prisoners rebelled in the spring of 1954, following the death of the infamous KGB head Lavrentiy Beria. They established “self-government” for 40 days—until the T-34 tanks arrived and ran over the zeks, killing more than 700 of them. But the Gulag was never the same: “What feelings wrung the hearts of those eight thousand men who for so long…had been slaves with no sense of fellowship and now had united and freed themselves? So long suppressed, the brotherhood of man had broken through at last!”

    In the chapter “Poetry Under a Tombstone, Truth Under a Stone,” the reader meets the poet Vasilyevich Silin, who became a believer while in the camps. Like Solzhenitsyn, he composed dozens of poems “from end to end without writing a word down.” He saw beauty in nature and believed that God’s grace could redeem even the most perverted will. Solzhenitsyn notes that “the atheist’s refusal to believe that spirit could beget matter only made Silin smile.”

    Solzhenitsyn recovered his own faith while in the Gulag. His journey from Marx to Christ was strengthened by the cure of an “uncurable cancer.” He writes:

    Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering. And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you…. Here is a rewarding and inexhaustible direction for your thoughts: Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought—can’t you possibly correct it now?

    Although not formally educated in philosophy, Solzhenitsyn was comfortable with ideas such as the good and the evil in everyone. He writes:

    It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. 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…. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good remains. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil.

    Solzhenitsyn describes how camp officials tried to “depersonalize” everyone, giving zeks “identical haircuts, identical fuzz on their cheeks, identical caps. Identical padded jackets, and numbers in place of names (like the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps).” But the “image of the soul” continued to shine through although “distorted by wind and sun and dirt and heavy toil.” In the battle between good and evil, Solzhenitsyn writes, “the sparks of the spirit cannot be kept from spreading, breaking through to each other.”

    In the chapter “The Bluecaps,” an angry Solzhenitsyn calls for an accounting of the Soviet crimes, like the Nazi trials. Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers, he asks, and Russia is not? What are we to do about those “who turned the handle of the meat grinder?” It is too late for equal retribution, he says, so let us be generous:

    We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them into a “swan dive,” nor keep them on sleepless “stand-up” for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls in iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage—we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them to trial!…and compel each one of them to announce loudly: “Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.”

    In the absence of such a trial, Solzhenitsyn writes, “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!”

    Yet, Solzhenitsyn did not despair. As he wrote Edward Erickson, Jr., who edited the one-volume abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago, he considered himself “an unshakable optimist.” The day before he was forced into exile, he said that “Gulag was destined to affect the course of history. I was sure of that.” He added: “You Bolsheviks are finished—there are no two ways about it.” The Gulag Archipelago played no small role in that happy outcome.

 Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com