The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 #1-7

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Thomas P. Whitney (Translator), Harry Willets (Translator)

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power.

This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Classics, Russia, Politics, Biography, Russian Literature

472 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

also known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)

Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.

This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.

Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solzhenitsyn systematically goes through the horrors of the Soviet slave labour camps, one of the blackest chapters in world history. I read this book as a teenager, not long after it came out, and I was appalled that my parents had presented the Soviet Union as anything other than a monstrosity. For some reason, leftist people wouldn't properly admit it for a long time. I still can't quite understand why.

If you feel any shadow of sympathy for Soviet Russia, read Solzhenitsyn and you will be cured. One of the first myths he explodes is that it was all Stalin's fault, and that Lenin was basically a good guy. Lenin just happened to die early, so it wasn't as obvious that he was equally to blame. Solzhenitsyn recounts a comparatively minor and unknown incident from the revolution, where Lenin brutally orders some railway workers to be executed for not fully cooperating with the Bolsheviks. As he comments: just for this one episode, Lenin fully deserved to be shot. He was responsible for dozens of much worse things.

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began ploughing through this book in the dreary and climacteric era of my workplace coming of age.

A quickly-promoted amateur in a world of pros, I was fast falling out of my depth - and the deft irony of this book’s prose was no match for my witlessness.

This book probably acted as one of its precipitants. Who knows?

But, three years later, recuperating from the last of my fatal plummets, I met Fred.

Fred was a disproportionately effusive returner of favours, like me. And, like me, he was bipolar.

So, working half-days then, I enlisted his help.

Most of the guys bad-mouthed him, but I was by then a Christian, so avoided their game.

In fact, I opened up to Fred, and confided to him that I needed to find something for my wife and asked him, a trained expert in such things, to help find it.

He did more than that. Much more (and it was so typically beautiful of Fred)...

He brought me in one of his spares from home and GAVE it to me. I was understandably floored. And my wife was delighted.

Next morning, working from home, I spotted this book on our piano. Eureka!

Fred - veteran as I was of tragic falls into his own gulags from official grace - would surely appreciate it.

That afternoon when I arrived at work I placed it quietly on his desk.

Was he fulsomely effusive in his thanks?

Yep - you got it - just like I can be.

(We’re like two overripe peas in a pod...)

You know, guys: I never would have finished my weary slog through these prolix chapters anyway, at that soul-stretching time of drastic downsizing in our organization.

And me in the state I was then.

I had a job in hard economic times, and no matter how enervatingly demanding it got, I was HOLDING ON to it.

But eleven years later - fully retired, though on a fraction of my income - wouldn’t I have loved, you’re saying, to restart this book THEN?

You’re darned right, friends. Books are expensive.

And inflation keeps shrinking my pension in real terms.

But folks, wouldn’t YOU have done exactly the same...

For a kid-at-heart like Fred, that day:

To see his big face light up in garish gratitude like the Times Square Christmas Tree?!

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in 1974 in a bad situation in my life. This put "a bad situation" in America in a totally new light. I wish more Americans would listen and have listened to Solzhenitsyn.

Update: I don't know how many of you have followed the...discussion that has been going on here but it inspired me to extend this review a little. The above is the original review in which I simply urged people to read the book for themselves as it has much to say and is applicable in many ways to events happening now.

The book traces the history of the Soviet Gulag and then the willing "refusal to look" at the Gulag system (that went on till the '80s well after the book's publication).

I still recommend this book I doubt anyone will have trouble seeing the resemblance between the Gulags and the Concentration Camps of the Third Reich...unless of course by willful ignorance.

There has also been a suggestion that Solzhenitsyn was antisemitic. This apparently came from the controversy over his book Two Hundred Years Together where he says that "some" Jews were as much perpetrators as victims in Russia. I can't take a stand on this but so far as I can see it's not antisemitism it's simply part of the book. It was intended to be a comprehensive history of Jews in Russia.

So far as THIS book goes I still recommend it and suggest as I do about all books that it be approached while thinking.

[Margaret M · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty"

Stop 28 on the world tour, takes me back to Lenin’s / Stalin’s Russia for ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ which for me is the most notable and extraordinary indictment of any ruling system and political regime I’ve ever read.

Disturbing, insufferable, harrowing, despicable and extremely sickening – why?

This was the story about the forced labour camps in Russia, and the inhumane treatment of its citizens who were selected in an attempt to censor and control the population, eliminate political opponents or anyone who was deemed socially dangerous, disruptive, or vocal, and those who were not seen to contribute to the dictatorship agenda. It’s good to see that things have changed though!!!

In Navalny’s words - ‘Don’t give up’ things might change. Sadly not for him though as he died unexpectedly in a penal colony showing signs of torture.

However, the criteria for selecting inmates didn’t stop there because there was a direct correlation between the economic needs of the country and the supply train taking prisoners to Gulag.

And the author? A witness to this soviet horror as a prisoner himself for having criticised Joseph Stalin and his regime in a private letter, and after serving eight years in the Gulag was then exiled.

Gulag Archipelago – the book

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

How true is this even in the world today? and how true is the author's reference to the old proverb

“No, the old proverb does not lie: Look for the brave in prison, and the stupid among the political leaders!”

The real statistics of politically induced deaths in these labour camps under the Soviet regime is hard to determine and remains a subject of much debate. It is true though that many were peasants from rural parts of the country whose voices were already silent. Ironically too, was that the people who were guilty of nothing were the ones seemingly unprepared to put up any resistance or defence, while their proofs of guilt were approximate and at the discretion of the interrogators.

Thankfully the author Solzhenitsyn has left us this unabridged account of life under Lenin’s and Stalin’s rule and in one of their forced labour camps. We know of these camps during WWII where the level of brutality was experienced by the country’s enemy, not their own people.

As a prisoner remarked, for not wanting to die by a German bullet the prisoner would be substituting it for a Soviet one for having been taken a prisoner of war. “Some get theirs from the enemy, we get bullets from our own”.

The Books Publication is interesting!!!

The KGB confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–1967, and was forced to develop his preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago in various sections. He accomplished some of this while in hiding at his friends' homes in the Moscow region and elsewhere.

In 1973, the KGB seized one of only three existing copies of the text still on Soviet soil. This was achieved by interrogating Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, one of Solzhenitsyn's trusted typists who knew where the typed copy was hidden. Within days of her release by the KGB she was found hanged in the stairwell of her apartment on the 3rd of August 1973. She had apparently either hanged herself or been murdered.

Although Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be first published in Russia, he knew this was impossible under the current political landscape, and so after Solzhenitsyn learned of Voronyanskaya's death he decided to allow its publication in Paris causing a huge stir internationally. Quickly the text was translated into multiple languages and so the camps and the atrocities committed there were revealed to the world.

Review and Comments

There is nothing that will awaken the senses quite like the story of people trying to survive one of Russia's labour camps. There is nothing more soul stirring and emotionally moving than reading about the inhumane treatment of people, who were petty criminals at most. Inmates who were treated like animals and through their incarceration we witness the ‘reduction’ of a human being, the narrowing of the intellectual mind and zest for life dwindling away with every beating, poor diet and every day suffering at the hands of this brutal regime. To read this book was to observe these prisoners die slowly in every way possible. Its heartbreaking.

I learnt a lot more from this story, for example, I thought it was Stalin who established this legal and government framework for a series of such camps, but in fact it was Lenin, and you can feel the utter contempt the author felt towards this barbaric individual, which is completely understandable. Stalin was then to continue with this political and social framework (ie concentration camps) which was considered a way of resourcing economic plans. It didn’t matter that the labour force were unwilling participants.

"Had not the camps arisen out of the crisis of unemployment of the 20s?" the author asks!!!

It seemed, it was not the number of genuine criminals which determined the intensity of the courts activities, but the requisitions of the economic establishment that these camps would continue to function with an abundance of manual resource.

I was sickened reading this book and although it is harrowing from start to finish, I couldn’t put it down. The stories and accounts of prisoner treatment, their general living conditions, the slave labour gangs and the technical prison camp system, camp rebellions and strikes, the continued internal exile following the completion of the original prison sentence, and the ultimate but not guaranteed release of the prisoner, if one survived is there is abundance from the voice of one that did survive. I am glad though that the author did survive to write this, otherwise we would have had to listen to more years of Soviet contradictions, denial and delusional claims that it works in the interests of its own people.

I repeat Look for the brave in prison, and the stupid among the political leaders!”

“What is striking is that the twentieth century has proven, in quantitative terms, the most murderous in human history - “Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed”.

A tyrannical, blood curdling, demoralising, graphic and soul stirring book about the forced labour camps in the Soviet Union.

For all those suffering injustice ‘Don’t Give Up’.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can not in clear conscience say that I really like a book about Soviet Gulags. To be honest, I repeatedly reached my limit of emotional energy. The story of any one of the 20 million people directly affected would have more impact.

Oh, right. He tried that first, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a lot of ways, this a response to critics and deniers of his earlier book.

[Mikey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given its historical importance, I fully expected that The Gulag Archipelago would be a lofty read. What I didn't expect was that it works so well as a story. Instead of being a straight history book, Gulag lies somewhere between journalism and history, and Solzhenitsyn's narrative voice is familiar and engaging. The book feels less like a history lesson, and more like a conversation with a good friend who knows how to put together and express an interesting, important, heartbreaking, and unforgettable story. A narrative about the Soviet prison camps seems like it would be so weighty as to be unreadable, but Solzhenitsyn makes it surprisingly palatable. It's quite refreshing when you read a classic for the first time, and instantly understand where all the hype came from.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.” So Solzhenitsyn’s journey into the gulag began in 1945 where he spent eight years. This is a personal history by a survivor of the false arrest, the long prison sentence, the brutal dehumanizing treatment that sends shivers up the spine. Solzhenitsyn also reports the experiences of many others. Each report is heartfelt. Solzhenitsyn changed history by once and for all undermining the mythical image of the Soviet Communist Party as a party for the workers. He convincingly exposed the brutality and hypocrisy of the Soviet system under Lenin, Stalin and after.

It begins with the arrest for a few critical words, or having a friend who uttered them, or not turning in your friend, or just to fill a quota. Such is the job of the bluecaps, the SMERSH, the apparatchiks of the State Security system, the interrogators whose job it is to get confessions. Their job is not to determine guilt or innocence. That is irrelevant. Their instructions are clear. Stalin has enemies. You must deliver them. If you do the rewards are great. If you don’t you will be gone. This is how the gulags were filled.

Perhaps most surprising is how effective the secrecy was. The average Soviet citizen knew people were watched and arrested or disappeared, but were ignorant of the scope. Many in the West were taken in by Soviet propaganda. While Stalin’s purges in the late thirties unsettled some admirers in the West, for others it took Solzhenitsyn to show them the true nature of Soviet society.

For many, incarceration was automatic. All returning prisoners of war in WWII were sent to camps. Similarly Russians who for any reason spent time in the West were sent to camps. Anyone who performed any function under the German occupation was sent to camp. These millions were added to the millions of political prisoners from the great purges and routine surveillance.

Solzhenitsyn describes the special camps, prisons, prison trains and the horrific penalty cells. Inmates were routinely crowded into small, dirty, vermin infested, unheated compartments and cells. For those that complained or attempted escape the penalty cells served up a wide variety of torture. In camps inmates lived in primitive huts or crowded barracks sleeping together in confined spaces. Many were not even allowed correspondence. These unfortunates could receive no news of loved ones nor could their loved ones know anything about them. Cut off completely from any prior life they ceased to exist to the outside world. Here inmates worked off their 10 or 25 year sentences if they lived that long and their sentences were not extended. Even if fortunate enough to eventually be released, they were sent with nothing but the rags on their backs to internal exile in some remote desert or tundra.

Solzhenitsyn details the constant humiliations, the beatings, the tortures, the starvation diets of gruel and bread crusts. He describes the work, harsh and meaningless, hour after hour, day after day, without respite. Some camps intentionally worked the inmates to death. Other camps were designated to contribute to the five year plans, to dig canals, to lay train tracks. The inmates received nothing for this and the quality of the work reflected their motivation. This use of prisoners kept the quotas high for the State Security system.

Solzhenitsyn tells us about the inmates. Typically dispirited, subject to a system designed to bring out the worst behavior – at times they support each other but all too often it is each person out for him or herself. He describes their captors, how they live off the system. Upon arrival they take any remaining inmates possessions and the best looking young women for private mistresses. Afterword they steal the inmate’s food and use their labor for their personal gain.

Deprived of every dignity and every hope, some inmates finally come to acceptance and Solzhenitsyn describes its remarkable effect on the soul – a feeling of quietness, peace. In his seventh year of prison Solzhenitsyn experiences an epiphany. “looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings…In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel…And it was only when I lay there rotting on the prison straw that I sensed in 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 is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.”

Thus Solzhenitsyn does not condemn the secret policeman, the interrogator, the camp guard as inherently evil. “If only it were 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.” - “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good…..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 calculated on a scale in the millions”

In our present time of rising populist nationalism, we should not forget Solzhenitsyn’s warning, “There is always this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” “Yet, I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to go through it personally.”

[Veeral · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorites.

One of the accounts from the book that still makes me laugh (you read that right, though I shouldn't really) is:

A political meeting was going on with about 1000 - 2000 people present in the hall somewhere in USSR (I can't recall the exact location and time of the event). Now the desiderata for survival in Stalin era was that everyone should stand up and clap their hands furiously at the mention of his name, and you don't want to be the one to stop clapping first. This might suggest that you oppose Comrade Stalin (how dare you, O ye of feeble bourgeois mentality).

So, at this assembly someone inevitably mentioned Stalin's name. Right at that exact moment the whole congregation stood up and began to clap without forgetting to put a beaming stupid smile on their faces. Now you can't be sure that if Cheka agents are watching you at that moment or not. And moreover, you cannot stop clapping before your neighbor does, as he/she might inform on you. So this went on for 8 minutes (I tried clapping for 10 seconds myself and came to the conclusion that you clap twice in a second if you are doing it with gusto - fake or genuine). So they battered their hands together for at least 900 times.

After smashing their hands together until they began to hurt, the highest ranking local member of the Party at the meeting decided that this was getting ridiculous even by then Soviet Standards. He thought that 8 minutes of clapping and smiling was enough for showing their loyalty for a singular mention of Comrade Stalin's name. So he slowly stopped clapping and sat down. The congregation took no more than half a second to do likewise following his lead. Nobody spoke anything about the event in the concluding hours of the meeting. (But I am pretty much sure that everybody made certain that they didn't mention Stalin's name again for rest of the evening).

Next day, the Party member was arrested and never heard from again.

This book would have been comical if it would have been a work of fiction rather than non-fiction. But alas, that is not the case which makes it a sad sad collection of numerous accounts of human suffering under Soviet tyranny.

[Petra wonders if AI going to kill search engines? · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book, but like many Russian authors, Solzhenitsyn goes on too long too often and all the excess verbiage takes away rather than adds to the enjoyment and understanding of the book. However this does not mean that some idiot librarian has the right to decide that all seven (I think it was 7) volumes of the book should be divided willy-nilly into just three volumes. So "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV" has all sorts of volumes combined in it, volume 2, volume 4 etc. WTF?

[Sweetwilliam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I view people that cling to the tenets of communism the same way I view Holocaust deniers. From the Bolsheviks of 1917 to the turmoil in Venezuela of 2017; Communism is as Churchill said; the equal sharing of misery. The pages of Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize winning masterpiece are full of misery.

Solzhenitsyn paints a picture for the naïve westerner of the backbone and main pillar of Soviet Socialism: The gulag. The purpose of the network of gulags in the Soviet Union is to 1. Intimidate the masses so that they dwell in a constant state of fear and 2. To provide the nation state with an endless supply of slave labor. From the pages of this book you will learn that communism is probably the cruelest form of government in the history of humankind.

Solzhenitsyn’s writing is first hand. He was imprisoned for 8 years after being accused of writing letters that were critical of Stalin. He wrote these letters while serving in the Red Army during WWII. Being able to tell his story and that of his fellow zeks(convicts) was the motivation used by Solzhenitsyn to survive a brutal prison system designed to systematically kill it's inhabitants. His writing style is angry and he uses sarcasm to describe the system of Soviet Gulags that make Tsarist Russia look like the Cub Scouts in comparison. It is not an easy read. One thing that makes it a difficult read is that that the author rambles on and repeats himself. Solzhenitsyn apologizes for this but he explains he was never able to proofread the manuscript. In fact, he never saw all of his notes in one place. He had written this book and hid it in pieces all over the Soviet Union. He was raided by the KGB while in the process of smuggling the pieces out of the country for publication. So please forgive the author if he repeats himself and makes a few errors. He wrote the book while living in a police state and didn’t have the luxury of being able to proofread it. THIS IS HOW YOU HAVE TO WRITE A BOOK WHEN YOU LIVE IN THE SOVIET UNION!!! For this reason, make sure you select the abridged version.

This book is full of horrific but interesting stories. Many are laughable if they weren't so cruel. The NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) would observe a mass meeting. Clapping would commence at the mere mention of comrade Stalin’s name. The ovation would last for 15 minutes or more. People applauding would quite literally pass out rather than be the first one to stop clapping. Finally, one of the factory general managers stopped clapping because, after all, this was ridiculous. There was an agenda to keep. After the gathering the factory manager was arrested. This was how the NKVD separated out the leaders. The Soviet Union only wanted sheep. Leaders were dangerous and sent to the gulag. There is another story about the man who was struggling carrying a mass produced bust of Stalin. The bust was too heavy and he had no way to carry it properly so he tied a rope around Stalin’s head and slung it over his shoulder. The man was given a 10 year sentence for terrorism. Still another man was given 10 years for draping his hat and coat on a bust of Lenin. There are endless stories about how the zeks (convicts) and the 58’s (political prisoners) were coerced into confessions and sentenced without a trial for political crimes they didn’t commit. When the suspect were charged with a crime it would be in code. When the citizen asked “what is code 58-[XYZ]” they were told by their interrogators “that is for us to know.” During interrogations, the arrested argued that they had fought against the Germans or fought in the Revolution and their interrogators would say that “that is another matter.” Please note that I did not use the term “suspects” because there were no suspects. If arrested, you were guilty.

These were not isolated incidents. Solzhenitsyn said that almost every family had at least one family member or more incarcerated in one of the many islands of prisons throughout the Soviet Union. The zeks were fed a ration that could not sustain them when subjected to backbreaking labor. They were forced to work hard labor 7 days a week and often 16 hour days even if temperatures fell to -60˚F. The author tells of a canal built to the black sea where a quarter million zeks were killed in the process. Solzhenitsyn refused to compare the building of the canal to the building of the pyramids because, as he says, the difference was that the Egyptian slaves were at least given contemporary technology while the Soviets used only primitive technology! Trees were cleared by tying ropes to the tops of them and having gangs of zeks wiggle the tree until it could be toppled over. The canal was dug by pick and shovel and the frozen earth was carried away in wheel barrows or in a sack carried over the shoulder. People were dead from exhaustion, starvation, and by exposure and froze to death where they fell. The useless canal that ended the lives of so many was never even utilized. This and other things built by slave labor and managed by central government planning were most often inferior and shoddy.

Solzhenitsyn argues that peasants of Tsarist Russia were far better off than peasants living under Soviet rule. He cites the outrages that led to revolution and uses statistics to demonstrate how these outrages pale in comparison to the modern Socialist State and the system of Gulags. The Russian peasants were far, far, far better off before Lenin and Stalin came along. Yes, the peasants were slaves prior to 1867 but they got Sundays off and several Christian Holidays off. There were far fewer political prisoners and capital punishment was relatively rare. Ironically, all of these things – abject slavery, political prisoners, and capital punishment – inspired the Revolution. Lenin – who had never pushed a wheelbarrow or worked a pick or shovel – thought it was a good thing for prisoners to work rather than sit idle. The gulag was his idea. Millions upon millions of the former peasants – some who had even fought in the revolution - were rounded up and convicted as political prisoners for such terrible crimes as “having a defeatist attitude.” Many were executed there on the spot but others were executed very slowly in the work gangs of the gulag.

I found the following argument very interesting: Solzhenitsyn remarks about how West Germany had convicted former Nazis for war crimes and crimes against humanity. By 1966, West Germany had convicted 86,000 of them. He said that the Soviets loved to read about this in the paper. Each person would express glee each time a Nazi was sentenced. He said if the West Germans convicted 86,000 than the Soviet Union should proportionately convict 250,000. However, only 10 men total in the Soviet Union were ever convicted of crimes against citizens. Solzhenitsyn cries out in the pages of this book that the killers of millions of people walk among us every day. He said that when he brings this up, he is told that he shouldn’t dredge up the past. Solzhenitsyn contends that Soviet society needed the healing that it would provide when these men and women would repent and confess for their terrible sins for incarcerating, torturing, and murdering their own citizens. He argued that the Soviet Union needed this healing just like the Germans experienced.

I could go on and on about the destruction of the Kulaks, political prisoners as young as 6-years old, a system of informants and stool pigeons, prison demonstrations and work stoppages that were settled under the tracks of T-34 tanks and strafing planes… but I have had enough. Communism disgusts me.

Gulag Archipelago is a fifty year old book. But it is timely reading. Over 40% of millennials surveyed say that they would prefer a socialist form of government over capitalism. Inside Russia, I am told that the youth yearn for the old days. Closer to home, the local high school has allowed the children to start a communist club. Isn’t that nice? Imagine the outrage if the school allowed the students to start a Nazi club? Maybe all the world’s “useful idiots” (as Lenin used to call them) have need to read Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece?

[Emiliya Bozhilova · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bulgarian review is first, the English translation follows it below

“Това, което написах, е само контролно прозорче към Архипелага, а не обзор от наблюдателна кула.”

Интервю с… Не, не с вампир. А с жертвите му. И става безпощадно ясно, че романизирането на злото често е просто престъпна заблуда, ако и да се среща често и да засища някаква прастара нужда да видим човечност и в най-невъзможни ситуации. Солженицин я показва, но не при вампирите, а при изтощените им жертви.

Когато през 1945 г. СМЕРШ (съкратено от “Смърт на шпионите”) пристигат за 27 годишния фронтовак, арогантен млад офицер и убеден марксист, капитан от съветската армия Александър Солженицин, вече крачещ по немска земя в края на войната, той все още не се догажда, че отива на една много дълга и много вледеняваща среща с историята, и че накрая ще стане неин говорител. А също и говорител на безименни милиони, оставили костите и(ли) душите си в замръзналата пустош.

Солженицин получава екслузивно гражданство в една съвсем отделна държава - тази на изтребителните, концентрационни лагери на Архипелаг “ГУЛАГ”. Тази държава има своя география, свои закони и свой народ - този на зековете (съкратено от “затворник”). През нея са минали няколко десетки милиона жители.

Тази държава е основана за класовите врагове и битовите престъпници. Първите са считани за много по-опасни от вторите, тъй като са социални чужди (не са пролетариат, а често някакви там професори, инженери, писатели…). Вторите - на тях и вина не може да им се вменява, тъй като са тласнати към престъпленията от класовото неравенство и класовия враг. Горките душички! Но Държавата бди - затваря зад телени огради и едните, и другите - но на рецидивистите често се връчват “възпитателни” и ръководни функции в затворите и лагерите - и те на воля се саморазправят с класовия враг и продават на черния пазар награбените вещи, като често са прерязали нечие и друго гърло в процеса, но няма лошо - жертвите са социално неприемливи индивиди.

Социално неприемливите в СССР се оказват безброй, всички обхванати от митичния член 58 на Наказателния Кодекс, който е толкова дълбоко законспириран, че да се намери за свободен прочит е немислимо, на арестанти не се дава, а дори и част от служителите в системата не са го чели. По член 58 могат да те осъдят, общо взето, само затова, че съществуваш. Долната граница е 12 години, подсъдни са намерението (искал, но неизвършил) и подозрението (вероятно (!) е знаел, но не докладвал на органите). Потвърждението на обвинението е формалност: на органите често се спуска бройка и те я запълват старателно (иначе и за тях лошо), а веднъж влязъл там, излизаш поне с десетка (10 години). С тази присъда те изпращат и ако гладен си скъсал два стръка жито от колхозната нива.

Изследователите на робовладелския строй имат богато поле за изява със съветските концентрационни лагери. Там кацат всички социално и идеологически неприемливи по член 58. Идеята е семпла: и три месеца да изкара, все икономическа файда ще има. После да мре - идва следващият. И така - безплатно (т.е. без разход за консумативи като храна, дрехи, инструменти и механизация) са построени куп големи инфраструктурни обекти като Беломорканал (напълно безсмислен и зле изпълнен), или се вадят ценни суровини с нула разход (материален) - златото в Колима. Работи се и при минус 40 градуса по 10 часа.

Солженицин методично, с научен подход, дисектира всеки етап от предварителния арест чак до гроба зад полярния кръг. Не бърза за никъде, излага пълната история и всеки факт от всяка една брънка от чудовищната верига, доколкото му е известна от онези 227 души, чиито разкази е събрал, и донякъде от собствения си опит. Разкоства показно, прецизно, хирургически, с черен хумор дори на моменти. Дисекцията включва и обстоен анализ на съветското наказателно законодателство след 1917 г. - теории и практики, както и сравнения с царска Русия. Изключително етнологическо свидетелство са детайлните му портрети на всяка една група обитатели на тази омагьосана земя - от бачкаторите (които са си просто смъртници), войниците в конвоя, чак до … да, индиректно чак до самия Вожд. Е, нещата не са започнати от Сталин, започнали са още от Ленин. Но Сталин подобрява процеса. До такава степен го усъвършенства, че макар нищо друго в СССР да не работи и икономика практически да липсва, затворническото дело е в бурен подем, и е методологически изпипано. Хитлер е можел да завижда.

Уви, Солженицин не е имал достъп до архивите, по обясними причини. А какво ли щеше да напише, ако беше имал! Макар да си мисля - щеше да добави само по някоя уточняваща цифра, която никак нямаше да повлияе на описаното. Ако пък беше познавал Примо Леви, бързо щеше да намери общите пасажи с опита от нацистките концлагери (копи-пейст на места).

Написаното от Солженицин няма давност. То е все ще валидно. Принципите, гарантирали успеха на ГУЛАГ, са сред нас и днес. Те са общовалидни и вечни. Трябва само да се взираме по-внимателно. И да се съпротивляваме. И са не се отказваме.

———
И най-доброто обобщение - съчинено от затворници, още се спори кой е съчинил и текста, и музиката:

https://youtu.be/Vn6MwNUfTks

———
През 2024 г. вече има желание да изключат напълно Солженицин от учебните програми в Русия. Това негово непримиримо писание за ГУЛАГ почти го оневинява за по-късните му имперски антисемитски залитания, и ще бъде винаги протест, срещу който никой тоталитаризъм и авторитаризъм не може да намери аргументи. Макар да се опитват - не бил имал най-тежката съдба (ами оцеляват само изклинчилите), бил ползвал разказите на други (ами той сам ги изрежда, давайки глас на безгласните), бил преувеличил бройката на репресираните (ами тая бройка е държавна тайна, службите и до днес я крият, айде да дадат опровержение в цифри, а!). Книгата е вечна.

———<•> ———<•> ———<•> ———<•> ———<•> ———
▶️ Цитати:

⛓ “Да, съпротивата би трябвало да започне оттук, от самия арест.
Не започна.”

⛓ “Братко мой! Не съди онези, които, изпаднали в такива положения, са се оказали слаби и са подписали нещо излишно…”

⛓ “Като не наказваме и дори не порицаваме злодеите, не просто съхраняваме техните нищожни старини, но и подкопаваме за новите поколения всякакви основи на справедливостта. Затова, а не заради „слаба възпитателна работа“ растат „равнодушни“. Младите свикват, че подлостта на земята никога не се наказва и винаги носи благополучие.
И мъчително, и страшно ще е да се живее в такава страна!”

⛓ “От затворника трябва да вземем всичко през първите три месеца — а след това повече не ни е нужен!”
Н. Френкел

⛓ “Идеологията! — тъкмо тя дава търсеното оправдание за злодеянието и необходимата продължителна твърдост на злодея. Тъкмо тя е онази обществена теория, която му помага да оневинява пред себе си и другите своите постъпки и “да чува не укори, не проклятия, а хвалби и почит. Така инквизиторите укрепват властта си чрез християнството, завоевателите — чрез възвеличаване на родината, колонизаторите — чрез цивилизацията, нацистите — чрез расата, якобинците и болшевиките — чрез равенството, братството и щастието на бъдещите поколения.”

⛓ “Не, несправедливо ще е този дивашки строеж на XX век, този канал (Беломорканал), построен „с ръчни колички и кирки“ — несправедливо ще е да го сравняваме с египетските пирамиди: та пирамидите са строени със съвременна за времето им техника. А у нас при налична техника — с четиридесет века назад!”

⛓ “Не отделни черти, а целият главен смисъл в наличието на крепостното право и Архипелага е един и същ: това са обществени устройства за принудително и безжалостно използуване на безплатния труд на милиони роби.”

⛓ “в този лагер трябва да умреш, а който не е умрял — да си направи извода.”

⛓ “Абсурдно? Диво? Безсмислено? Ни най-малко не е безсмислено, тъкмо това се нарича „терор като средство за убеждаване“.”

⛓ “Но в това открай време е нещастието на човека — той не може да разбере кое е вещта и кое — цената за нея.”

⛓ “Интелигентът е този, чиито интереси и воля към духовната страна на живота са настойчиви и постоянни, непораждани от външните обстоятелства и дори въпреки тях. Интелигент е този, чиято мисъл не е подражателна.”

⛓ “В нашето славно отечество най-важните и смели книги остават непрочетени”

⛓ “Нима цялото зло, което се върши на Архипелага или по цялата земя, не се извършва чрез самите нас?”

⛓ “О, колко трудно, колко трудно е да станеш човек!”

⛓ “А психологията на престъпника е много проста и достъпна за усвояване:
1. Искам да живея и да се наслаждавам, плюя на останалите!
2. Който е по-силен, той е прав.
3. Не се завирай където не те засяга! (Тоест, докато не бият теб, не се застъпвай за този, когото бият. Чакай си реда.)”

⛓ “За климата на Архипелага се знае, че дванадесет месеца е зима, останалото е лято.”

⛓ “в МВД е достатъчно да бъдеш тъп и да се прицелваш точно в черепа.”

⛓ “паметта е най-слабото място у руснаците, особено паметта за злото”

⛓ “У нас тъкмо падналия го бият. А в изправения - стрелят.”

“What I have written is only a small window into the Archipelago, not an overview from a watchtower.”

An interview with... No, not a vampire. With its victims. It becomes mercilessly clear that romanticizing evil is often a criminal delusion, even if it’s a common one—satisfying some ancient need to find humanity in the most impossible situations. Solzhenitsyn shows humanity, but not in the vampires; he finds it in their exhausted victims.

When SMERSH (short for "Death to Spies") came for the 27-year-old veteran, arrogant young officer, and staunch Marxist Captain Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1945, he had no idea he was heading for a long, freezing encounter with history—one that would eventually make him its primary witness. He became the voice for the nameless millions who left their bones and souls in the frozen wasteland.

Solzhenitsyn received "exclusive citizenship" in a separate country: the extermination and concentration camps of the Gulag Archipelago. This country has its own geography, its own laws, and its own people—the zeks (prisoners). Tens of millions have passed through its borders.

This state was founded for "class enemies" and common criminals. The former were considered far more dangerous because they were "socially alien"—intellectuals, engineers, writers—not the proletariat. The latter, the criminals, were seen as "unfortunate souls" driven to crime by class inequality. The State kept a watchful eye on both behind barbed wire, but recidivists were often given "educational" and leadership roles in the camps, where they were free to terrorize the "class enemies" and trade looted goods on the black market, often after slitting a throat or two. To the system, this was acceptable; the victims were socially undesirable anyway.

In the USSR, the "socially undesirable" turned out to be countless, all caught in the mythical Article 58 of the Criminal Code. This article was so shrouded in secrecy that finding it for public reading was unthinkable; it wasn't shown to prisoners, and even many officials hadn't read it. Under Article 58, you could be sentenced essentially just for existing. The minimum punishable age was 12 years; punishable offenses included "intent" (wanted to, but didn't act) and "suspicion" (likely (!) knew, but didn't report). Confirmation of guilt was a formality: quotas were handed down to the authorities, and they filled them diligently. Once inside, you left with at least a "ten-er" (10 years)—even if you were just a hungry peasant who plucked two stalks of wheat from a collective field.

Scholars of slave-owning societies have a rich field for study in the Soviet concentration camps. The idea was simple: if a prisoner lasts even three months, there is economic profit. After that, they can die—the next one is already coming. Thus, massive infrastructure projects like the White Sea Canal (completely useless and poorly built) were constructed for "free" (zero expenditure on food, clothing, or machinery). Or precious resources were extracted at zero cost—like the gold in Kolyma. Work continued at minus 40 degrees for 10 hours a day.

Solzhenitsyn methodically, with a scientific approach, dissects every stage from the initial arrest to the grave behind the Arctic Circle. He is in no hurry; he lays out the full history of every link in this monstrous chain, based on his own experience and the accounts of 227 people he collected. He deconstructs it precisely, surgically, even with flashes of black humor. His dissection includes an extensive analysis of Soviet criminal law after 1917—comparing theory and practice with Tsarist Russia. His detailed portraits of every group of inhabitants—from the "laborers" (who were essentially the walking dead) to the convoy guards and, indirectly, to the Great Leader himself—are an extraordinary ethnological testimony. The process didn't start with Stalin; it began with Lenin. But Stalin perfected it. He refined it to such a degree that while nothing else in the USSR worked and the economy was non-existent, the prison industry was booming and methodically sound. Even Hitler might have been envious.
Alas, Solzhenitsyn did not have access to the archives for obvious reasons. One wonders what he would have written if he had! Though I suspect he would have only added a few specific figures that wouldn't have changed the nature of the description. If he had known Primo Levi, he would have quickly found the parallels with the Nazi concentration camp experience—copy-pasted in places.

Solzhenitsyn’s writing has no expiration date. It is still valid. The principles that guaranteed the success of the Gulag are among us today. They are universal and eternal. We only need to look more closely. And to resist. And never give up.
The best summary—composed by prisoners (the debate over who wrote the lyrics and music continues):

https://youtu.be/Vn6MwNUfTks

In 2024, there is already a desire to completely remove Solzhenitsyn from the school curriculum in Russia. This uncompromising writing on the Gulag almost absolves him of his later imperial and anti-Semitic leanings; it will always be a protest against which no totalitarianism or authoritarianism can find an argument. Though they try—claiming he didn't have the hardest fate, that he used the stories of others, or that he exaggerated the numbers (numbers that remain state secrets to this day!). The book is eternal.

---<•> ———<•> ———<•> ———<•> ———<•> ———
▶️ Quotes:

⛓ “Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of arrest. It did not.”

⛓ “My brother! Do not judge those who, falling into such positions, proved weak and signed something extra...”

⛓ “In not punishing or even censuring the evildoers... we are not simply protecting their trivial old age; we are thereby undermining the foundations of justice for the new generations... Young people learn that meanness on earth is never punished, but always brings prosperity. It will be painful and frightening to live in such a country!”

⛓ “Ideology!—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.”

⛓ “Not individual traits, but the entire main sense of the existence of serfdom and the Archipelago is the same: they are social systems for the forced and merciless use of the free labor of millions of slaves.”

⛓ “In this camp you must die, and whoever has not died—let him draw his conclusion.”

⛓ “Absurd? Savage? Meaningless? Not at all; it is precisely what is called 'terror as a means of persuasion.'”

⛓ “But that has always been the misfortune of man—he cannot understand what the thing is and what its price is.”

⛓ “An intellectual is one whose interests in and will toward the spiritual side of life are persistent and constant, not triggered by external circumstances and even in spite of them. An intellectual is one whose thought is not imitative.”

⛓ “In our glorious fatherland, the most important and daring books remain unread.”

⛓ “Oh, how difficult, how difficult it is to become a human being!”

⛓ “For the climate of the Archipelago, it is known that there are twelve months of winter, and the rest is summer.”

⛓ “Memory is the weakest point in Russians, especially the memory of evil.”

[Amor Towles · Rating 5 out of 5]

FIVE EXPANSIVE BOOKS SET IN CLOSE QUARTERS (#3)

This summer, the Wall Street Journal asked me to pick five books I admired that were somehow reminiscent of A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW. To that end, I wrote on five works in which the action is confined to a small space, but in which the reader somehow experiences the world. Here is #3:

In 1945, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an officer of the Russian army and recipient of the Order of the Red Star, was arrested for including criticisms of Stalin in his personal letters. Having been interrogated in the Lubyanka, he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor and shuttled off to the remote and inhospitable wilds of his own country where, as he puts it, “the sooner you get used to being without your near and dear ones, and the sooner they get used to being without you, the better.”

But faced with interment under unspeakable conditions, Solzhenitsyn makes an extraordinary choice: rather than succumb to bitterness and despair, he determines to pursue the richness of the human experience through conversations with his fellow inmates. Where are they from? Why were they arrested? What happened at their trial? Who did they leave behind? What do they miss? And what keeps them going now?

Years later, the vast catalog of these interviews stored away safely in Solzhenitsyn’s memory became the basis for one of the most harrowing, inventive, and subversive works of the 20th century: the “experiment in literary investigation” he called The Gulag Archipelago. With every element of liberty, every sensation of color, every hint of festivity stolen from him, Solzhenitsyn uncovers the richness of the human experience and the resilience of the human spirit. Though you may never face incarceration, the author’s advice to the new prisoner is valid just the same: “Own only what you can always carry with you. Know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag… Look around—there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you’ll hear.”

[Michael Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a perfectly acceptable and in some ways a better single volume version of S that I recommend to everyone. I read the original trilogy, and most of the rest of S, but most readers don't need this. It's full of old stories, but the single volume, here, is the best choice. It has everything the reader needs.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...

==============


“The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.”

-Solzhenitysn

======

“Everything will be all right. And, even if it isn’t, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.”

― Alexei Navalny, imprisoned Russian dissident and critic of Putin

=================

what Solzhenitsyn and Orwell knew.....

“Nothing makes with greater certainty of making earth into a hell, then a man wanting to make it his heaven.”

-Friedrich Hölderlin

===========

new article: the author who brought down an empire...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/op...

a story from Solzhenitsyn's opus...

The audience exploded into applause. Every person in the room jumped up and began to wildly clap, as if racing each other to see who could get to their feet the fastest. The applause was all to honor the dictator Joseph Stalin at a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.

But the big question soon became: Who would have the nerve to be the first person to stop clapping in honor of Comrade Stalin? No one had the courage, so the clapping went on…and on…and on.

You might be wondering why in the world anyone would be afraid to stop clapping for any leader. To understand this, you need to know Joseph Stalin.

Stalin was a ruthless dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952. Although no one knows the precise number of political prisoners he executed, estimates usually reach well over a million.

Historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev estimated that Stalin had about 1 million political prisoners executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 alone. That doesn’t even count the 6 or 7 million who died in the famine that Stalin created through his policies, or the millions who had to do long, hard sentences in the Gulag labor camps.

So when people were afraid to stop clapping for Stalin, they had good reason.

Here is how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the surreal scene in his great book, The Gulag Archipelago:

“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”

At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.

That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bleak and unremittingly grim account of the gulags between 1918 and 1956, narrative history rather than Solzhenitsyn’s usual literary voice. There are occasional flashes of hope and redemption, but these are few.
Solzhenitsyn provides a historical account reasoning through the state’s decision-making process and covering all the process of prison and exile from arrest to release (not so many reached release). There are detailed descriptions of the food, interrogations, torture, sanitary arrangements, travel, weather, clothing, the guards, stool pigeons, the daily work, rebellions, hunger strikes, executions, cells, relationships between the sexes and exile. It is comprehensive and Solzhenitsyn does not spare the reader. He also outlines some of the policies which led to the gulags, the architects of them (primarily Lenin and Stalin) and provides some estimates of the death toll generally from the gulags, starvation and land clearance; figures are in the tens of millions all told.
It is an indictment of what Lenin and Stalin made of Marx in the Russian situation and some of the logical inconsistencies in the system (you achieve the withering away of the state by making it bigger). The whole thing is a testament to the fortitude of the human spirit. There are occasional flashes of humour; the party meeting where no one wants to be the first to stop clapping and so it goes on for over 8 minutes springs to mind.
The book is of historical importance; placing the origins of the gulag with Lenin rather than Stalin; he just exploited and perfected it. It is a must read and there isn’t a lot more to say. Anyone who wants to understand Soviet history has to read this.

[Paula M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Soljenítsin

Há livros que nunca deveriam ter sido escritos, mas que devem ser lidos.

Uma obra e um homem por trás dela surpreendentes!
Soljenítsin dedicou-se a escrevê-la a partir de 1965, num lugar secreto na Estónia. Durante dois invernos seguidos- 65 dias no primeiro e 81 no segundo- escreveu, escreveu e só escreveu. Sozinho, sem vizinhos, cheio de precauções e com pouco mais do que alguma lenha e comida que caçava, fê-lo em memória de todos os torturados e mortos no Gulag.
É extraordinária a resiliência do autor não só por ter sobrevivido aos campos de trabalho corretivo e a um tumor canceroso (quando era ainda prisioneiro), mas tb por se propor a reviver e a sentir novamente a dor das atrocidades.

A partir da sua experiência e principalmente do testemunho de 227 pessoas, que lhe chegaram em forma de relatos , recordações e cartas , criou um extenso livro de História , de memórias pessoais , de reflexão política e filosófica.
O Arquipélago está dividido em sete capítulos ( A Indústria Prisional / Movimento Perpétuo / Extermínio pelo Trabalho / A Alma e o Arame Farpado / Os Trabalhos Forçados / O Desterro / Não há Estaline), que se subdividem em capítulos menores.

O Gulag - referido na obra como a espátula gigantesca, o tumor canceroso; o lado escuro das nossas vidas; o fígado dos acontecimentos - era o sistema dos campos de trabalho forçado. A ' Alma Mater' do Gulag, expressão de Soljenítsin, são as ilhas Solovki, onde um mosteiro da Igreja Ortodoxa Russa foi transformado no primeiro campo de trabalho por decreto de Lenine. Estaline deu asas à insanidade e esticou milhões de quilómetros de arame farpado por todo o país, nascendo assim um 'arquipélago' tenebroso.

Soljenítsin foi preso, aos 26 anos, em 1944, devido a correspondência interceptada pela censura. A um amigo da escola referia- se a Estaline como o Cabecilha por ter traído a revolução, pela deslealdade e crueldade. Não se podia sussurrar quanto mais escrever o que se pensava, por isso enfrentou o Artigo Cinquenta e Oito do código penal. Era com ele que se condenavam os ' inimigos do povo' ( conceito usado pela primeira vez neste artigo) , os suspeitos de atividades contra-revolucionárias. Foi com ele que milhares de inocentes tiveram acesso rápido e direto ao inferno.
Era-se preso por qualquer coisa e por coisa nenhuma : por se ter um carrinho de linhas, por se pertencer a um grupo ou classe social, por se chegar atrasado ao trabalho, por se ser esteta (10 anos!) e até por se ser parecido com Estaline!
Os indígenas do Gulag morriam de exaustão e também de escorbuto,tuberculose, fome, tortura, distrofia alimentar, edema de carência ou por estarem 1 milímetro desalinhados da fila ( era-se reeducado eficazmente com um tiro! ).

Grandes obras foram construídas pelos zeks a custo zero, por isso os campos eram economicamente vantajosos. A primeira grande construção foi a do Bielomorkanal . Estaline forneceu as diretrizes: " o canal deve ser construído num curto prazo e ficar barato" . Assim, um canal com 227 km de comprimento, do Mar Branco ao Báltico, ficou pronto em 22 meses à custa de 30 mil homens. Foi inaugurado no 1* de Maio. (O canal do Suez com 160 km foi construído em 10 anos e o do Panamá , com 80 km, em 28) .
No campo de Kolimá , na Sibéria, era dia de trabalho com 45 ou 50 graus negativos.
Os presos, protegidos com farrapos, trabalhavam as mesmas horas que nos outros campos , 16 ou mais.

Soljenitsin foi meticuloso no relato que nos deixou. Nada ou quase nada do que se viveu entre 1918 a 1956 foi esquecido. Não há nenhum monumento no seu país em memória destas vítimas. Deixou-lhes ele este tributo.

Nestas páginas, o Cabecilha é também o Grande Celerado ou ironicamente, o Tigre Brincalhão , o Amigo, ou o Genial Estratega de todos os tempos. Quis o Amado Mestre ficar conhecido como Stalin, que significa "homem de ferro". De ferro era, mas a sua mãe queria-o mais maleável ( seminarista!...)

[Kiran Dellimore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gulag Archipelago is without a doubt the heaviest book I have ever read in my life. It took enormous mental fortitude and discipline for me to perservere to the end. This was in no way due to any fault of the author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who deserves full credit for this literary tour de force, but rather due to the disturbing subject of the book – the Russian Gulags (i.e., the labor and correction prison/slave camps in Russia during communism).

The descriptions of the inhumanity and senseless cruelty inflicted on millions of innocent Russian citizens by the morally bankrupt and corrupt communist regimes under Stalin and Khrushchev is utterly depressing. The Gulag Archipelago could easily lead one into misanthropy, since it gives an unprecedented look into the hellish depths of depravity to which the human soul can descend.

Yet there is a silver lining. Through the suffering and moral desert of the Gulags some prisoners, Solzhenitsyn among them, find a way to survive, not only physically but spiritually. They refuse to be morally corrupted against all odds and in fact extract a positive upliftment from the suffering that they endure. They realize that despite being innocent of the crimes for which they are imprisoned, they are nevertheless like all human beings guilty of doing wrong to others (in the past), which means in a spiritual sense they are not undeserving of their sentences.

If I were to distill the priceless nugget of wisdom that Solzhenitsyn imparts through this monumental opus it would be that the secret to finding meaning in life and reaching our higher selves as human beings lies in suffering. This is of course a bitter pill for many to swallow, but one which is worth serious meditation. I am not sure everyone has the stomach for such a heavy book, but if you are up for the challenge I would highly recommend The Gulag Archipelago.

[Sean Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They have tightly bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is probably the greatest and most disturbing account of human rights violations and political oppression. Now I look around me and see other people stress over nothing, and am disgusted by their egotistical self-centeredness.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am surprised, no, shocked actually, at how perfectly constructed, researched and organized Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago' is. He methodically describes the entire scheme developed in the Soviet Union from being arrested to examination and conviction in a legal court of judges to transportation to the awful Siberian prisons. Stalin perfected this legal political police state in order to legally murder or enslave millions of Russian citizens, but he only continued what others began.

I have no doubts the Communist revolutionaries used communism like a drug or a religion to develop a religious and sexual ecstasy in themselves. Destroying free will and independence in their victims involved lots of nakedness and torture and starvation - to break down pride in their victims (and do what to watchers, hmmmm). Their version of communism became a legalized tool to utterly destroy any tendency to think for oneself in any human head, especially brains resistant to religious ecstasies.

The novel '1984' 1984 is based on historical fact, gentle reader. The Soviet Union's history.

This is a stomach-churning story of insanity and torture, gentle reader. Solzhenitsyn's scholarship cannot deaden the horror of a police state. Unlike the Nazis, the Communist revolutionaries passed laws which were totally bonkers. This was done in order to ensnare ANYONE who actually expressed any sort of opposition, or who might be thinking in the future of opposing, or maybe they simply cross their legs looking like they oppose the revolutionaries. These insane laws fed victims into an assembly line of institutionalized slavery madness by Stalin and his government. Perhaps the communists were trying to literally create metalic robots from living flesh through torture and starvation. Survivors were certain to be broken mentally after the systemic methodologies the revolutionaries developed to make human brains incapable of all thought.

Honestly, if the revolutionaries and Stalin really wanted to only transform people into the type of citizen they wanted, they should have driven spikes into the eyes of their entire population. It works.

Lobotomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

Instead, I think they WANTED to keep their people busy in the daily work of torture and killing.

What, I can hear you say, that is crazy! Yes, gentle reader, I agree. Yet it happened and was sustained by a human government and an entire country of compliant citizens. The Soviet Union later invaded all of eastern Europe and influenced many countries all over the world to change their governments into similar police states the Soviets had perfected.

It is a mistake to blame the political theory of communism for this, gentle reader, in my humble opinion. This is male genetics gone wild. These are men given license to act on those impulses to make war on their fellows and control other people's bodies through violence. In 'The Gulag Archipelago' it was a Communist government. This madness has also been expressed by:


-the Catholic Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisi...,

-America's Red Scares https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sca... and Salem witch trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_w...,

-Idi Amin's Uganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin,

-Cambodia's Khmer Rouge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_R...,

-China's Cultural Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultura...

-North Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_K...


and many many many many many other instances of human history, too numerous to list. Truly. Too numerous to list. Think about it.

The insanity of these systemic institutionalized regimes of terror is clear to see. The mistake you might be making every day, gentle reader, is to assume this stuff could never happen again. It will happen again. It will.

I strongly recommend reading 'The Gulag Archipelago' at least once in your life. At minimum, read '1984', a shorter fictional read which nonetheless mirrors the reality of many many many instances of human history.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening book, the first one that showed me what gulags were...

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firstly a note on the edition - this is the ABRIDGED version, but it was authorised by the author, as the original runs to 1800 pages in some editions and would be too much for most non-specialised readers. On the whole I think the abridgement is impressive, but if you value your sanity, you should skip Jordan Peterson's introduction unless you like being talked down to by aggressively right wing Americans. I read the book for a discussion in the Reading the 20th Century group, and I am glad I did, though it is not an easy read and there might have been better ways to start a new reading year.

Solzhenitsyn's own experience of the gulags is a key source, but he also accumulated stories from many others - this edition also contains a glossary of names which identifies which of them were among his witnesses. While there is inevitably a degree of political spin, it is humanity, laced with a surprising amount of dry humour, that characterise the authorial voice, despite the grimmest of subject matter - the list of torture techniques employed by Soviet investigators is long and detailed, and the sheer scale of the atrocities becomes mind-numbing.

The book broadly follows the experience of a political prisoner (zek) as he passes through the system, so the first part is about arrest, interrogation and initial prison experiences, and it is quite some time before we reach the main subject, life in Stalin's camps. Right at the end we get a little about release and its aftermath.

Solzhenitsyn also challenges the widely held view that the atrocities were largely confined to Stalin's famous purges of the 1930s - his list of state casualties starts with the Revolution and continues right through to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. There is also quite a lot on how the Bolsheviks tightened and massively extended the systems of repression developed by the Tsars.

This is a monumental and sobering book that had to be written for the many victims whose stories can never be fully told (and it is oddly comforting to think that there are much worse places to be than a western country in the throes of a pandemic), but it is never a comfortable one to read.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most monumental accounts of one of the cruellest ideologies of history,this book should be read by all
Layer by layer Solzhenitsyn exposes the hideous system of imprisonment ,death and torture that he refers to as the 'Gulag Archipelago'
He strips away that the misconception of the good Tsar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs and exposes how it was Lenin and his henchmen who put into place the brutal totalitarianism , which would be inherited and continued by Stalin
In fact the only thing that Stalin really did differently was to introduce a more personalised ,Imperial style of rule but otherwise carried on the evil work of Lenin
It was Lenin who imprisoned the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) , Mensheviks,Social Democrats,Social Revolutionaries Anarchists and independent intelligentsia and had many killed
In this way he completely destroyed all opposition to Bolshevik hegemony
Under Lenin the persecution started of anybody convicted of religious activity and the complete destruction of the church in Russia
And it was Lenin who began the genocide of whole ethnic groups that would later gain momentum under Stalin
Under the Communist system all that is spiritual or not purely material in nature is destroyed.And we discover what a horror Marx's idea of 'dialectic materialism ' really is
But I cannot describe the horrors which Solzhenitsyn outlines in this book :the hideous torutres,the slave markets selling of young women into sexual slavery
Solzhenitsyn describes how the prison system of the Tsarist system was compassionate by comparison but the mild abuses of Tsarist imprisonment where reacted to with a shrill outcry that never greeted the horrors of Bolshevism and Communism
As he says in his ever present biting sarcasm "Its just not fashionable,just not fashionable
And even today,even after the fall of Communism in Europe (though its iron grip remains strong in parts of Asia,Africa and in Cuba) its still not regarded as fashionable to highlight the horrors of Comm

[Mohsen Rajabi · Rating 5 out of 5]

یکی از دردناک‌ترین و باشکوه‌ترین کتاب‌های غیرداستانی که خواندم. این کتاب سخت و عجیب، که انگشت به‌دهانتان می‌گذارد و درست زمانی که فکر می‌کنید بیش از نمی‌شود سختی‌های زندان بیشتر شود چنان چهارستون بدنتان را به لرزه در می‌آورد که گویی بمبی در نزدیکی‌تان منفجر کرده‌اند. مجمع‌الجزایر گولاگ بسیار بیش از یک کتاب است. جان‌هایی که در همه‌ی این سال‌ها در شوروی رنج دیده‌اند، شکنجه دیده‌اند، و مرده‌اند در این کتاب حضور دارند. سولژنیتسین شمعی برداشته است و با صبر و حوصله‌ای کم‌نظیر همه را به ما نشان می‌دهد

نمی‌دانم... اینقدر سنگین است این کتاب که حتی فکر کنم برای کسانی که چند وقتی زندان هم رفته‌اند سخت و ناگوار باشد. فردی را تصویر کنید که ناگهان به خاطر دفترچه یادداشتی که مطالبی کاملا معمولی می‌نویسد به ده سال حبس محکوم می‌شود (خب این یکی را به لطف زندگی در ایران می‌شود تصور کرد)، فردی را تصور کنید که حکم اعدامش را داده‌اند و به اصطلاح به «واپسین فرجام» گرفتار شده است و در برزخ مرگ و زندگی سیصد روز طول می‌کشد تا اعدام شود و در این سیصد روز جیره‌ی غذایی‌اش قطع شده چون باید اعدام شود و کار این فرد به جایی می‌رسد که بزرگترین آرزویش اعدام‌شدن می‌شود و این فرد را ضرب در هزاران نفر در سال کنید...

و یا تصور کنید که به سلولی منتقل می‌شوید که سطلی پر از مدفوع در آن قرار دارد؟ چه می‌شود اگر به شما بگویند که در زندان‌های شوروی دیدن این سطل پر از کثافت چنان برای زندانیان خوشایند شده بود که انگار بویی خوش می‌پراکند؟ و چرا اینگونه؟ چون از یک زمان دولت شوروی تصمیم می‌گیرد که به خاطر آکنده‌شدن سلول‌ها از زندانی دیگر در سلول‌ها سطل نگذارد و همه مجبور بودند در کف سلول قضای حاجت کنند

یا سفر کردن با قطار را در نظر بگیرید که نشستن بر روی صندلی‌ها چقدر سفت است؟ یک زندانی محکوم در شوروی از دیدن یک کابین که فقط صندلی‌هایش پر باشند و مجبور باشد بنشیند روی زمین بسیار خوشحال می‌شده چون برای زندانی‌ها واگن‌های مخصوصی بوده که آنقدر آدم در آن می‌گنجاندند که گاه تا چندین طبقه و لایه آدم بر روی هم قرار می‌گرفتند

مجمع‌الجزایر گولاگ کتاب بی‌رحمی به نظر می‌رسد و فقط به این جهت که نویسنده دارد کار روایتش را انجام می‌دهد. زندگی در همه‌جای دنیا سخت است اما در بعضی جاها بی‌رحمانه است و تمامی موجوداتی که از نظر فیزیکی انسان هستند از نظر روحی به چیزی به جز انسان تبدیل می‌شوند

خواندن این کتاب سخت بود. برای من طبق اطلاعات گودریدز از دوم آگوست ۲۰۱۳ شروع شده و امروز سی‌ام آپریل ۲۰۱۷ تمام شده و من کسی نیستم که خواندن کتاب‌ها را کش بدهم، اما این کتاب طول کشید و بسیار طول کشید ولی یکی از جاودانه‌ترین کتاب‌هایی است که خواندمش و حتما مدت‌زمانی بعد برمی‌گردم تا باز در داستان‌ها غوطه‌ بخورم و شاید بعضی از داستان‌ها را از دید خودم روایت کنم

[Δx Δp ≥ ½ ħ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apa yang harus saya ceritakan tentang buku ini? Tak ada--atau lebih tepatnya tak bisa. Buku ini harus dibaca sendiri.

Nyaris tak ada buku yang bisa menyajikan teror semenggelisahkan buku ini. Banyak orang yang tersedu-sedan saat membaca buku tentang kekejaman holocaust seperti di buku Diary of Anne Frank atau Night. Tapi kalau mereka sudah membaca buku ini, mereka akan menangis guling-guling.

Bercerita tentang kengerian kamp konsentrasi buat para "si penjahat malang" (baca: siapapun yang dianggap menentang keinginan Si Kumis Besar a.k.a Stalin) yang bernama Gulag, buku ini sudah menimbulkan kengerian bahkan sejak halaman pertama. Gulag jauh lebih mengerikan daripada penjara manapun buatan manusia lainnya--bahkan Iblis pun tak mungkin bisa sekejam ini. Tak akan cukup kata di review ini buat menuliskan kengeriannya. Baca sendiri! Dan bersiaplah untuk mimpi buruk yang tak akan pernah berakhir.

Gulag merupakan versi neraka di bumi yang bahkan lebih kejam daripada neraka versi agama langit. Di neraka-Nya, penghuninya masih diberi makan berupa onak duri dan air nanah bercampur logam mendidih. Di Gulag, para tahanannya sama sekali tak diberi makan kecuali sisa sampah yang bahkan hewan paling putus asa pun tak akan mau memakannya.

Stalin telah membuat Hitler terlihat seperti bocah bengal 7 tahun yang hanya bisa melampiskan amarahnya dengan menyiksa kecoa malang.

Buku ini sama sekali bukan bacaan yang menyenangkan. Teror, nestapa, dan kebrutalan yang dihadirkannya akan menghilangkan selera makan, meremukredamkan perasaan, dan meluluhlantahkan pertahanan otot air mata. Buku ini akan menantang pembacanya dengan pertanyaan paling fundamental tentang aspek moral kemanusiaan: "Apakah manusia itu pada hakikatnya terlahir sebagai seorang yang baik? Atau malah jahat?" dan yang paling menohok, "mana yang lebih utama, menyebarkan derma kebaikan atau mencegah angkara kejahatan? Mengapa kita lebih mudah melakukan kebaikan dengan gagah namun sering kali tak berdaya mencegah kejahatan yang tampak mudah dibantah?".

Ketika saya membaca buku Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu 1, saya merasa stress. Ketika membaca buku ini, saya merasa depresi. Dengan tema yang sama--memoar menyakitkan tentang perjuangan orang-orang yang bertahan dari penindasan rezim represif, Gulag menyajikan teror berkali-kali lipat tak berkesudahan sampai halaman terakhir dan akan terus mengendap di benak pembacanya selamanya...


PS: Tengkyu Panda atas pinjemannya. ditunggu pinjeman Nyanyi Sunyi 2-nya :P

[Emily May · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive view of the atrocities that took place under Stalin, and also a powerful meditation on how ideology can enable cruelty by reframing it as virtue. People across the world supported the Soviet regime because they believed in the core ideology, and because of this they gladly turned a blind eye to the horrors they didn't want to see.

Solzhenitsyn spares no details in how people were arrested, dragged from their beds, brutally interrogated and tortured, starved, and sentenced for jokes, hearsay, past associations, or fabricated crimes. Children over 12 were held criminally liable and given the same treatment. He shows what happens when the law becomes an instrument of power rather than a seeker of justice.

The Gulag Archipelago is most effective because Solzhenitsyn understands that the Soviet Union was not special, not a special kind of evil caused by Stalin alone, but something that can affect any vulnerable populace. People wanted what it offered, and understandably, because they had lived through autocracy, worker exploitation and poverty under the Romanovs.

And there was such a raw vulnerability that came through in Solzhenitsyn's writing. It was him begging his readers to understand, describing in detail what they did and how it felt, saying See? You see how it was? whilst also seeming to say: you will never understand.

[فهد الفهد · Rating 2 out of 5]

أرخبيل الغولاغ

أهمية هذا الكتاب لا تخفف ثقله، فلذا لا أنصح بقراءته إلا للمهتمين بالحالة السوفييتية، حيث يركز هذا الكتاب على الجانب الحقوقي فيها، متناولاً بالتفصيل الموجات الاعتقالية، أساليب التحقيق، القانون السوفييتي الذي كان على أساسه يخون الناس ويزج بهم في الغولاغ الرهيب.

ستقرأ في هذا الكتاب ما يتجاوز خيالك من حالات ظلم، حيث كان يسجن كل من يبدي رأياً مخالفاً وربما يعدم، وحيث كان الناس يرسلون إلى المعتقلات لعشر سنوات بدون أي محاكمة، بل ويورد المؤلف حالات ذهب الناس فيها للمعتقلات لأنهم إما عادوا من الحرب أو انتقدوا قلة الإنتاج، أو مثل حالة تلك المرأة التي ذهبت لتسأل ما الذي يمكنها أن تفعله برضيع جارتها التي اعتقلت في اليوم السابق، فاعتقلت هي بدورها !!!

الكتاب يمنح قارئه حالة اكتئابية لا تزول بسهولة، وخاصة عندما نتذكر أن هذا النظام المجنون الذي زال أخيراً من الاتحاد السوفييتي كان وربما لازال موجوداً في بعض بلادنا العربية.

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very tough read. The Gulag Archipelago (1973), is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's exhaustive account of the Soviet Gulags between 1918 and 1956.

It's almost unremittingly grim and is based on Solzhenitsyn's own years in labour camps and the testimony of around 200 survivors. The reader learns about the waves of mass arrests, the interrogations and torture techniques, adapting to life in the camps, the food, sanitary arrangements, executions, cells, the guards, the travel to/from camps, weather, clothing, guards, escape attempts, stool pigeons, daily work, prisoner uprisings, hunger strikes, relationships between the sexes, and so on.

Take, for example, the section on interrogations and torture techniques which consists of pages and pages of horribly vivid and imaginative torture techniques and other psychological methods to extract confessions. It's incredibly hard to even momentarily consider how awful each method would have been for the victims, and yet these techniques were unofficially sanctioned by the state and inflicted on millions of innocent ordinary Soviet citizens.

Much of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account is blackly comedic, absurd, and stranger than any fiction, for example how thieves were co-opted into the revolution as they were already opposed to private property. Where they were caught or prosecuted (their crimes were often ignored) they got significantly lighter sentences than political prisoners and were offered preferential roles within the labour camps. Or how children could be guilty of political crimes and so became an increasingly sizeable proportion of the prison population (e.g. 8 years for stealing a potato) and quickly adapted to the dog-eat-dog ruthlessness of camp survival.

I listened to the abridged version which is about a third of the length of the original, it's still almost 600 pages long, or 23 and a half hours of audio. Even abridged, it's still sometimes somewhat monotonous and chapters on, for example, some of the more famous show trials felt superfluous to the book's core messages, or the occasional circular philosophical musings about the implications of Soviet policy. Perhaps the gruelling length, occasional monotony, and repetition is the most appropriate way to shine a light on the scale of State sanctioned murder and abuse by a country on its own population? Total deaths in the Gulags have been estimated at 60 million, but no one knows for sure. It's impossible to really get your head round the scale of the suffering and death but The Gulag Archipelago is about as close as an individual reader will ever manage. Everyone should read this book in order to gain some understanding about what happened in the Soviet Union in the decades following the October Revolution, after all, those who fail to understand the past are condemned to repeat it.

4/5

The blurb...

A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

'The Gulag Archipelago helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

Epic.

Important and relevant.

Depressing as hell.

I have read sections of Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece for decades and enjoy his writing but could never pull the trigger on the whole thing because of its size. Apparently there was an authorized abridged version, so that I could handle.

Solzhenitsyn shares his story and how it is corroborated by hundreds of other victims of Stalinism and describing the fate of millions. This epic history documents the years between 1918 and 1956, from the rise of Bolshevism until after Stalin’s death.

Solzhenitsyn had been a Marxist himself and a Red Army captain before his arrest and he spent years in prison for the offense of writing to a friend who apparently was against the state. He describes his own imprisonment and his observations of how the police state worked and of the monumental violence done to the civil rights of people living in the sphere of the Soviet Union.

The author also explains that the massive penal system provided the state with slave labor as they mined, farmed, cut timber and whatever else during their years (frequently decades) of servitude. He also reveals the pervasive specter of fear that gripped the lives of tens of millions.

I recall watching The Death of Stalin, a very dark humor film, and seeing scenes of nighttime knocks on doors and of secretive arrests and murders. While much of that was hyperbole for the sake of humor, what Solzhenitsyn describes is not too far off. Speaking of humor, I noticed several scenes of gallows humor bubbling up from page after page of darkness. This is by no means funny, but he did add some spice and wit to his otherwise freight train of despair.

I must add this to a short list of titles that I will likely never read again, a list that includes The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Rape of Nanking. There’s only so much you can take. I once visited Dachau (near Munich) and was floored by the demonic efficiency of torture and death. One of the many things that bothered me about Dachau was it’s proximity to Munich, literally on the edge of town. Soldiers and guards likely came into town, drank and ate, got their hair cut, had girlfriends, etc. Everyone must have known what was going on, but what could they do? So too the people living in this Soviet nightmare, what could they do but keep their heads down and try not to be noticed and be suspected of something and possibly arrested or worse. People feared being labeled as anti-communist and the punishment that would follow. Stalin made people disappear.

So for historic significance and a masterful writing of a time and a place, two thumbs way up. But for length and a depression inducing narrative, a book I will likely never pick up again.

[Charlie Hasler · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I don't have a Kindle I took pictures on my phone of parts that stopped me dead. After further reading and picture taking, I now have an Archipelago folder on my phone. I did this because the words and points made so utterly shattered and moved me that I felt it so important I revisit these pages in the future.

The writing style reminded me of reading Henri Charrieres Papillon. Fast, to the point, and powerful.

Probably one of the most important books I will ever read.

[I · Rating 1 out of 5]

(execrable) Anti communist fanfiction by the friend of Apartheid and Franco. Even Mrs. A.S. was surprised at the purchase of Solzhy's regurgitations. Everyone's a critic I suppose. http://www.idcommunism.com/2018/01/gu...

[Bettie]

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