Harvey F’s Reviews > The Gulag Archipelago - An Experiment In Literary Investigation - Nobel Prize Winning Complete Three Volume Trade Paperback Set by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with a forward by Anne Applebaum > Status Update

Ch.4. Solzhenitsyn self-gain. Arrested with 6 Nazi-PoW Soviets, German he ordered to carry stolen case. PoWs helped carry, not question authority. Peasants heckled him: traitor. Good & evil not binary. Threshold when people must face crimes. 20th c. evil scale ungodly - ideology. Korneyeva preached to agents. Humanity at death or family not virtuous. Humans justify evil as good. Zoo fed prisoners? Need social reform.

Ch.4: Bluecaps. Self-prohibition of thought else enjoyment. Nazis stopped without evidence; Soviets created cases. No mercy with intoxicating greed for power and gain. Interrogators given special privileges even above rank but only for those in the know. Exploit women, wives and girlfriends. Vengeful petty arrests. Waves of arrests of security. Officer training else fight Stalingrad. Solzhenitsyn joined then heckled.

Ch.3: Prisoner’s dilemma but implicating any connections. Testimony twisted by interrogators pressuring you to sign. No public access to Criminal Code. Overfilled prison cells. Torture including slow crushing of manhood under boot. Some who didn’t sign made it through. Worse conditions than Tsarist prisons who wouldn’t go after family. Solzhenitsyn’s war diary thrown in the fire. Right to complaint hidden.

Ch.3: Interrogation. Torture methods, psychological if not physical, on fabricated charges since beginning of USSR. Skripnikova undergoing 5th interrogation with blood pressure 240/120 shouted at: “That’s too low, you b*tch!” Stalin deliberately ambiguous not to give specific order to torture. No permission needed during Purge. Inquiry demands investigation with confession. Sleep deprivation supported torture.

Chapter 2: Arrests began as the revolution was underway not just in Stalin’s purge. Lists were made. One by one each of the non-Bolshevik groups were targeted. People would be arrested, released, re-arrested. Church was infiltrated. People were taken hostage for those to be arrested. Engineering industries were decimated e.g. rail workers advised against large loads on tracks but fine when communist recommends it.

Volume 1. Forward, Preface, Author’s Note, Part I: Chapter 1 - Arrest. Already learnt of some of the gruelling details. Coffin containing dead baby overturned during searches, quotas for arrests, arrest during an operation, “quarter” of Leningrad mass arrested, complete double standards on frontline. Anytime, anywhere, anyhow. Many felt relief upon arrest. Solzhenitsyn directed own apprehenders to Lubyanka.