When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: “Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!” The first translations into Western languages in 1974—just fifty years ago—proved almost as sensational. No longer was it so easy to cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the ussr. In France, where Marxism had remained fashionable, the book changed the course of intellectual life, and in America it helped counter the New Left celebration of Mao, Castro, and other disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
What was it that made this book so effective? And what did Solzhenitsyn mean by calling it “literary,” even though everything in it was factual? To answer these questions is to grasp why Gulag towers over all other works of the Soviet period and, indeed, over all literature since the middle of the twentieth century.
Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been “repressive,” but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: “I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!” “The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.” Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.
In 1965, Solzhenitsyn explains, “my archive was raided [by the secret police] and a novel impounded,” and thus he had to be especially careful with Gulag, since his notes for it mentioned the real names of his informants. In Russia, literature was not only persecuted but also dangerous, and not just to the writers. The fact that the book could not be published in the ussr and had to be smuggled abroad also marked the difference between the Russian and Western experiences. Russian literature was morally serious in a way American, British, and French literatures were not. The preening of Western intellectuals about social injustice began to look almost ridiculous by comparison.
Western intellectuals usually supposed that Russian dissidents might suffer the sort of punishment that in their own countries is reserved for dangerous criminals. At worst, Westerners pictured conditions like those in tsarist Russia, long considered the model of an oppressive state. That is why Solzhenitsyn devotes so many passages to contrasting what passed for tyranny in nineteenth-century Russia with ordinary Soviet conditions.
Begin with numbers. Solzhenitsyn instructs: from 1876 to 1904—a period of mass strikes, peasant revolts, and terrorism claiming the lives of Tsar Alexander II and other top officials—“486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country,” a figure that includes “ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!” During the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko, and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 2,200 persons were executed,” a number contemporaries described as an “epidemic of executions.”
By contrast, Soviet judicial killings—whether by shooting, forced starvation, or hard labor at forty degrees below zero—numbered in the tens of millions. Crucially, condemnation did not require individual guilt. As early as 1918, Solzhenitsyn points out, the Cheka (secret police) leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice to disregard personal guilt or innocence and just ascertain the prisoner’s class origin: this “must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.”
On this basis, over five million peasants (classed as “kulaks,” supposedly better off than their neighbors) were forcibly exiled to completely unsettled wastelands with no food or tools, where they were left to die. The same punishment later befell whole nationalities deemed potentially disloyal (such as ethnic Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars) or dangerous because of the possibility of receiving subversive support from a foreign power (as in the case of Koreans and Poles). “The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was followed by the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. All food for a large area of what is now Ukraine was requisitioned, and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited, so that over the next few months inhabitants starved to death. Idealistic young Bolsheviks from the capital enforced the famine. In total, Stalin’s war on the countryside claimed more than ten million lives. As Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this crime is not nearly as well known among intellectuals as the Great Purges, which claimed fewer victims, because many purge victims were themselves intellectuals.
Arrests also took place by quotas assigned to local secret-police offices, which, if they knew what was good for them, petitioned to arrest still more. After World War II, captured Russian soldiers in German slave-labor camps were promptly transferred to Russian ones, as was anyone who had seen something of the Western world. Even soldiers who had fought their way out of German encirclement were arrested as traitors, simply because they had been behind German lines. Still more shocking, the Allies—who could not imagine why people would not want to return to their homeland—forcibly repatriated, often at bayonet point, over a million fugitives, some of whom committed suicide rather than face what they knew awaited them.
Of course, individuals, as well as groups, were charged with political crimes, a category including more than prohibited actions. The code also specified “Counter-Revolutionary Thought” and what Solzhenitsyn calls a “very expansive category: . . . Member of a Family (of a person convicted under one of the foregoing . . . categories).” There was even a special camp for wives of enemies of the people; their teenage children were arrested to forestall possible vengeance. As the prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko explained, “we protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.”
Punishments were both more numerous than in tsarist times and much harsher. The conditions Dostoevsky described in his autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62) seem like paradise compared with Soviet prisons and camps. After all, Solzhenitsyn points out, when Catherine the Great detained the radical Alexander Radishchev, he was not subjected to torture, and no one thought of arresting his relatives. In fact, “Radishchev knew perfectly well that his sons would serve as officers in the imperial guard no matter what happened to him . . . . Nor would anyone confiscate Radishchev’s family estate.”
“Seven attempts were made on the life of Alexander II himself,” Solzhenitsyn also notes. “What did he do about it? Ruin and banish half Petersburg, as happened after [the prominent Communist Sergey] Kirov’s murder? You know very well that such a thing could never enter his head.” As for the taking of hostages, “the concept didn’t exist.” Or consider Lenin’s career. Even though his brother had been hanged for an attempt on the life of the tsar, Lenin not only remained free, he was even admitted to the Kazan University law faculty. When he was expelled for organizing a student demonstration against the government (“in our day he would have been shot”), this younger brother of a would-be regicide was at last banished—not to a desolate wilderness but to his family estate of Kokushkino, “where he intended to spend the summer anyway.” Despite this record, Lenin was allowed to take the bar exam and become a lawyer. When he was arrested for founding a revolutionary organization, he was sent to prison for one year, not twenty-five. There he was allowed to receive as many books as he needed and to write most of The Development of Capitalism in Russia. He could buy whatever food or medicine he liked. Many revolutionaries regarded prison as an opportunity to meet each other and organize seminars for the study of radical texts.
When Lenin was again banished—not to the frozen North but to “a land of plenty”—he was allowed before departing to go about the capital for three days on his own and leave instructions for revolutionary circles, then to do the same in Moscow. What’s more, he was not packed into a cattle car so crowded that there was not even room for everyone to stand, as in Soviet times, but permitted to travel unsupervised in a private train compartment to his place of exile. There he published revolutionary works and, “when mosquitoes bit him while he was out hunting, he ordered kid gloves.” Pre-Soviet conditions were so lax that Stalin was able to escape from banishment four times. As Solzhenitsyn observes, “Laziness would seem to be the only reason for not escaping from Tsarist places of banishment.”
Things were rather different under the Soviets. There “is no comparison anyway,” Solzhenitsyn explains, “because none of our revolutionaries ever knew what a really good interrogation could be.” The chapter on interrogation famously begins:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
As millions were forced to confess to crimes everyone knew were fabricated, interrogators soon found the daily torture routine boring. “The fact is that the interrogators like some diversion in their monotonous work, and so they vie in thinking of new ideas.” The types of torture were unregulated, Solzhenitsyn says, and “every kind of ingenuity was permitted, no matter what.” What happens to a person who can literally do anything to others? Tolstoy wrote about the “attraction” of power, Solzhenitsyn recalls, but for Soviet interrogators, “attraction is not the right word—it is intoxication!”
All of a sudden a new method of persuasion occurs to you! Eureka! So you call up your friends on the phone, and you go around to other offices and tell them about it—what a laugh! Who shall we try it on, boys? It’s really pretty monotonous to keep doing the same thing all the time. Those trembling hands, those imploring eyes, that cowardly submissiveness—they are really a bore.
One invention that became popular, and inspired all sorts of variations, was placing a person just arrested and still utterly confused in
the box . . . which sometimes is dark and constructed in such a way that he can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several hours . . . or a day.
The prisoner in the box knows nothing, not even if he will die there. One ingenious variation was the “divisional pit,” a hole in the ground about ten feet deep and exposed to the weather, which for several days becomes for the prisoner “both his cell and his latrine.” Yet another creative variation was the “alcove,” where a prisoner
could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, nor turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water onto his scalp . . . which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours.
Similar ingenuity was applied during arrests. The innocent person apprehended can only ask “Me? What for?” But he soon discovers that his life is irrevocably split in two. “That’s what arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.” You suddenly lose everything: position, connections, family—for even if you survive your term, and are permitted to return to your family, they will no longer be able to understand you. You have been away so long, and endured a world so incomprehensible to anyone who has not endured it, that for them only your name is the same. Such reunions are almost never successful. So are encounters between former prisoners and anyone who has never been arrested. “We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.”
“The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it,” Solzhenitsyn observes. “Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.’ ” But for the arresting officers, the whole procedure is often an exercise in creativity. One young woman, who had just bought some material for a dress, shared a cab with a young man—who arrested her. Important people were sometimes given new, desirable assignments and sent off in a private railway car, where they were arrested en route. Irma Mandel, a Hungarian, was given two front-row seats to the Bolshoi. She and the man courting her “sat through the show very affectionately, and when it was over,” he took her to prison in the Lubyanka (secret-police headquarters).
One has to give the Organs their due: in an age when public speeches, the plays in our theaters, and women’s fashions all seem to have come off assembly lines, arrests can be of the most varied kind. They take you aside in a factory corridor after you have had your pass checked—and you’re arrested. They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest—just let him try! They ’ll take you right off the operating table—as they took N. M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer. . . . You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street . . . .
Sometimes arrests even seem to be a game—there is so much superfluous imagination, so much well-fed energy, invested in them.
People never knew when they might be arrested, or by whom, and so “there was a general feeling of being destined for destruction.” Since failure to denounce was itself a crime, and stool pigeons were everywhere, one could trust no one. In theory, socialism brought people together, but in fact it created complete atomization and utter loneliness. So anxious did some people become that arrest brought relief “and even happiness!”
What is the point of such cruelty? Why so many arbitrary arrests, and why so much energy spent on extracting unbelievable confessions that no one would ever see? Some have explained the system economically, as a source of slave labor, but Solzhenitsyn shows that the gigantic expense incurred by the state furnishing countless interrogators and guards, transport, watchtowers, and barbed wire ensured that the system never paid its way. What economic sense did it make to take a scientist with years of training and deport him to the far north to dig frozen earth and die soon of exhaustion and hunger? If one wanted to eliminate enemies, wouldn’t it be easier just to shoot them all? And why arrest people who were completely loyal? One difference between the ussr and the Third Reich was that Germans who were neither Jews nor members of some other disfavored group, and who supported the regime, did not have to live in constant fear of arrest.
Soviet terror was an end in itself. Torture alone was not cruel enough, Solzhenitsyn points out. No, the goal was absolute dehumanization, reducing people to quivering masses of flesh who had forgotten who they were and who had lost the ability to feel normal emotions one by one until only anger was left. George Orwell understood this aspect of the regime as other Western observers did not. The new society, O’Brien explains to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is
the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. . . . Always, at every moment, there will be . . . the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face—forever.
Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn’s catalogue of horrors grow boring? You read three long volumes about boots trampling on human faces and your attention never flags. One reason is that Solzhenitsyn, like Edward Gibbon, is a master of ironic narration. At times, the book is unexpectedly funny. Along with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it stands as one of the great satires of world literature.
But it is the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s “experiment in literary investigation” that best explains why this book remains riveting. Gulag is structured as what might be called a collective autobiography. Readers learn about Solzhenitsyn’s personal experiences, and the author also records the analogous experiences of others. He seems to say: here is how I was arrested, and now here is how it happened to others; here is how I addressed the moral choices I faced; others reacted differently. Stalin is supposed to have said that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. Through collective autobiography, Solzhenitsyn allows the reader to sense, if not a million tragedies, then at least many thousands of individual ones.
Solzhenitsyn does not present himself as a paragon:
I remember very well that right after officer candidate school, I experienced the happiness of simplification, of . . . not having to think things through; the happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived . . . the happiness of forgetting some of the spiritual subtleties inculcated since childhood.
As an officer, he regarded himself “as a superior human being” and enjoyed ordering subordinates about. Yes, “pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig,” he says of himself. “Even at the front, where, one might have thought, death made equals of us all, my power soon convinced me that I was a superior human being,” Solzhenitsyn confesses. In his arrogance, he addressed “fathers with the familiar, downgrading form of address” and calmly sent ordinary soldiers to their deaths. “I ate my officer’s ration of butter with rolls, without giving a thought as to why I had a right to it, and why the rank-and-file soldiers did not.” Even when arrested, Solzhenitsyn, still thinking of himself as the officer he no longer was, made another prisoner carry his bag. The Lubyanka changed all that.
“The day after my arrest my march of penance began,” Solzhenitsyn recalls, and over hundreds of pages we trace the gradual changes in his character as we might trace a heroine’s development in a multivolume English novel. A key moment occurred when he met the Jewish prisoner Boris Gammerov. Commenting on a prayer offered by President Roosevelt, Solzhenitsyn “expressed what seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it: ‘Well, that’s hypocrisy of course.’” Trembling from emotion, Gammerov asked why Solzhenitsyn could not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God.
This reply, coming from someone born and educated after the Russian Revolution, shocked Solzhenitsyn. He recalls that he could have given the standard response, “but prison had already undermined my certainty . . . and it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from the outside.” The insight is crucial: one may not believe what one thinks one believes; it may really be an idea “implanted from outside.” How, then, does one recognize which beliefs are truly one’s own?
Learning to separate true and implanted beliefs: that is the story Solzhenitsyn tells. Gammerov and his friend Ingal kept challenging his formulaic ideas:
At the time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it “the hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgeoisie,” or the “militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia.”
Solzhenitsyn slowly learned to judge for himself. The process of spiritual ascent had begun.
In “The Ascent,” the book’s key chapter, Solzhenitsyn recalls how, lying in a prison hospital, he realized it was “a good time—to think! Think! Draw some conclusions from misfortune!” He asked himself: faced with a life of torment they could not have imagined, why did so few prisoners commit suicide—fewer, even, than people on the outside?
If these millions of helpless and pitiful vermin still did not put an end to themselves—this meant some kind of invincible feeling was alive inside them. Some very powerful idea.
Could there be something beyond the survival instinct and the quest for happiness? “Poverty and prison . . . give wisdom,” we hear, but what is that wisdom? Not just Solzhenitsyn, but also many others asked this question. This collective autobiography guides us through their answers.
“Here is how it was with many others, not just with me,” Solzhenitsyn explains. One’s first prison experience resembles the sky over Pompeii or the heaven of the Last Judgment “because it was not just anyone who had been arrested, but I—the center of this world.” One thought occurs to everyone: one must vow to survive at any price. And one soon realizes what that means: “at the price of someone else.”
And whoever takes that vow . . . allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world.
This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go the left—you lose your conscience.
Solzhenitsyn concedes that at that fork, “at that greater divider of souls,” most choose survival. Intellectuals—resembling many of his Western readers—usually acted swinishly because they could always find a way to justify anything.
One could also expect the worst from those who “accept that pitiful ideology which holds that ‘human beings are created for happiness.’” That, of course, is what most secular Americans take for granted. Reading this book, they are likely to ask: what else could life be about if not individual happiness? Exiled to the West, Solzhenitsyn shocked educated people by criticizing the shallowness of such thinking. Life is not just about oneself, he insisted, and one can expect arrogant bosh from those who think it is. They often responded by dismissing him as a religious fanatic.
Although most prisoners chose survival, many chose conscience, and Solzhenitsyn describes a few he met. They all knew that, according to official Bolshevik atheism, there are no transcendent values. Lenin and his followers scorned such ideas as “human dignity” and the “sanctity of human life.” No, Soviet citizens were taught, only the material result counted, and that meant the only moral standard was the interest of the Communist Party. People who accepted this way of thinking readily concluded that, on the individual level, too, all that matters is what promotes one’s own welfare.
Choosing conscience meant rejecting such thinking. You gradually recognize that “It is not the result that counts . . . but the spirit! Not what—but how.” You begin to change. Instead of being sharply intolerant, you begin to forgive. “You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others.” In short, “you are ascending.”
“Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering.” For the first time you examine your life sincerely and “remember everything you did that was bad and shameful.” Solzhenitsyn recalls how, when he was in the hospital, the deeply wise Dr. Kornfeld, a convert to Christianity, explained to him that although you are innocent of the crime for which you were imprisoned, “if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply,” you will be able to find real transgressions worthy of such punishment. As it happened, Dr. Kornfeld was murdered that very night. “And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance.”
Solzhenitsyn was not sure that everyone’s punishment was in some way deserved, but he accepted that idea for himself:
I had gone over and re-examined my life quite enough and come to understand why everything happened to me . . . . And I would not have murmured even if all that punishment had been considered inadequate.
Solzhenitsyn realized that he had been telling his life story backward:
What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary.
In his most evil moments, Solzhenitsyn was convinced he was doing good, and he was most mistaken when he considered himself infallible. By the same token, it was when he was most certain there was no God that God was with him. As he wrote in a poem: “God of the Universe! I believe again!/ Though I renounced You, You were with me!”
Solzhenitsyn discovered that “the meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.” Recognizing he would not have discovered that meaning without suffering, he disagrees with all those writers who “considered it their duty . . . to curse prison. . . . I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: ‘Bless you prison, for having been in my life!’”
Strangely enough, then, this book about countless deaths, unimaginable cruelty, and the worst of human nature turns out to be, in the final analysis, optimistic. It tells us how, even in the depths of evil, one can discern and choose the good.
