The Gulag Archipelago
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The Gulag Archipelago, probably the most powerful and certainly the most influential account of the Soviet slave labor and concentration camp system, is a massive, 1,800 page nonfiction narrative written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as his own experiences as a prisoner in a Gulag labor camp. Written between 1962 and 1973, it was published in the West in 1973, thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its official publication in 1989.
"GULag" is an acronym for the Russian term "Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps", the bureaucratic name of the Soviet concentration camp system. The original Russian title of the book is "Arkhipelag GULag", the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor deployed throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast "chain of islands", known only to those who were fated to visit it.
Structure and Factual Basis
Structurally, the work is made up of seven sections divided into three volumes.
At one level, the narrative traces the history of the Soviet concentration camp system from 1918 to 1956, starting with the original decrees issued by V.I. Lenin immediately after the October Revolution, which laid the practical and legal framework for a slave labor economy and concentration camp system. The narrative describes and discusses the various "waves" of purges, assembling the various show-trials and placing them into the context of the larger development of the GULag system. Also, Solzhenitsyn pays particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic development of the GULag system, tracing the decrees and organizational development. The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, with the so-called Secret Speech delivered by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress of 1956, which publicly revealed the existence of the GULag system and assigned the blame for it to the atrocities committed by Josef Stalin.
Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows in sequence the typical course of a zek (political prisoner) through the concentration camp system, starting with arrest, phony trial and initial internment; transport to the "archipelago"; treatment of prisoners and general living conditions; slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system (where Andrei Sakharov and his team of prisoner-scientists developed the hydrogen bomb, among other Soviet scientific breakthroughs); the practice of internal exile following the completion of the original prison sentence; and ultimate (but not guaranteed) release of the prisoner. Along the way, Solzhenitsyn details the trivial and commonplace events of an average zeks life, as well as specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprisings.
Apart from using his own personal experiences as a zek at a scientific prison (called a sharashka, experiences which provided the basis for his 1968 novel The First Circle), Solzhenitsyn draws on the testimony of 227 fellow zeks. These prisoners provided the first hand accounts that the work is based on. One chapter of the third volume of the book is written by a fellow prisoner named Georgi Tenno, whose exploits enraptured Solzhenitsyn to the extent that he offered Tenno a position as co-author of the book, although Tenno declined.
The sheer volume of first-hand testimony and primary documentation that Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble in The Gulag Archipelago made all subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work useless.
Basic Arguments and Historical Impact of the Work
The historical and cultural import of The Gulag Archipelago is key to understanding its relevance, and cannot be overstated.
Up until its publication, most well-informed people in the West believed that the purges and prison camp systems in the Soviet Union had been the exclusive work of Josef Stalin, and had been limited to his dictatorship (1924 through his death in 1953). Furthermore, it was thought that the Great Purge and show trials had been limited to the late 1930's. And finally, it was believed that these prison camps had been "aberrations" of the Soviet system. However, with The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn disproved all three of these assumptions.
For the first time, the theoretical, practical and legal framework of the Soviet concentration camp system was systematically traced not to Stalin but to Vladimir Lenin. Not only was this framework traced to Lenin's time, but responsibility for the system was placed on Lenin himself. Through documentation, mostly laws approved of or drafted by Lenin, but also letters, diaries and notes, Solzhenitsyn showed how the GULag system represented the stated wishes of Lenin himself, and were not a perversion of his aims and goals but rather a fulfillment of both.
Secondly, Solzhenitsyn showed how the Purges of the late 1930's, far from being unique, represented only one of the multiple waves of repression that gripped the Soviet Union throughout its history. Solzhenitsyn showed how the Purges of the late 1930's were the most notorious because the victims had been Party and military leaders and members of the intelligentsia—prominent and vocal members whose disappearances and show trials had been noted. But they had not been the only purges, and that every level of Soviet society had been purged and sent to the GULag system.
Third, and most damning, far from portraying the camps as an "aberration" of the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn proved that the Soviet government in fact could not govern without the very real threat of imprisonment, and that the Soviet economy depended on the manpower provided by the slave labor camps, especially insofar as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned.
This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system.
In Western Europe, reaction to the work caused the immediate political collapse of all the Soviet-sponsored Communist parties. It also forced a reevaluation of the historical role of Lenin, who up until the release of Solzhenitsyn's work had been regarded as a secular saint, whose views and goals had been perverted by Stalin. With The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin's political and historic reputation suffered a blow from which it never recovered. Current scholarship with the now-open Soviet files and source materials confirm all the charges made by Solzhenitsyn's work: The Soviet slave economy and concentration camp system were a direct result of Lenin's conscious and clear directives, and were intrinsic to the survival of the system. Stalin merely continued the implementation of the system, as did Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and even Gorbachev.
Additional Noteworthy Elements
Though the scope of the work ends in 1956, it is interesting to note that the GULag system continued uninterrupted until 1991, ending wiith the collapse of the Soviet Union that year. The last political (that is, non-criminal) prisoners were quietly released in 1989. The exact number of Soviet citizens who went through the prison and slave labor camp system will never be known, especially as key documentation was deliberately destroyed as the Soviet Union was collapsing. But conservative estimates put the figure at a minimum of 20 million people, probably around 30 million, but no more than 35 million. The number of those who died in the system will also never be known, but a figure of 8-10 million is not exaggerated. Anecdotally, the GULag system was so voracious that the 1939 Soviet census was a classified document until the collapse of the regime; between 1930 and 1939, at least one third of the population of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was sent to the GULag.
One of the surprising and noteworthy elements is the powerful humor Solzhenitsyn employs throughout the work. It is one of the reasons the book has remained so popular. Rather than a grim rendering of crimes and attrocities, The Gulag Archipelago is often sarcastic and ironic, quite possibly the darkest gallows humor ever written. Precisely because of this dark humor, the prose often turns human and profoundly moving without ever falling into sentimentality or self-pity.
After the KGB confiscated one of only three extant copies of the work, the complete manuscript was smuggled to France in 1973 and published by the YMCA Press, contrary to Solzhenitsyn's hoped-for wishes but with his full approval, because of the very real fear that the work might be lost forever. Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first. The international impact of the work was immediate and tremendous.
Because of the incendiary nature of the work, Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Due to the KGB's constant surveillance of him, Solzhenitsyn only worked on small portions of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the work as a whole in jeopardy if he happened to be arrested. For this reason, he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow and the surrounding suburbs, in the care of friends, purportedly visiting them on social calls, but actually working on the manuscript in their homes.
Solzhenitsyn did not think this series would be his defining work, as he considered it journalism rather than literature. However, it is by far his most popular and accessible work (with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
Interestingly enough, The Gulag Archipelago was never "finished"—the version published in 1973 and known to us today was the working manuscript. Had Solzhenitsyn not been forced to publish it in 1973, it is quite possible that he would have continued expanding it indefinitely, adding more and more testimonies to the narrative.
See also
External links
- The Gulag Archipelago in original Russian, [parts 1 and 2], [parts 3 and 4], and [parts 5, 6, and 7].
- [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Saving the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State"] "Moscow News"(2.05.2006)
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