The Gulag Archipelago

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The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ), 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 1958 and 1968 (dates given at the end of the book) 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 main governing board, and by extension, the camp system itself. 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.

1 Structure and factual basis
2 Historical impact of the work
3 Additional remarks
4 Publication
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Structure and factual basis

Structurally, the work is made up of seven sections divided (in most printed editions) into three volumes: pt 1-2, pt 3-4, pt 5-7.

At one level, the narrative traces the history of the Soviet concentration camp and forced labour system from 1918 to 1956, starting with the original decrees issued by V.I. Lenin shortly after the October Revolution, which laid the practical and legal framework for a slave labor economy and concentration camp system. The narrative then 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, at the time of the so-called Secret Speech delivered by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress of 1956, which denounced the personality cult around Stalin, his autocratic grip on power and the system of surveillance and secret spying that pervaded the Stalin era. Though this speech was not published in full in the Soviet Union for some time after, it marked a break with the most atrocious practices of the concentration camp system; Solzhenitsyn was aware, however, that the outlines of the GULag system had survived and could be revived and expanded by future leaders. In spite of the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront this shame of the Soviet system, the realities of the camps remained a more or less taboo subject right into the 1980s. While Khrushchev, the party, and most observers in the West wanted to view the GULag camps as a result of the deviations of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and many in the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture—an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project as such. This view, though politically unpopular with many both inside and outside the USSR during the Cold War because it ascribed to Lenin the theoretical and practical origins of the concentration camp system, has become the prevalent view with informed writers and scholars following the demise of the Soviet Union.

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, show-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); camp rebellions and strikes (see Kengir uprising); 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 firsthand 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. Much of the impact of the book stems from the closely detailed, and often brilliantly retold, stories of interrogation routines, prison indignities and (especially in section 3) camp massacres and inhuman practices.

There had been books about the Soviet prison/camp system before, and the fact of its existence was known to the Western public. However, never before had the wide reading public been brought face to face with the horrors of the Soviet system in this way. The controversy surrounding the work was the Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal and practical origins of the GULag system at Lenin's feet, not Stalin's. According to Solzhenitsyn's work, Stalin merely amplified a concentration camp system that was already in place. This is significant, as most of the Western left-wing movements ("the New Left") and Western Communist or Socialist parties in the seventies tended to view the Soviet concentration camp system as a "Stalinist aberration", rather than as an intrinsic component of the Soviet system.

[edit] Historical impact of the work

The historical and cultural import of The Gulag Archipelago is the key to understanding its relevance, and could hardly be overstated.

Up until its publication, many well-informed people in the West believed that the purges and prison camp systems in the Soviet Union had been primarily the work of Josef Stalin, and had been limited to his dictatorship (1928 to his death in 1953). Furthermore, it was thought that the Great Purge and show trials had been a phenomenon 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 set out to disprove 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 was rooted in the wishes and decrees put forward by Lenin himself, and should not be seen, then, as a perversion of his aims and goals but rather a fulfillment of both.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn being searched at a checkpoint in a gulag, c.1950

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 the work came, in time, to force a rethinking of the historical role of Lenin. With The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin's political and historical legacy became problematic, and the fractions of Western communist parties who still based their economic and political ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof against themselves. In the view of many scholars and journalists in recent years, working through the now open Soviet files and source materials on the Stalin era, these confirm all the charges made by Solzhenitsyn's work: The Soviet slave economy and concentration camp system should be seen as a direct result of Lenin's conscious and clear directives, and were intrinsic to the survival of the system, and the industrialization of the U.S.S.R. Stalin merely continued the implementation of the system, as did Khrushchev, Brezhnev and later leaders. These claims are of course, highly polemical (see also article on The Black Book of Communism).

[edit] Additional remarks

Though the scope of the work ends in 1956, it is interesting to note that the GULag system continued uninterrupted until 1991, ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union that year. The last prisoners sentenced according the political paragraphs of the criminal code 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 western 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.

One of the noteworthy elements of Solzhenitsyn's work are the seemingly outlandish claims of Soviet brutality which he made in the book which subsequently turned out to be true—or in some cases which turned out to be even more outrageous than what Solzhenitsyn had stated. For instance, Solzhenitsyn claimed that the GULag system was so voracious that between 1930 and 1939, a quarter of the population of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was shipped to the GULag. Post-Soviet scholarship has confimed (see [[1]] that the figure was even higher. This one, seemingly unbelievable event, was reported by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, to scepticism in the West. The collapse of the USSR and subsequent availabilitiy of heretofore secret documents (including the secret 1937 Soviet census, which was suppressed because it reflected the negative impact of the GULag system on the population) have confirmed most of the claims Solzhenitsyn made.

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 atrocities, 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. The work is also a powerful testament to Solzhenitsyn's multi-layered, rhythmic and precise prose art. In interviews he has often stated his wish to use all the resources of the language, old and new, proverbs, prison slang, legal style and poetic images, and this variety is masterfully used in The Gulag Archipelago and carries even in translation.

[edit] Publication

After the KGB seized one of only three extant copies of the work still on Soviet soil - this was achieved by torturing a dissident woman who knew where the typed copy was hidden; within days after she had been released by the KGB, she killed herself - the book was published by the YMCA Press in Paris. Solzhenitsyn had been in touch with them about the upcoming publication which he knew he could not put off much longer, but the final decision was taken by the YMCA Press themselves, with the author's implicit approval (two years previously, they had published August 1914). Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first, but he knew this was of course impossible under current conditions. The international impact of the work was immediate, and it provoked a very vivid debate; it was also confluent with the media stir at Solzhenitsyn's forced exile and arrival in the West, a mere six weeks after the book had left the presses in Paris.

Because the work might obviously render anyone who came into contact with it a long prison sentence for 'anti-Soviet activities', Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Due to the KGB's constant surveillance of him, Solzhenitsyn only worked on parts 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 trusted friends, and sometimes purportedly visiting them on social calls, but actually working on the manuscript in their homes. During much of this time, Solzhenitsyn lived at the dacha of the world famous cellist Rostropovich, and due to the reputation and standing of the musician, even with Soviet authorities, he was reasonably safe from KGB searches there.

Solzhenitsyn did not think this series would be his defining work, as he considered it journalism and history rather than high literature (the distance between those two poles is shorter, anyway, in Russian tradition than in many Western European literatures). However, it is by far his most popular work, at least in the West, (with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).

Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal representative, Dr Kurt Heeb of Zürich, to await publication (a later paper copy, also smuggled out, was signed by Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against possible accusations of a falsified work). Solzhenitsyn was aware that there was a wealth of material and perspectives that merited to be continued in the future, but he considered the work finished for his part. The royalties and sales income for the work were transferred to the Solzhenitsyn foundation for aid to former camp prisoners, and this fund, which had to work in secret in its native country, managed to transfer substantial amounts of money to those ends in the 1970s and 1980s.