Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr i. Solzhenitsyn

I dedicate this

And may they please forgive me

for not having seen it all

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Dedication, GULag Archipelago)

I grew up adoring the USSR. When it broke up in 1991 (I still vividly remember Yeltsin asking Gorbachev to "Read it") I was very sad, both at the scary prospect of a Unipolar world and at the demise of a superpower. But that was also the time when a lot of Russian books/documents/info was opened up to the Russian public (and outsiders), courtesy Glasnost. I had already read a lot about the oppression in East Europe nations courtesy Orwell’s essays. So when a friend offered to make available an ’unofficial’ copy of GULag Archipelago in Kolkata, I latched on to the offer with both hands.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of the book, was awarded the Nobel prize, in 1978 if I remember correctly, for his outstanding contribution in unveiling the Russian history to the Western World.

GULag Archipalago was written during a 10 year stint from 1958-68 by Solzhenitsyn. The book recounts the holocaust of Soviet forced labour camps (GULags) between 1918 and 1956 on the basis of the authors own stint at one such camp as also first hand evidence from 225 odd Zeks (prisoners) at such camps. Though the book was finished in 1967-68, such was the all pervasive influence of KGB that the first English translation could be published only in 1974; and wide circulation began after 1990. The Book was written in three volumes consisting of seven parts. The instant review is limited to the Vol 1 (parts 1 & 2), translated by Thomas P. Whitney and deals with the arrest, trial & transportation of the Zeks to the camps.

The term "GULag" is the acronym of the Russian department that administered the labour camps. The word "Archipelago" alludes to the expansive network of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union in an inconspicuous fashion so that they become known only to those who were fated to visit them. So the book "Gulag Archipelago, " is loosely about the journey of millions of Russian citizens to the hundreds of islands of the "sewage disposal system", as the Archipelago is sarcastically called." The tale traces the biographies of the prisoners, from their arrest on super flimsy pretexts, through first cell and "interrogation", through onward transmission to transit prisonsin overcrowded, pestilent trains, to the ports and ships of the GULag. It is a story human debasement and death, of the heart-rending daily torture, execution, rape, starvation, thirst, disease and more. The journey and book ends upon arrival at the forced labor camps. The life at camps is recounted in later Volumes.

The Zeks "live in the cursed conditions in which a human being can disappear into the void and even his closest relatives, his mother and his wife ... do not know for years what has become of him". An extract describing how Zeks are taken in, is reproduced as under :-

Suddenly the door crashed open, and one of us was summoned, a quiet bookkeeper, thirty-five years old. He went out. The door was locked. We started running about our box even more agitatedly than before. We were on hot coals.

Once more the crash of the door. They called another one out and readmitted the first. We rushed to him. But he was not the same man! The life had gone out of his face. His wide-open eyes were unseeing. His movements were uncertain as he stum- bled across the smooth floor of the box. Was he in a state of shock? Had they swatted him with an ironing board?

"Well? Well?" we asked him, with sinking hearts. (If he had not in fact just gotten up from the electric chair, he must at the very least have been given a death sentence.) And in the voice of one reporting the end of the universe, the bookkeeper managed to blurt out: "Five . . . years!"

And once more the door crashed. That was how quickly they returned, as if they were only being taken to the toilet to urinate. The second man returned, all aglow. Evidently he was being re- leased.

"Well, well, come on?" We swarmed around him, our hopes rising again. He waved his hand, choking with laughter.

"Fifteen years!"

It was just too absurd to be believed.

Solzheitsyn’s narrative is a cocktail of the points of view of a disillusioned ideologist cum historian, woven together with Russian proverbs, satire, camp lingo and parodies of Russian institutions. He regularly departs from the Zek’s narratives to long essays on the background, evolution, sociology and administration of the Gulag country including interalia, the development of the political police, trial institutions, criminal code, political trials, the three main "waves" of arrests that populated the GULag viz., peasants swept in by collectivization in 1929-30, party and other officials purged by Stalin in the late 1930’s and repatriated Soviet POWs taken in 1944-46.

Much of what is recounted by Solzhenitsyn is hair-raising stuff that will have even tough cookies crying like a babies. The Nazis will appear kinder in comparison. Remember we are talking about at least 50 mn people living “forced labour” lives (to say nothing of the countless that died), wishing everyday that they were dead. Solzhenitsyn chooses to place the blame on ... hold it, not on Stalin ... but Lenin & the Bolshevik ideology. He argues that the camps were started by Lenin and the practice of debasing human lives was a direct offshoot of the Bolshevik revolution.

The translation by Whitney is detailed yet lucid. While his narrative is a starkly told account of a gruesome holocaust that will have you hooked like nothing else will, many may find it difficult to subscribe to his explanation of the "inhuman excesses". A simpler explanation could be that the generals under Stalin, with or without his consent, continued to exploit the Bolshevik ideals of late 1910s and use it as a tool to terrorise the citizens into working for nothing. I guess the way to look at it is :-

There are two ways to move a mountain. One, by dynamite. Two, by having people dig through it.

What do you do if you dont have the inclination/money to buy dynamite and you consider human life valueless... ? That’s just what the GULag did !