The Gulag Archipelago is Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s comprehensive history of the Soviet Gulag system, which he experienced firsthand having been a prisoner himself. Early after his arrest he made it his goal to catalogue his experiences and those of the people he met there, and to write this book to give the world and in particular the people of his country a glimpse of the nature of this system and the fate of those millions who had been caught up in it. For his efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1970.
Chapter 1 – Arrest
For those destined for the Gulag, the start of their journey was arrest. The state security Organs preferred night arrests, a knock on the door at night which would catch their victim unprepared and with little resistance from witnesses. However the Organs didn’t neglect other forms of arrest among the millions they picked up, to which A.S. includes many examples and anecdotes. Those who might be considered more dangerous, such as VIP’s in the military or the Party were sometimes first given new assignments, and while ensconced in a private railway car, were arrested on route.
A.S. spends some time on the seeming lack of any resistance, despite there being millions of people being gathered up. Those in the camps later burned thinking about how different things would have been if people had simply resisted rather than submit so meekly. And yet, at which point would you resist? Some still hoped for a favorable outcome to their case are are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry.
For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact that people were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever. . . A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.
(Page 14)
Chapter 2 – the History of Our Sewage Disposal System
In this chapter we get a detailed description of all the various waves of prisoners sent to the Gulag, from the 1920’s through to the 1950’s. The list is simply staggering, with some examples being:
- Members or former members of any non-Bolshevik political parties (and later, members of factions of the Bolshevik’s who have fallen out of favor, such as supporters of Trotsky)
- White Guards (those opposed to the Communists in the Russian Civil War) and their families
- Peasant Hostages (an example: early in the revolution orders came down to take hostage peasants from those localities where the removal of snow from railroad tracks was not proceeding satisfactorily, and if snow removal did not take place they were to be shot)
- Students and Intellectuals
- Members of Churches, Clergy
- Russians returning from abroad (including even returning soldiers and former POW’s in particular)
- Nationalities and ethnic groups who were resisting or perceived to be resisting the establishment of Soviet power in their homelands
- Former Tsarist state officials
A few groups in particular I’ll mention more specifically:
The Technical Intelligentsia (ie. Engineers)
In other words we never did trust the engineers – and from the very first years of the Revolution we saw to it that those lackeys and servants of former capitalist bosses were kept in line by healthy suspicion and surveillance by the workers. The more our economic leadership matured – the more the number of plans increased, and the more those plans overlapped and conflicted with one another, the clearer became the old engineers’ basic commitment to wrecking. The Sentinel of the Revolution [ie. State Security] narrowed its eyes with ever greater vigilance, and wherever it directed its narrowed gaze it immediately discovered a nest of wreckers. This therapy continued full speed from 1927 on, and immediately exposed to the proletariat all the causes of our economic failures and shortages
(Page 43-44)
A.S. goes on to describe many interesting anecdotes about situations where engineers would be accused of ‘Wrecking’, such as this one:
And what accomplished villains these old engineers were! What diabolical ways to sabotage they found! Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, of the People’s Commissariat of Railroads, pretended to be terribly devoted to the development of the new economy, and would hold forth for hours on end about the economic problems involved in the construction of socialism, and he loved to give advice. One such pernicious piece of advice was to increase the size of freight trains and not worry about heavier than average loads. The GPU exposed von Meck, and he was shot: his objective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case of foreign military intervention! When, not long afterward, the new People’s Commissar of Railroads, Comrade Kaganovich, ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled and tripled them (and for this discovery received the Order of Lenin)-the malicious engineers who protested became known as limiters. They raised the outcry that this was too much, and would result in the breakdown of the rolling stock, and they were rightly shot for their lack of faith in the possibilities of socialist transport.
(Page 44-45)
At the time these engineers were being rounded up, the masses of people showed their support in voting for the death penalty for these wreckers. Very, very great bravery was required to say “No”! in the midst of that roaring chorus of approval, and frequently those who did would be arrested.
The Dispossessed Kulaks
In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system of even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with it in all Russian history … But yet so cleverly were the channels of the GPU-Gulag organized that the cities would have noticed nothing had they not been stricken by a strange three year famine – a famine that came about without drought and without war
(Page 54)
The term ‘Kulak’ originally referred to a miserly, dishonest rural trader, who grows rich not through his own labor but through the labor of others, through usury and operating as a middleman. Gradually, the term took on a broader and broader meaning:
the inflation of this scathing term Kulak proceeded relentlessly, and by 1930 all strong peasants in general were being so called – all peasants strong in management, strong in work, or even strong merely in convictions
(Page 55)
At this point (around 1930) only a dozen years had passed since the great Decree on the Land, where the land had been fully redistributed based on the number of ‘mouths’ per family, equally.
Then suddenly there were kulaks and there were poor peasants. How could that be? Sometimes it was the result of differences in initial stock and equipment; sometimes it may have resulted from luck in the mixture of the family. But wasn’t it most often a matter of hard work and persistence? And now these peasants, whose breadgrain had fed Russia in 1928, were hastily uprooted by local good-for-nothings and city people sent in from outside. Like raging beasts, abandoning every concept of “humanity,” abandoning all humane principles which had evolved through the millennia, they began to round up the very best farmers and their families, and to drive them, stripped of their possessions, naked, into the northern wastes, into the tundra and the taiga.
(Page 56)
This was also a time for activists and neighbors to settle personal accounts, of jealousy, envy or insult.
Article 58 of the Criminal Code
This chapter also gives our first introduction to Article 58 of the Criminal Code of 1926, an Article whose sections are so broad that almost any human activity could be captured within them, some examples:
Section 1: An action (or absence of action) directed toward the weakening of state power
Section 10: Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of Soviet power … and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content
The real law underlying the arrests over those years was the assignment of quotas (ie. higher levels of government would simply give a region a quota to make a certain number of arrests) A.S. includes various anecdotes about some of the ways these quotas were fulfilled.
Chapter 3: The Interrogation
Because virtually all of the people being caught up in the Gulag system were essentially innocent, the interrogation was an important part of the process, in order to gain a confession from the subject and to get him or her to implicate others. In this chapter A.S. describes in detail various tortures and psychological techniques used to drive confessions.
The time allotted for investigation was not used to unravel the case but, in 95 cases out of 100, to exhaust, wear down, weaken and render helpless the defendant, so that he would want it to end at any cost
(Page 97)
Stalin himself did not pronounce that final word [torture] in his instructions, his subordinates had to guess what he wanted. So no list of tortures and torments existed in printed form. All that was required was for every Interrogation Department to supply the tribunal within a specified period with a stipulated number of confessions. This explained the variety of different techniques employed at different interrogation centers.
When interrogation begins, for many people the logical thing would seem to be to simply sign the confession, knowing that a guilty conviction is inevitable, so as to preserve your strength and health before heading to an inevitable term at a camp. And that would be the smart choice if the matter concerned only yourself. However – this was rarely the case, as prisoners were frequently pressured to accuse others.
Some of the more pervasive techniques are outlined below:
- Sleep Deprivation: Prisoners would often be deprived of sleep for days at a time. 4-5 days of sleeplessness before an interrogation started was common.
- Starvation: Denied food or put on starvation rations
- Punishment Cells: Cells which are painfully small, sometimes such that you can’t even sit down in. Often these are also extremely cold, such that at first you feel you likely won’t live more then a few hours. Prisoners can spend days in such cells.
- Physical Beatings: Beatings of all types, often with rubber truncheons in order to leave fewer visible marks.
- Psychological Techniques: Threatening your close family members if you don’t confess, lying about other people having confessed against you
Although there were plenty of awful interrogation and torture techniques described by A.S. in this chapter, he points out that nothing incredibly creative was required along the lines of medieval torture devices. Sleep deprivation along with starvation and punishment cells is plenty enough for most people to confess.
He notes during the chapter how ruthless the Soviet state was in dealing with interrogations, in contrast to what the Revolutionaries had been put through in Tsarist times, many of whom nonetheless buckled under the slightest pressure. Another example:
the Tsarist gendarmes seized the manuscript of Lenin’s essay “What Are Our Ministers Thinking Of?” but were unable to get at its author: “At the interrogation the gendarmes, just as one might have expected, learned very little from the student Vaneyev. He informed them only that the manuscripts found at his place had been brought to him in one package for safekeeping several days before the search by a certain person whom he did not wish to name. Therefore the interrogator’s sole alternative was to tum the manuscripts over for expert analysis.” The experts learned nothing. (What did he mean-his “sole alternative”? What about icy water up to the ankles? Or a salt-water douche? Or Ryumin’s truncheon?)
(Page 132-133)
The key to making the best of your interrogation, as we learn from A.S. in this chapter, is that the moment you cross the threshold into the prison, you need to entirely leave your old life behind. It is over with – you are dead to that world, don’t hold out hope of getting out. We learn about his own interrogation at a prison in Moscow. It didn’t leave him much to be proud of but his main relief was that he survived it without getting anyone else imprisoned (which was a major concern considering he had kept detailed diaries of his wartime service, including details of candid political conversations with his fellow front line soldiers. Luckily, the investigators were too lazy to go through his stash of notes and diaries, and they were eventually poured into the prison furnace. This included his years of notes which had been meant to be the basis of a future novel). A.S. spoke of once being in his interrogator’s chamber and noticing a mound of manuscripts nearby:
In notebooks, in file folders, in homemade binders, in tied and untied bundles, and simply in loose pages. The manuscripts lay there like the burial mound of some interred human spirit, its conical top rearing higher than the interrogator’s desk, almost blocking me from his view. And brotherly pity ached in me for the labor of that unknown person who had been arrested the previous night, these spoils from the search of his premises having been dumped that very morning on the parquet floor of the torture chamber, at the feet of that thirteen-foot Stalin. I sat there and I wondered: Whose extraordinary life had they brought in for torment, for dismemberment, and then for burning? Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building -a whole lost culture? Oh, soot, soot, from the Lubyanka chimneys! And the most hurtful thing of all was that our descendants would consider our generation more stupid, less gifted, less vocal than in actual fact it was.
(Page 137)
When A.S. meets with the prosecutor to finalize his case, he asks for him to exclude the additional charge under Section 11 (member of an organized group – this because A.S. was arrested for exchanging politically critical letters with a friend. 2 people = a group). The prosecutor doesn’t modify the charge. When his confession is ultimately presented for his signature, A.S. briefly refuses to sign. However after his interrogator threatens to start all over again with him, he loses his nerve and signs, including the Section 11. Although he doesn’t know it at the time, because of that Section 11 he is eventually sent to a hard labor camp. Because of that Section 11, even after “liberation” and his prison term is completed, without additional charge he is sent into eternal exile.