The Gulag Archipelago

“Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.”

Surviving the prisons and the Gulag camps may seem impossible, but Solzhenitsyn provides insight into how people came to terms with the reality of their punishment. Only the people who completely abandoned hope could survive, as there is no longer anything that the prison guards staff could take from them. This is a comment on the nature of the Gulag system, which was so inhumane and punishing that it demanded the eradication of any optimism as a prerequisite for survival.

“That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.”

The Gulag’s prisoners were so cut-off from the rest of society that even a monumental moment like victory in World War II did not mean anything to them. Though their country had turned the tide of the war against the Germans, the inmates struggled to react emotionally. They knew that the victory was not for them. They were no longer members of Russian society, as they had been so dehumanized that they could no longer empathize with other Russians. They were cut-off from society, from Russia, and even from the passage of time as announced by the turn of seasons. Spring is a moment of rebirth and revitalization, but not for the non-humans locked away in the Gulag.

“That tedious prison spring had, to the tune of the victory marches, become the spring of reckoning for my whole generation.”

Solzhenitsyn creates a stark contrast between the people on the inside and outside of the prison system. For those inside the prison, the arrival of spring was tedious and uneventful. The inmates struggled to be excited about anything, including the arrival of the better weather and the new season. For those on the outside, however, the spring was to be celebrated. Their celebrations regarding the weather and the victory in World War II are juxtaposed with the inmates’ lack of reaction, illustrating the deadening effect of the Soviet prison system.

“And almost always a person obediently allows himself to be killed.”

The crushing effects of life in the prison system show the extent to which the inmates gradually lost all hope. Solzhenitsyn comments on how people obediently allowed themselves to be killed by the guards. They were not happy to die, nor were they sad. Instead, they showed a deadened passivity. The people had become husks of their former selves, no longer able to distinguish between life and death.

“So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.”

The inmates were not the only people dehumanized by the prison system. The guards had spent so long tyrannizing the inmates that they lost their basic capacity for empathy. Even giving an inmate water was viewed in terms of the extra work that it created. After so long in the prison system, the guards no longer saw inmates as fellow humans, but as transient annoyances which must be dealt with expediently.

“And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope.”

Solzhenitsyn’s book has a rhetorical structure to effect jarring emotional impact. The opening chapters’ horrific prison descriptions are set to appear unsurpassable; a reader may struggle to imagine that the conditions in the Gulag could possibly be worse than the interrogations and the train rides. Those in the prison came to believe the same thing. Solzhenitsyn teases the audience, however, assuring them that conditions can become much, much worse. The structure creates the effect of falling endlessly into an ever-worsening hell. The inmates abandoned all hope as their world worsened at every possible opportunity.

“According to the estimates of émigré Professor of Statistics Kurganov, this ‘comparatively easy’ internal repression cost us, from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of… sixty-six million—66,000,000—lives. We, of course, cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official. And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons.”

Solzhenitsyn writes with the hope of alerting the world to the evils of the Soviet regime. He admits, however, that he “cannot vouch” (178) for some of his more damning facts and figures. This empirical unreliability introduces an element of reasonable doubt to his audience, but it also highlights the notion of systematically state-suppressed history. After all, there are few reasons that such a government would openly or accurately report the figures relating to its own crimes against humanity, and here Solzhenitsyn poses a challenge to the state to refute his claims: “And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons” (178). Nevertheless, the text has since received scrutiny for a lack of scientific rigor which would not generally be permitted in academic settings.

“Throughout the nation unemployment was abolished, and the economic rationale for expansion of the camps appeared.”

Solzhenitsyn’s description of the camps frames them as an almost inexplicably evil hell on earth. However, he also comments on the economic rationale for the Gulag’s existence: The inmates were a source of free labor. A million people in the Gulag system allowed the Soviet Union to rapidly and affordably industrialize. The camps were not only inhumane, but morbidly utilitarian and exploitative.

“It was possible to obtain such manpower only by swallowing up one’s own sons.”

The dark morality of the camps cannot be wholly conveyed through traditional prose. Rather than only documenting the raw facts and the numerous anecdotes that he has collected from others, Solzhenitsyn uses mythic allusions to implicitly situate Soviet corruption within a Western canon of evil. He here alludes to the Greek/Roman myth of Saturn eating his own sons. Like Saturn, the Soviet Union is a titanically powerful being which also dreads its own downfall. The Soviet Union similarly swallowed its own sons by throwing them into the Gulag, abandoning its morality to cling to power. These allusions provide a historical, folkloric context for the Gulag and more vividly animate the idea of its evil.

“And hands were also untied by the fact that there was no meaning, no purpose, left in life.”

Life in the camp casts morality and sexual propriety in a new light. For the inmates, life was so precarious and death so close that they saw no point in clinging to the ideals of Russian society. Their hands became untied from the traditions and rules which govern society. The Gulag was not designed to rehabilitate anyone. Instead, it infected inmates with a sense of amorality and listlessness which made them unsuited for society.

“Now that is something!”

Solzhenitsyn uses sarcasm to emphasize the horrors of the Gulag. Throughout the book, he shifts through various tones. He is remorseful, downbeat, and horrified at points. At others, he focuses on the absurdity of his situation. Faced by the Gulag’s incomprehensible horrors, all he can do is laugh. Sarcasm becomes a coping device, showing his desensitization. The horror and the remorse are gone, replaced by dark humor.

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

Solzhenitsyn explains the mismatch between the Gulag and its operators. The nature of the Gulag means that the staff held a huge amount of power over the inmates. They could dictate, without liability, whether inmates lived or died—a supreme, and supremely unearned, dominion. The guards were young, the administrators were bored bureaucrats. None of them was invested in some great project, as they were unremarkable, “limited people” (285). Nevertheless, they were permitted to unleash their inner cruelty without restraint.

“Due to all these causes not only does the Archipelago not pay its own way, but the nation has to pay dearly for the additional satisfaction of having it.”

Solzhenitsyn tries to explain that the Gulag is an economic venture which, by its very nature, is unable to pay for itself. Worse than economic unviability, however, is the moral cost. The Gulag’s existence is a stain on Russia’s moral character. No economic or industrial production could ever justify the price of the inmates’ suffering. The Gulag’s moral debt is a travesty incriminating the Russian people for their cowardly negligence.

“But the Gulag Archipelago knows no pangs of conscience! […] No, not only do you not repent, but your clean conscience, like a clear mountain lake, shines in your eyes. […] It was in this nearly unanimous consciousness of our innocence that the main distinction rose between us and the hard-labor prisoners of Dostoyevsky. There they were conscious of being doomed renegades, whereas we were confidently aware that they could haul in any free person at all in just the same way they had hauled us in; that barbed wire was only a nominal dividing line between us.”

The Gulag was characterized by something extraordinary and even bizarre, relative to other prisons: Its inhabitants were overwhelmingly conscious of their own innocence. The barbed wire of the prison was, metaphysically, a meaningless separation between two groups of people—the imprisoned and the free—neither of whom had actually committed crimes against the state. The Gulag’s oxymoronic “innocent criminal” is a prime representative of one of the text’s themes: the absurdity of Soviet justice.

“What was most terrifying about it was that it exuded poisons and infected the whole body.”

Solzhenitsyn contracted cancer while in the Gulag. He had an operation to remove the tumor, then uses the tumor as a metaphor for the Gulag system’s effect on Russian society. To him, the Gulag is a tumor slowly poisoning Russia from within. The entire society is infected by the malign influence of the Gulag; everyone knows the reality of the labor camps but does nothing to stop them as they are too scared. As a result, the society is fearfully suspicious and resentful. Solzhenitsyn hopes that the Gulag can be removed from the society as easily as the tumor was removed from his body.

“Mankind is almost incapable of dispassionate, unemotional thinking. In something which he has recognized as evil man can seldom force himself to see also what is good. Not everything in our lives was foul, not every word in the papers was false, but the minority, downtrodden, bullied, beset by stool pigeons, saw life in our country as an abomination from top to bottom, saw every page in the newspapers as one long lie.”

Solzhenitsyn recognizes his own flaws and biases and acknowledges that his account of Russia is not an exhaustive portrayal. His experiences of suffering within Soviet society have impaired his recollection of anything positive about “life in [his] country” (340). At the same time, this passage gives insight into how such trauma can shatter a person’s perception and maim their ability to feel hope or see any beauty in the environment that traumatized them.

“It would have been impossible to create better conditions than Lenin enjoyed in his one and only period of banishment.”

The lengthy description of Lenin’s exile creates an ironic contrast between the periods before and after the Russian Revolution. In the pre-Revolution era, the highest form of punishment was one which allowed Lenin to retire to the country and work on his writing. Lenin wrote extensively about the unfairness of the Russian society in which he lived, and he persuaded others to join his vision and rise alongside him in revolt. In an ironic twist, the architect of this revolution eventually created a society which would not have permitted him to enjoy such an easy exile. The unfair society which Lenin criticized provided him with the opportunity to foment his revolution, while the society Lenin created would have punished him more severely and ensured that he had no time to plot against the regime.

“A bird cannot renounce seasonal migration, and a committed escaper cannot help running away.”

The desire to get out of the Gulag was innate. The inmates imagined life outside, and they fixated on the idea of escape. This idea was so natural that Solzhenitsyn compares it to the instinctive migration flight of a bird. Birds are not taught to migrate; they simply feel a yearning to fly elsewhere at certain times. Likewise, the inmates were not taught to escape, but they felt a yearning to break free from confinement and defy their oppressors.

“The oppressed at least concluded that evil cannot be cast out by good.”

Morality functions differently in the Gulag. The inmates eventually realized that fighting back against their oppressors would require them to engage similarly oppressive tactics. In such an immoral system, trying to remain moral is a doomed endeavor, and the prisoners needed to relinquish their own morality.

“Truth was unrecognizable and repulsive to them if it manifested itself not in secret instructions from higher authority but on the lips of common people.”

Solzhenitsyn describes Soviet society as paralyzed by fear. Whatever a person’s place in society, they were suspicious of anyone whom they considered beneath them but fearful of anyone whom they considered to be above. They were thus caught in permanent stasis. This is particularly true in bureaucracies, where people are too afraid for their position to act. Their inaction slowed everything to a crawl and ensures that nothing is ever accomplished.

“In all other respects, release is arrest all over again, the same sort of punishing transition from state to state, shattering your breast, the structure of your life and your ideas, and promising nothing in return.” 

Even after Solzhenitsyn leaves the Gulag, life is not pleasant. He relates the stories of people who have served their time and returned to society. These people know the horrors of the Gulag and they know that even the slightest infraction can send them back to the camps. As a result, they spend their lives with the shadow of the Gulag hanging over them. 

“All you freedom-loving ‘left-wing’ thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there!’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.”

Solzhenitsyn is highly critical of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks, and the communist ideology. However, he also criticizes the Western liberals who would stand by and dismiss the evils his text portrays. He comments on the irony of people who supposedly love “freedom” (468) but who, due to any progressive zeal, might excuse or deny Soviet criminality. These people, in Solzhenitsyn’s opinion, are naïve and intellectually dishonest.

“I must explain that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time! In September, 1965, when work on the Archipelago was at its most intense, I suffered a setback: my archive was raided and a novel impounded. At this point the parts of the Archipelago already written, and the materials for the other parts, were scattered and never reassembled […] The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature. Take the book for what it is.”

In the closing stages of the book, Solzhenitsyn recounts how the KGB confiscated and destroyed parts of his work on the text. Considering the chaotic and fragmentary nature of the text’s composition, he acknowledges the text holds some discontinuity—but it is all he has to give. He anticipates that critics may legitimately note the text’s “jerkiness” (“repetition” and “loose construction”) (470), and yet he contends this very quality evinces the text’s persecution, and therefore its necessity.