The Gulag Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn discusses the thieves, the criminals who were hailed as “noble brigands” (261) in Russian literature. After the Russian Revolution, society’s thieves and criminals were culturally re-appraised. The professional criminals and thieves—also known as the urki—flourished under Stalin, in Solzhenitsyn’s opinion, as the authorities spent so much time focusing on political offenses that they did not care about burglaries or similar crimes. Likewise, newspapers did not report on criminal trials or crimes, to give the impression that crime was not a problem in the Soviet Union. Gulag staff tried to teach the urki about political theory, but these efforts largely failed. Instead, the urki became powerful figures in the camps. The high-ranking urki were given separate cabins, the best rations, and their own “temporary wives”—yet more rape sanctioned by Gulag staff (265).

Solzhenitsyn discusses the youngest inmates in the Gulag. The criminal code allowed the condemnation of children as young as 12 for theft, assault, mutilation, and murder, as well as political crimes. Young people, including children, made up a large percentage of the Gulag population. By 1941, Stalin decreed that juveniles were to be given the same sentences as adults. Solzhenitsyn sardonically observes that even the party members with young children did not hesitate to sign the paperwork codifying children’s arbitrary incarcerations. Many children spent their formative years in the Gulag. They picked up on the nihilistic, dark philosophy of the Gulag and learned morality from the thieves that surrounded them. They became “the worst kind of beasts, with no ethical concepts whatever” (270).

The youngest children were sent to dedicated children’s camps while older children were sent to mixed category camps, which were home to women, the elderly, and people with disabilities. The children were starved and beaten, so they banded together as groups of amateur urki. The young boys developed a predatory fascination with female inmates, while also learning about the code of the urki from the older thieves. In addition to the children who were arrested for political offenses, other children were orphaned by their parents’ arrest. These orphaned children would inevitably end up in the Gulag.

Solzhenitsyn recalls the Gulag authorities’ attempts to re-educate the inmates through art and propaganda.

In a “mock-serious anthropological treatise” (280), Solzhenitsyn sarcastically suggests that the inmates of the Gulag should be considered a separate race.

Solzhenitsyn tries to describe the “tsars of the Archipelago” (282), the men who ran the administration of the Gulag. However, a description is difficult because inmates like Solzhenitsyn rarely cared about the identity or the motivation of the administrators in distant offices. Administrator candidates were carefully selected for their “cruelty and mercilessness” (282). After years of working for the system, those who were not horrified by the Gulag were promoted into positions of responsibility. Those who worked for the Gulag the longest and those in the highest positions were the most merciless of all. Solzhenitsyn believes that these people shared a few common characteristics: They were arrogant, stupid, autocratic, entitled, greedy, corrupt, lascivious, malicious, and cruel. Solzhenitsyn points out that these people were reintegrated into society and they may now be seemingly indistinguishable from everyone else, though he believes that their dour faces always contain some hint of gloominess. While Solzhenitsyn admits that the occasional lower-ranked guard was capable of empathy for the inmates, this was never true of the officers.

Solzhenitsyn describes the “zone of stink” (288) which lingered around every prison labor camp. He believes that this festering stench eventually filtered through to the rest of the country. The stench reached the society at large through the people who lived around the camp. These included the guards, the camp officers, the jailers, any local people, former inmates, and other people who were somehow linked to the area. Many who lingered around the camp for years did not know any other way to live.

The inmates in the Gulag often argued about how their confinement benefited the state—economically, politically, and socially. The Gulag held more than just criminals; the number of inmates was determined by the “requisitions of the economic establishment” (291). No free citizen would willingly dig canals or cut down forests, so a captive labor force was required to achieve the state’s long-term industrialization goals. However, the Gulag was never profitable for the state. The expenses were always more than the profits. The inmates were not invested in making a profit for the Gulag, so they hindered and sabotaged the equipment while their products were low-quality. The camp guards stole from the worksites, and projects were always mismanaged or delayed through inane bureaucracy. Solzhenitsyn disdainfully remarks on the Gulag’s continued existence, “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” (296).