The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword by Anne Applebaum

  Preface

  Part I: The Prison Industry

  1: Arrest

  2: The History of Our Sewage Disposal System

  3: The Interrogation

  4: The Bluecaps

  5: First Cell, First Love

  6: That Spring

  7: In the Engine Room

  8: The Law as a Child

  9: The Law Becomes a Man

  10: The Law Matures

  11: The Supreme Measure

  12: Tyurzak

  Part II: Perpetual Motion

  1: The Ships of the Archipelago

  2: The Ports of the Archipelago

  3: The Slave Caravans

  4: From Island to Island

  Author’s Note

  Translator’s Notes

  Glossary:

  Names

  Institutions and Terms

  Index

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what was then the Soviet Union, the emotions the book stirred have left marks which remain today. Usually, readers were given only twenty-four hours to finish the lengthy manuscript before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and a whole night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn’s prose—not an experience anyone was likely to forget. Members of that first generation of readers remember who gave the book to them, who else knew about it, whom they passed it on to next. They remember what the book felt like—the blurry, mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night—and with whom they later discussed it.

  In part, Russians responded so strongly because The Gulag Archipelago’s author was, at that time, simultaneously very famous and strictly taboo. Twelve year earlier, in 1962, Solzhenitsyn had attained an unusual distinction, becoming both the first authentic Gulag author to be published in the official press, as well as the last. In that year—the height of the post-Stalinist “Thaw”—the Soviet general secretary Nikita Khrushchev had personally permitted the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The book, based on Solzhenitsyn’s own camp experiences—like Ivan Denisovich, he too had been a camp bricklayer—described a single, ordinary day in the life of a Gulag prisoner.

  Reading it now, it can be hard for contemporary readers to understand why Solzhenitsyn’s only published work had created such a furor in the Soviet literary world. But in 1962, Ivan Denisovich came as a revelation. Instead of speaking vaguely about ‘repressions,’ as some other books did at the time, Ivan Denisovich was blunt and specific. The sufferings of its heroes were pointless. The work they did was boring and exhausting, and they tried to avoid it. They spoke using camp slang and were rude to one another. The Party did not triumph at the end of the story, and communism did not win out in the end. This honesty, unusual in an era of morality tales and social realism, won Solzhenitsyn admirers, particularly among camp survivors, who wrote him long letters of praise. Each new printing of the novel sold out instantly, and copies were eagerly shared among groups of friends.

  Solzhenitsyn’s honesty also quickly won him detractors. Within a month of publication, the novel had already been denounced at a meeting of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Critics wrote that it was too bleak, too “amoral.” Within a few more months, Solzhenitsyn himself was under personal attack, falsely accused of having surrendered to the Germans during the war, and of having been convicted on criminal charges. He fought back, but to no avail: thanks to the furor caused by this first published novel, none of his work would ever be officially published in the Soviet Union again.

  Yet his name and his novels remained in circulation thanks to the world of underground publishing in Russia, which at that time was growing rapidly. In fact, in the years between his first burst of “official” fame and the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago in samizdat form, Solzhenitsyn became if anything more notorious, and more celebrated, despite the official ban. The KGB began to follow him closely, and at one point stole his entire personal archive. His wife lost her job. Recently released archival documents show that his every move was closely analyzed at the highest levels of the Soviet security apparatus, and sometimes even by the Politburo itself. At the same time, his occasional lectures were wildly popular: six hundred people showed up for one of his first public readings in 1966. His books began to appear in foreign translations, to great acclaim, and were copied and re-copied in secret.

  Then, in 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. Fearing he would be barred from returning to Russia, he decided not to travel to Stockholm to accept the award. But he issued a statement to be read out at the Nobel banquet, among other things noting the “remarkable fact that the day of the Nobel Prize presentation coincides with Human Rights day,” and calling on all Nobel Prize winners to remember that fact: “Let none at this festive table forget that political prisoners are on hunger-strike this very day in defence of rights that have been curtailed or trampled underfoot.”

  The Swedish government was unnerved, and the Nobel Committee failed to read out that part of the statement. The Soviet authorities were furious, and boycotted the ceremony. The Soviet Writers’ Union denounced Solzhenitsyn as the darling of “reactionary circles in the West,” and reviewers described him as “a run-of-the-mill writer with an exaggerated idea of his own importance” whose literary gifts were “inferior to many of his Soviet contemporaries—writers the West chooses to ignore because it finds the impact of truth in their writing unbearable.”

  Still, millions of Russians learned of the prize through Western radio, as well as through the underground press (which circulated the statement that the Swedes had feared to read), and celebrated the award to their countryman. Thus when news that Solzhenitsyn had written a history of the Soviet Gulag began to filter out too, there was an enormous reading public—and a listening public, for excerpts were immediately read out on Radio Liberty—already waiting to receive it.

  Yet the impression which The Gulag Archipelago made on its first Russian readers was not solely due to the author’s notoriety, or to his Nobel Prize, or to the denunciations of him in the Soviet press. More importantly, the book’s appearance also marked the first time that anyone inside Russia had ever tried to write a complete history of the Soviet concentration camps, using what information was then available, mostly the “reports, memoirs and letters by 227 witnesses,” whom Solzhenitsyn cites in his introduction. Many knew fragments of the story, from the cousin who had been there or the neighbor’s nephew who worked in the police. No one, however, had attempted to put it all together, to tell, in effect, an alternative history of the Soviet Union.

  And the result was unique. Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago an “experiment in literary investigation,” and that remains the best description of a work which is otherwise impossible to categorize. The book is not quite a straight history—obviously, Solzhenitsyn did not have access to archives or historical records—and large sections are autobiographical. Solzhenitsyn describes in great detail his own arrest and interrogation, his first prison cell, and, courageously, his flirtation with camp police who asked him to serve as an informer. Other parts of the book rely heavily on the
words and experiences of others, including some of Solzhenitsyn’s camp friends, as well as many people he did not know but who wrote to him after the publication of Ivan Denisovich. Still other sections are based on Solzhenitsyn’s research into what sources were available: legal tomes, official histories, and the Soviet press.

  But all of the material was then filtered through Solzhenitsyn’s unique sensibility, and retold in a style which was simultaneously angry, prophetic, ironic—and always opinionated. Thus The Gulag Archipelago is a history, but it is also an interpretation of history, and one which many at first found shocking. Up until the publication of Gulag, many in Russia and elsewhere were content to blame Stalin for Soviet terror, concentration camps, and mass arrests. Solzhenitsyn argued, and with real evidence, that Lenin, not Stalin, was responsible for creating the Gulag, and that the first Soviet concentration camps for political prisoners were built in the 1920s, not the 1930s. He also showed that the famous “great purge” of the 1930s, during which many leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were put on public trial and then eXecuted, was no aberration. In reality, it was only one of the many “waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting,” and not even the largest at that: far more people were killed during the era of mass collectivization, and the Gulag population actually reached its zenith a decade later, at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s.

  Most importantly, Solzhenitsyn aimed to show that, contrary to what many believed, the Gulag was not an incidental phenomenon, something which the Soviet Union could eventually eliminate or outgrow. Rather, the prison system had been an essential part of the Soviet economic and political system from the very beginning. “We never did have empty prisons,” he wrote, “merely prisons which were full or prisons which were very, very overcrowded.” In fact, The Gulag Archipelago was intended to serve as a condemnation not just of the Soviet camp system, but of the Soviet Union itself. It succeeded—so much so that Soviet authorities decided they could no longer tolerate Solzhenitsyn’s presence at all. As a result of its publication, not just in Russia but in multiple foreign countries, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country. He would not return until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  With his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn became a true international celebrity, and the influence of The Gulag Archipelago began to spread rapidly outside Russia. The first German translation was received rapturously and in exactly the spirit its author had intended. One left-wing German newspaper wrote that The Gulag Archipelago constituted a “burning question mark over fifty years of Soviet power, over the whole Soviet experiment from 1918 on.” The French and English translations appeared somewhat later, thanks to some misunderstandings over ownership of publication rights, but were equally influential. In the United States, where Solzhenitsyn ultimately chose to reside after his expulsion, the paperback edition of The Gulag Archipelago’s first volume sold more than two million copies. In France, it is no exaggeration to say that the book effectively ended the long-standing French intellectual flirtation with Soviet communism. So threatening was the book to the French status quo that Jean-Paul Sartre himself described Solzhenitsyn as a “dangerous element.”

  The West had heard of the Soviet camp system before, of course: credible witnesses had begun reporting on the growth of the Gulag as early as the 1920s. But what Solzhenitsyn produced was simply more thorough, more monumental, and more detailed than anything that had been produced previously. It could not be ignored, or dismissed as a single man’s experience. No one who dealt with the Soviet Union, diplomatically or intellectually, could ignore it. Among other things, its horrific portrait of Soviet terror certainly contributed to the development, first under President Jimmy Carter and then under President Ronald Reagan, of an American foreign policy which recognized “human rights” as a legitimate element of international debate.

  Since then, the stature of The Gulag Archipelago—now published in hundreds of editions, and in dozens of languages—has continued to grow. True, as open debate about the book and its subject has become possible in recent years, some legitimate criticisms of the work have been aired. Some camp survivors felt their memoirs, entrusted to Solzhenitsyn, were used in ways they didn’t like, or to illustrate points they hadn’t been making. Others objected to his almost fanatical insistence that any form of cooperation with the Gulag authorities had amounted to collaboration. The writer Lev Razgon, another Gulag memoirist, argued that for himself, as for many others, choosing to take an indoor accounting job was a matter of survival, not moral weakness: it was not immoral, Razgon wrote, to choose life.

  It is also true that in the fifteen years that have passed since the Russian archives have opened, some errors have been found in Solzhenitsyn’s work. His statistics are often wrong, and he sometimes garbles names and dates. Some of the stories he tells are impossible to verify. Some of the information he presents is partial or incomplete.

  Nevertheless, what is most extraordinary about re-reading The Gulag Archipelago more than fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union is how much it does get right. Although he did not have access to archival documents or government records, Solzhenitsyn’s general outline of the history of the Gulag—from its origins in the Solovetsky Islands in the 1920s, through its expansion at the time of collectivization in the early 1930s, through the death of Stalin and the subsequent camp rebellions—has been proven correct. His description of the moral issues faced by the prisoners has never been disputed. His sociology of camp life, though presented in literary form, is unquestionably accurate. Among other things, the general reliability of the history presented in The Gulag Archipelago proves that “prisoners’ gossip,” so often dismissed by scholars as inaccurate, was often right. Indeed, part of the book’s impact at the time of publication derived from the fact that both former victims and former perpetrators recognized Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions and chronology as accurate, reflecting their own experiences.

  This truthfulness continues to give the book a freshness and an importance which will never be challenged. For a contemporary reader, the book brilliantly evokes a mentality which no longer exists, and which is increasingly difficult to describe or explain: the atmosphere of constant fear; the constant temptation of betrayal; the ubiquity of secret police; the reversal of “normal” values; the generalized cruelty that permeated the culture of the Gulag, and of the Soviet Union itself.

  And yet—no twenty-first century reader who picks up Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece for the first time should imagine that he or she is about to read a straightforward historical account. His book not only describes history: it is itself history. Thanks to Solzhenitsyn’s obsessive attention to detail and his literary and polemical gifts, The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world that we live in today—a world in which Soviet communism is no longer held up as anybody’s political ideal.

  Anne Applebaum

  Preface

  In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream—and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.

  The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.

  As for us, however—we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the pre
historic flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.

  We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.

  And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

  And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

  But, as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago, they kept their silence.

  By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: “No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.”

  But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”

  Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some improbable salamander.

  I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents. And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them? Those who do not wish to recall have already had enough time—and will have more—to destroy all the documents, down to the very last one.