The Gulag Archipelago Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Map

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword to the Abridgment

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  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

  PART III The Destructive-Labor Camps

  1. The Fingers of Aurora

  2. The Archipelago Rises from the Sea

  3. The Archipelago Metastasizes

  4. The Archipelago Hardens

  5. What the Archipelago Stands On

  6. “They’ve Brought the Fascists!”

  7. The Way of Life and Customs of the Natives

  8. Women in Camp

  9. The Trusties

  10. In Place of Politicals

  11. The Loyalists

  12. Knock, Knock, Knock . . .

  13. Hand Over Your Second Skin Too!

  14. Changing One’s Fate!

  15. Punishments

  16. The Socially Friendly

  17. The Kids

  18. The Muses in Gulag

  19. The Zeks as a Nation

  20. The Dogs’ Service

  21. Campside

  22. We Are Building

  PART IV The Soul and Barbed Wire

  1. The Ascent

  2. Or Corruption?

  3. Our Muzzled Freedom

  PART V Katorga

  1. The Doomed

  2. The First Whiff of Revolution

  3. Chains, Chains . . .

  4. Why Did We Stand For It?

  5. Poetry Under a Tombstone, Truth Under a Stone

  6. The Committed Escaper

  7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

  8. Escapes—Morale and Mechanics

  9. The Kids with Tommy Guns

  10. Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning

  11. Tearing at the Chains

  12. The Forty Days of Kengir

  PART VI Exile

  1. Exile in the First Years of Freedom

  2. The Peasant Plague

  3. The Ranks of Exile Thicken

  4. Nations in Exile

  5. End of Sentence

  6. The Good Life in Exile

  7. Zeks at Liberty

  PART VII Stalin Is No More

  1. Looking Back on It All

  2. Rulers Change, the Archipelago Remains

  3. The Law Today

  Afterword

  P.P.S.

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

  The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.

  About the Author

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, in 1918. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. He was brought up in Rostov, where he graduated in mathematics and physics in 1941. After distinguished service with the Red Army in the Second World War, he was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953 for making unfavourable remarks about Josef Stalin. He was rehabilitated in 1956, but in 1969 he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union for denouncing official censorship of his work. He was forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and deported to West Germany. Later he settled in America, but after Soviet officials finally dropped charges against him in 1991, he returned to his homeland in 1994.

  He has written many books, of which One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago are his best known.

  Also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in English translation

  Novels

  ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

  CANCER WARD

  THE FIRST CIRCLE

  AUGUST 1914

  Stories

  STORIES AND PROSE POEMS

  Poems

  PRUSSIAN NIGHTS

  Plays

  THE LOVE-GIRL AND THE INNOCENT

  CANDLE IN THE WIND

  General

  A WORLD SPLIT APART

  WARNING TO THE WEST

  LENIN IN ZURICH

  LETTER TO THE SOVIET LEADERS

  THE NOBEL LECTURE ON LITERATURE

  A LENTEN LETTER TO PIMEN, PATRIARCH OF ALL RUSSIA

  FOR THE GOOD OF THE CAUSE

  WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES

  THE RUSSIAN QUESTION AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  REBUILDING RUSSIA

  Memoirs

  THE OAK AND THE CALF

  INVISIBLE ALLIES

  I dedicate this

  to all those who did not live

  to tell it.

  And may they please forgive me

  for not having seen it all

  nor remembered it all,

  for not having divined all of it.

  Foreword to the Abridgment

  If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

  Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

  Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accepted Professor Ericson’s suggestion to create a one-volume abridgment of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago, in order to facilitate its reading for those who do not have much time in this hectic century of ours. I thank Professor Ericson for his generous initiative as well as for the tactfulness, the literary taste, and the understanding of Western readers which he displayed during the work on the abridgment.

  ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN

  Cavendish, Vermont

  Introduction

  For a few decades the word Holocaust has served us well as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. In recent years a second such shorthand term has entered our working vocabulary: Gulag. This term comes to us not from a host of witnesses but from one lone man: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose very name has become a household word around the world. Even people who have not read him seem to have an opinion about him.

  His best-known title is The Gulag Archipelago. The title is better known than the work itself. Although the readership of this work is substantial, it is surely the case that many bought the first of the three volumes of it because, at the time of its initial publication in early 1974, newspapers were running front-pa
ge stories about the author’s personal crisis of expulsion from his homeland. On the many occasions when I have lectured on Solzhenitsyn, members of the audience have told me that they have read the first hundred or so pages of Volume I but never returned to read the rest.

  Still, Solzhenitsyn’s sales—and, thus, presumably his readership—are large enough to be the envy of almost all other writers. American sales alone have reached some 2,844,000 copies of The Gulag Archipelago. Most of these are of Volume I; but a half million are of Volume II, and nearly 100,000 are of Volume III. Worldwide sales figures would be a significant multiple of these numbers. These numbers reveal two facts. First, many people have read parts of Gulag. Second, only a relatively small percentage of those readers know the final parts, the ones which put the whole work in focus.

  Had Solzhenitsyn done nothing more than give us the shorthand term, our debt to him would be immense. But he has done much more. One of his greatest achievements (though probably not even his greatest, for he is preeminently a novelist) has been to write this history of the concentration camps of the Soviet Union. Were The Gulag Archipelago to be even more widely read than it has been, it would, I believe, make an indelible impression on the modern mind and have a salutary effect on the whole world.

  We can identify at least three reasons why Gulag is left unread by many and read only in part by others. First, the work is very long—more than eighteen hundred pages. Second, it makes great demands of its readers, the heaviest of which is a considerable knowledge of Russian and Soviet history. Third, it strikes many readers as both tedious and depressing because of its accumulation of horror stories. Solzhenitsyn is aware of this problem. Does it seem that I am repeating myself? he asks at various times. But, he explains, it is the Gulag which keeps repeating itself. Sixty million times, in fact—just counting those whom it killed, not those who survived.

  Consider that widely accepted number. Here we have the greatest horror story of human history—in quantitative terms, at least (the comparable toll in China having not yet been calculated)—and, although it happened during our lifetime, most of us do not even know about it.

  It was with thoughts such as these in mind that I, perhaps rushing in where angels would fear to tread, decided to embark on the project of abridging this monumental work. My motive is obvious: to increase the readership for at least some parts of this work—specifically, for the 25 to 30 percent which this abridgment has retained.

  Usually the first reaction to any act of abridgment is that it is a bad business, almost a desecration. I, too, would of course prefer that people read the whole work. However, since not many are doing so, I proceed on the principle that half a loaf—or even less—is better than none.

  And I do believe that abridgment is more defensible in the case of The Gulag Archipelago than it is in the case of most long works which suffer such amputation—novels, for instance. Gulag is not a novel; it is a work of historical reconstruction. At the same time, it is, as its subtitle asserts, a literary investigation. That is to say, Solzhenitsyn’s literary craftsmanship makes this factual account gripping. The organization is more topical than chronological. And the literary elements—irony, sarcasm, imagery, anecdotes—are employed primarily to gain and to hold reader interest. Certainly, despite the fact that, during the process of writing, Solzhenitsyn never had his entire manuscript in front of him at any one time, this work has an organizational integrity; there is a definite relationship among its seven parts and among the chapters which compose them. But it is not a consecutive account which demands that every page be read. One can read it with great profit even if one skips some sections.

  It was only after his forced exile that Solzhenitsyn could see the whole of The Gulag Archipelago at the same time. He took the opportunity to add some passages to his work, and these appear in his collected works in Russian. Solzhenitsyn asked me to include certain of these passages in the abridgment, and I have done so. Thus, despite its being an abbreviated version of the original, this volume contains some material which has never before appeared in translations.

  My work of abridgment has been governed by several clear principles. First and foremost, I have kept in mind a Western readership, one which has only a limited knowledge of Russian history. Of course, it is impossible to take the “Russianness” out of this book, and I would not want to do so if I could. This work was, after all, written by a Russian and primarily for Russians, most especially for future generations of Russians. It is these readers in particular who need to know, in as much detail as possible, the truth of their history, so that official Soviet efforts to distort or to erase that history will not succeed. But much of universal moral value remains even after the deletion of many details. Second, I have retained the seven-part structure of the original. I have sought to give readers a sense of the whole work and its developing argument, not merely a series of disconnected excerpts. Third, I have attempted to resist the urge to explain, to expand upon the text. Only a few times have I interpolated words of my own. Fourth, I have tried to leave as few marks of excision as possible; I have striven for maximum readability. This abridged text is designed for the general reader, not for the scholar. The original text, including footnotes and explanatory glosses, remains available for all who wish to consult it.

  I have also adhered to the following procedures. Wherever possible, I have given no indication that passages have been deleted. Although it is sometimes apparent where the stitching occurs, I hope that it is seldom apparent unless the original text is consulted. When the stitching is obvious, I have resorted to the semi-apology of inserting ellipsis points. Chapters that have been entirely deleted are summarized in a sentence or two. The same is true of the few chapters which are cut so deeply that the sense of them cannot be gleaned from the remaining passages. On certain occasions, I have altered the paragraphing. At Solzhenitsyn’s own suggestion, I have eliminated much of his personal story, though parts of it I treasure too much to drop.

  I shall resist the strong temptation to come between the reader and the text by giving explicatory commentary. But I do here exercise my prerogative to give one piece of advice: If even the abridged version is too long for some readers, I urge them to include in their reading some of the later chapters. Readers who do so will not fall prey to one of the major misperceptions about Solzhenitsyn: that his books are depressing. It is in these chapters—“The Ascent” and “Forty Days at Kengir,” to name just two—that we hear that note which is always Solzhenitsyn’s final one: the note of hope. The more I have read Solzhenitsyn, the more clearly I have come to see this point. One can perpetrate all sorts of atrocities upon human beings, body and soul, but one can never fully succeed in quenching the human spirit. Some persons will submit and will die spiritually. But others, like Ivan Denisovich, will endure and prevail. Despite all of the indignities inflicted upon them, their innate human dignity will remain intact. By definition, then, totalitarianism must always fail. In Solzhenitsyn’s own words, taken from a letter to me giving much valuable advice about my work of abridging, “the main goal, the main sense of Archipelago [is] a moral uplifting and catharsis” (emphasis his).

  I must add that the author has given me considerably more help on this project than I ever could have hoped for. I am deeply appreciative of his many personal kindnesses during my work on this abridgment.

  Needless to say, I take responsibility for any errors of omission or commission. I hope only that any mistakes which I have made do not interfere with the transmission of Solzhenitsyn’s words to an audience which I believe desperately needs to hear them.

  EDWARD E. ERICSON, JR.

  Calvin College

  Grand Rapids, Michigan

  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 specime
ns 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 prehistoric 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.”