Fathers herman and seraphim. the gulag archipelago

Fathers Herman and Seraphim of Platina
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
By Solzhenitsyn

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (Vol. 1), by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Harper & Row, New York, 1974. 660 pages, hardcover $12.50, paperback $1.95.

THE DISCOVERY of one manuscript of this book in 1973 by the Soviet Secret Police, and its subsequent publication abroad by the author, were the immediate causes of the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union early this year. The subject of the book is the Soviet slave-labor system from 1918 to 1956 (the system, of course, continues to exist today), based on the author’s own 11-year experience of it as well as on information carefully recorded from others who have lived through it. “Gulag” is an acronym for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps,” which is in charge of most of this system, and it is conceived by the author as an “archipelago” or series of “islands” (camps, prisons, detention centers, etc.) which are spread through the whole of the Russian land like a country within a country. Basically there is nothing new here for anyone who is familiar with the literature on this subject in the free world, whether in Russian, English, or other languages.1 The distinction of The Gulag Archipelago is to have presented for the first time the whole panorama and history of this phenomenon, complete with many actual names, dates, and places—and with such literary skill that it is brought to life before the reader in all its hideous reality. Although it is strictly “non-fiction,” it is perhaps the most powerful literary work of the 20th century; but even more than this, the book is a major spiritual document of our times.

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1 See, for example, in English: David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Conn., 1947 (4th printing, 1955), 331 pp. John H. Noble, I Found God in Soviet Russia, St. Martin’s, NY, 1959, 192 pp. A. Alexander, In the Name of Humanity, 1959. Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony (about the state of the Soviet camps in the late 1960’s), 1969. In Russian: M. Rozanov, Zavoyavatelyi Belykh Pyaten, Possev Publ., 1951, 290 pp. (with maps). Ivan Solonevich, Rossiya v Kontzlagere, Washington, DC, 5th ed., 1958, 512 pp. Y.B. Margolin, Puteshestvie v stranu ze-ka, Chekhov Publ., NY, 1952, 414 pp. M.Z. Nikonov-Smorogdin, Krasnaya Katorga, NTS Publ., 1938, 372 pp. R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Tyurmy i Ssylki, Chekhov Publ., 1954, 412 pp. Boris Shiryaev, Neugasimaya Lampada, Chekhov Publ., 1954, 408 pp.


There is no need to quote the often sickening details of this reality, which some even now will prefer to regard as “incredible,” “exceptional,” or at least “a thing of the (Stalinist) past”; the reader may obtain the book himself in order to find out what “real life” is like in the USSR for that five per cent or more of the population (Solzhenitsyn guesses the number to be twelve million) which, at any given time, is in the slave-labor camps or on the way to them. (The number appears to be less at the present time, but the treatment remains the same.) Here it will be sufficient to give a brief outline of the book, which is actually quite a calm and objective account of the remarkable Soviet slave-labor system.

The whole book is divided into seven parts in three volumes. Part I describes “The Prison Industry” from arrest to sentencing, all of it a prelude to incarceration in the camps. Here we learn that “the Gulag country begins right next to us, two yards away from us” (p. 4) (i.e., in the nearest installation of the Secret Police), and it is not meant for criminals either. Those who are aware know that “every honest man is sure to go to prison” in the USSR (p. 12), whether singly or in “waves,” as when “a quarter of the entire city” of Leningrad was arrested (p. 13). Spies and secret police are everywhere, and no one can be trusted. “You are arrested by a religious pilgrim whom you have put up for the night ‘for the sake of Christ.’ You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theater... They’ll take you right off the operating table” (p. 10).

And there need be no “reason” for arrest. One may be arrested for not listening to the radio, for listening to music and sipping tea, for possessing a radio tube, for expressing a desire to have a sack of flour, for baking your own bread, for speaking to someone or shaking his hand, for thinking, and of course for the major crimes of belief in God or “Praise of American Technology.” “Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent?” (p. 76.)

Chapter 2 of Part I gives the “History of Our Sewage Disposal System,” the author’s poetic term for the slave system, showing that this system has been in operation not just in some spectacular year when multiple millions of victims were washing down the drain of society into the camps, but that it has been operating constantly from 1917 to the present day, with wave after wave of thousands and millions of victims.

Chapter 3, “The Interrogation,” contains a selected list of 31 of the chief tortures employed in order to make people confess to “crimes” they have not committed. “What had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great... was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century--in a society based on socialist principles... not by one scoundrel alone, but by tens of thousands of specially trained beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims” (p. 94). “For the first time in history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken” (p. 102). In this and other chapters the author ironically compares the Soviet system with the much more lenient system of Nazi Germany and the incomparably more humane Tsarist treatment of criminals, documenting each point.

Chapter 4 examines the “Bluecaps,” members of the Secret Police, and the absolute and arbitrary power they wield in Soviet society.

Chapter 5 describes the author’s “First Cell,” where he began to realize that “prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life” (p. 187). Here he began to know the joy of meeting kindred souls without having the constant fear of being spied upon that Russians in “freedom” have in the USSR (“stool pigeons” in prison are generally easy to spot).

Chapter 6 describes “That Spring” at the end of World War II when Stalin, in gratitude for the deliverance of Bolshevism from the enemy, sent new waves of millions into the camps, including all the returning Russian prisoners of war — something never before done by any country in the world’s history. Unlike all Soviet and most Western historians alike, the author puts the events of these months in true perspective: the “consistent shortsightedness and stupidity” of Roosevelt and Churchill, their cruel surrender to Stalin of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who preferred death to returning, and even the much-maligned “Russian Liberation Army” of Vlasov, who led “a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy” (Hitler) (p. 262). “In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian” (p. 256).

Chapter 7 is devoted to the “Engine Room”—the process of sentencing prisoners without a trial (most prisoners have never seen a judge), with no possibility of appeal.

Chapters 8 through 10 relate the growth of Soviet “Law.” The great staged ‘public trials’ from 1918 to the end of the 1930’s are described, revealing a new concept and purpose of law: not justice, but the benefit of the Party. For the “guilty,” it makes no difference whatever whether they are sentenced with or without a “trial.”

Chapter 11 gives details of the history of the “Supreme Measure” (the death penalty), which several times in Soviet history was briefly “abolished” — which of course did not prevent people from being killed in prison as usual. The sufferings of those waiting to be officially executed are worse even than those of other prisoners.

Chapter 12 is devoted to the prisons as such — “the old jail tradition,” as opposed to the new camps — with many comparisons with Tsarist prisons, all to the immense advantage of the latter.

Part II is devoted to “Perpetual Motion”: transportation to and from the camps, with chapters on the “Ships” (various inhuman means of transportation) and “Ports” (transit prisons) of the Archipelago, and the “Slave Caravans” (by cattle cars and barges and also by foot) which are required when thousands and millions of prisoners must be transported in a short time. The conditions here are worse than in the prisons and preliminary confinement centers, being aggravated by the presence of the “thieves” — common criminals and cut-throats who work with the police and guards to terrorize the “political” (i.e., innocent) prisoners. The author ends the chapter on the Slave Caravans thus: “We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all... worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be... worse” (p. 587).

Volume Two of The Gulag Archipelago (just now coming off the press in Russian, in Paris) is devoted to these camps.

 

No human being can read this book without being shocked. But this is no ordinary expose of “man’s inhumanity to man.” It is not merely the story of one nation’s tragedy. It is not an account of some monstrous “accident” of history, of the “mistakes of the past.” Solzhenitsyn writes: “Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions” (p. 174).

But what monstrous ideology can be responsible for such an historical “experiment” as the Soviet slave-labor system, the likes of which has not been seen in all the world’s history of terrorism?

The Gulag Archipelago is not a “political expose,” as the author himself says (p. 168). “Communism” as such is incidental to the terrible events described in this book; the villains of this book do not act the way they do because they are Communists, but because they are the victims of an ideology far deeper and more deadly than Communism, an “ideology” the significance of which few of them realize, because it is not something logically thought out, but rather something which has become part of their blood as men of our “enlightened” 20th century. Communism is merely the system in which this deeper “ideology” has been most effectively put into practice.

What is this “ideology”?

One of the 19th-century thinkers most in tune with the spirit of modern times, Friedrich Nietzsche, proclaimed himself the prophet of Nihilism, which he defined as the belief that “God is dead,” that “ ‘there is no truth; the highest values are losing their value. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question: ‘why?’ ” And he accurately described the consequences of this belief: “We have killed God, you and I! We are all his murderers! Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become gods, merely to seem worthy of it?” And again: “If there is no truth, everything is permitted.” He declared: “What I am describing is the history of the twentieth century, the triumph of Nihilism.”

This is the “ideology” of 20th-century man, the self-made god, and The Gulag Archipelago is the history of this ‘triumph of Nihilism’ by one who has lived through it.

Anyone who is aware of what is happening spiritually in the free world today, and reads this book with an open mind and heart, will find that it is not merely a description of something that has happened and is happening far away, to others. Solzhenitsyn himself, after being banished and finding that his brutally frank revelation of an “internal affair” of the Soviet Union was interfering with the progress of “world peace,” and in particular with the “detente” between the USSR and the USA, has written in a letter to a German newspaper:

“The suppression of those who think differently in the Soviet Union is not an ‘internal affair’ of the Soviet Union, and it is not simply a far-away manifestation of cruelty against which noble sensitive souls protest in the West. The unhindered suppression of those who think differently in Eastern Europe creates a deadly, real threat to peace everywhere, prepares the possibility of a new world war much more surely than trade pushes this possibility away.... Today they are crunching our bones — this is a sure pledge that tomorrow they will be crunching yours.

“My premonitions come from a Soviet experience of many years’ duration; my whole life has been devoted to the study of this system. Whoever is in charge of the fate of the West can disdain my premonitions today also.

“They will remember them when it will no longer be possible to obtain a scrap of a page of this very Aftenposten except under threat of a prison term.” (Aftenposten, May 25, 1974. Russian text in La Pensee Russe, Paris, June 6, 1974.)

Is this merely the raving of another “right-wing fanatic”1 whose “political” obsession with Communism has unhinged his mind so that he sees a “world conspiracy” where there is really only an “alternative social system” which, hopefully, will finally start “mellowing” any day now? No; this is the precise forecast of a man who views the Soviet system, and the state of the whole world, soberly and spiritually. “Politics” has nothing whatever to do with it. All political systems in the world today serve the same master; it is just that some are more “advanced” than others on the same path. Given the spiritual state of the contemporary world, it is inevitable that a Soviet-type Nihilism sooner or later will swallow up the whole world; where is there a power to oppose it?

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1 President Nixon is reported to have said to Secretary of State Kissinger shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s banishment: “Solzhenitsyn is to the right of Barry Goldwater.” To which Secretary Kissinger replied: “No, Mr. President, he’s to the right of the czars.” (Newsweek, March 8, 1974.)


Solzhenitsyn has indeed written the “history of the twentieth century.” History, after all, is not a chronology of political or economic events; it is what happens in the souls of men, for good or evil, and only then is reflected in outward events. In the whole 19th century there were only two “historical events”: the progress of the world-wide Revolution, which is to say, the progress of unbelief in men’s souls; and the attempt of one power to stop it: Orthodox Russia — an “event” which can be seen as well in the lives of 19th-century Orthodox Saints as in the anti-Revolutionary actions of the Tsarist Russian Government. Similarly, in the 20th century only one historical event is very visible to us as yet: the progress of Revolutionary atheism (or anti-theism, to use the Socialist Proudhon’s more accurate word) once it has come to power. The actions of those temporarily opposed to Bolshevism either out of envy (Hitler) or out of hypocrisy (the Western Allies) are only historical episodes, not events; Solzhenitsyn has chronicled the historical event of the 20th century.

Any American bankteller, mechanic, corporation executive, baseball player, religious leader, congressman, supermarket clerk — would fit nicely in the Gulag Archipelago, whether as a torturer or as one of the “helpless rabbits” (p. 6) who are his victims. Those with imagination in the West have already sensed this — witness the “surrealistic” stories of Kafka and the “absurdist” plays of Ionesco, which describe man in the grip of irrational forces in a world turned upside down. That is the Soviet Nihilist world, which the free world in its decadence is striving towards, but has not yet reached.

There is one dimension conspicuously absent in The Gulag Archipelago, and this will doubtless cause shallow critics to conclude that the book is, after all, no more than a work of “humanism,” telling us only that “the human spirit will somehow survive, after all.” This missing dimension is the Christian, the Orthodox dimension, which we know about through the testimony of numerous new martyrs and confessors of the Communist yoke. The subject of religion, indeed, is mentioned only in passing in this volume. There are several hints, however, that this dimension will have its proper place in the next two volumes. Solzhenitsyn has woven his own autobiography in with the story of his suffering people, and in the period covered by this volume he was still an atheist, indeed a Marxist; he and his generation (those born around the first year of the Revolution) had yet to encounter the question of Christian faith as a living reality. At the conclusion of this volume the author describes his meeting at the end of World War II with a young man born in 1923 who astonished him by declaring that “of course” he believed in God. And Solzhenitsyn began to wonder if the new generation is moving “in another direction, in a direction we wouldn’t have been able and wouldn’t have dared to move in?” (p. 615). And he began to feel the reproach and the truth of the glances directed at him and his generation who were still, in spite of everything, “idealistic Communists” in 1945 when “our younger brothers would only look at us contemptuously: Oh, you stupid dolts!” (p. 615). If the promise of this first volume (which ends on these words) holds true, the next two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago will be yet more powerful and truthful, and will give yet greater insight into what will happen in Russia and the whole world when, as the author predicts, “whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth” (p. 298).

In this book Solzhenitsyn has spoken for a whole truth-starved people — and not only for those who are left in Russia. His attitude toward the Soviet system is exactly that of the Russian emigres1 who for fifty years have been slandered and abused as “moth-eaten monarchists” and “political reactionaries.” Let everyone know, then, that Solzhenitsyn’s book expresses exactly what every true Russian means when he says that he is “anti-Communist.” This is not a political statement, any more than Solzhenitsyn’s is a political book; it is an expression of a burning love of truth, and of the hatred of falsehood which must accompany such love, if it is genuine.

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1 Not the Orthodox “liberals,” who always qualify the truth they say they love, but only those “naive” ones who believe the same way the Orthodox Russian people has believed for a thousand years.


A final word should be said about the language of Solzhenitsyn, as well as about the English translation. In the original, this book is a classic of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn writes “with great soul,” as Russians say, in a highly expressive, warm, lyrical language, very powerfully, with brevity and a biting wit. In Russian classical literature he is closest to the master Pushkin in his use of language. This is all the more amazing in view of the subject matter and his use of the crude Soviet jargon and slang. It is not the case, as the translator naively writes in his notes (p. 617), that Solzhenitsyn has “contributed to the revival and expansion of the Russian literary language” by introducing readers to this jargon (who needs such a “revival”?!), but rather that he has marvellously incorporated this language (which obviously has no value in itself, but is necessary in order to reveal the reality of Soviet life) into a classical literary work without at all destroying the beauty of the work. The book is extremely moving and very uplifting, and doubly so for anyone who has gone through the tragic and painful experience of “being a Russian” in the 20th century, and until now has not had someone to speak the truth of this experience to the world.

The English translation has failed to capture the beauty and power of Solzhenitsyn’s language. To some extent this was inevitable, in that modern English on the one hand lacks the warmth and “soul” of Russian, and on the other hand has not been subjected to the cold and soulless barbarism of the “Soviet” Russian language, with its endless list of ideologically fabricated words and ugly abbreviations, and its deliberate vulgarization. The use of the foulest obscene language also has been deliberately promoted under the Soviet regime, and Solzhenitsyn himself notes that such language is specifically employed in interrogations as a means of torturing people who have been delicately brought up (p. 104).

Many of the nuances of Solzhenitsyn’s language, therefore, simply cannot be conveyed in English. The translator, however, has added some vulgarization of his own. Solzhenitsyn marvellously conveys the atmosphere of even the most repulsive areas and aspects of Soviet reality — without once resorting to foul language. (Only once does he use a foul word, when quoting Lenin directly!) The translator, however, deferring to the “liberal” taste of the West in this regard (which here is in accord with the Soviet, but not with the Russian, spirit), has “spiced up” the text on a number of occasions by using foul or crude words when they were not called for to translate the Russian. The same thing was done (much more crudely) by the American translators of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who declared that they preferred to “spell out” the words which Solzhenitsyn used in a “disguised” form. But even in this “small” point one can see how far Solzhenitsyn’s whole outlook is misunderstood in the West. His is the voice of honesty and decency rebelling against the lies and vulgarity of the Soviet system, and his translators put him into that same vulgar idiom he despises! Solzhenitsyn quite deliberately “disguises” or only hints at the vulgarity of Soviet language and does not “spell it out” — because he is not wallowing in that filth, as are contemporary writers in the West, but he has transcended it and written a work of genuine literature. All this is a revealing commentary on the distance between the crude Nihilist reality which is to be found everywhere today, and the stature of a literary and moral giant like Solzhenitsyn, who stands as much above Soviet reality as he stands above Western decadence.

All royalties from the sale of The Gulag Archipelago have been designated by Solzhenitsyn to be placed in a special Fund to be used for aid to families of political prisoners in the Soviet Union.