The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago is an influential book written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published in 1973 that documents the implementation of Progressivism and failure of Socialism in Russia, and the murderous system of compulsory behavior. The Gulags were a system of "corrective labor camps" for people with politically incorrect views or attitudes; however, they were often populated by people caught up in random round-ups by government bureaucrats to fill production quotas in a leftist system that promised a "guaranteed income".

Solzhenitsyn, who served as a captain during World War II, was imprisoned immediately afterward, along with German POWs. In 1955, the German prisoners were amnestied and returned home, while Solzhenitsyn and other Red Army soldiers, who defeated the fascists and won World War II, remained imprisoned by their leftwing communist slave masters for criticizing socialism.

The Gulag Archipelago, 3 volumes and 1,800 pages, is required reading in all Russian high schools today. Because of liberal censorship, "official" histories and encyclopedias published in Soviet times are virtually useless, The Gulag Archipelago provides much of the missing history of the Soviet Union. It is one of the most influential and powerful books to appear in the 20th century.

In a new foreword for the 2018 Penguin Books English language edition, Prof. Jordan Peterson writes, "It was Solzhenitsyn, however, whose revelations made it positively shameful to defend not just the Soviet state, but the very system of thought that made that state what it was."^[1]

Outline[edit]

Volume I: Covers Solzhenitsyn's arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment. Solzhenitsyn comes into contact with other political prisoners serving long terms, who had served time at other gulags and work projects throughout the Soviet Union. Prior to its publication in 1973, V.I. Lenin was still considered in the West and much of the world as a benevolent dictator while communist atrocities had all been blamed on Stalin.^[2] Solzhenitsyn documents Lenin and other early revolutionaries employed terrorism and mass murder to establish rule.^[3]

Volume II: Goes into every day life in the camps, the different groups of prisoners and charges under which they were held, including Socialist party members whose interpretation of progressive views fell out of favor with the elite bureaucrats. The Volume goes into much detail of the history of the KGB, which administered the camps, under different KGB heads. The leftist and collectivist ideology eliminated the problem of unemployment during the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s by making unemployment illegal; the leftist ideology also abolished greed and the profit motive, making forced labor vital to production and the functioning of the economy.

Volume III: Covers the period of Solzhenitsyn's exile, a form of parole from the Soviet judicial system. The Soviet Union being so vast, barbed wire wasn't always necessary in some remote areas. Each camp had a little village beside it which housed prison guards and their families. Many "cities" plotted on National Geographic maps in the United States were actually leftist slave labor camps.^[4] A prisoner who served his term could be released, with no money, and still barred from living within so many kilometers of the Moscow Center. These longterm exilees then took up residence in the village, living in chicken coops and basements of prison guards, employed as handymen and servants or in other services the village needed. Also covers much of World War II and the early Cold War history of the 1950s.

The Progressive Doctrine[edit]

30 years into the leftist multicultural experiment called the Soviet Union, Alexander Solzhenitsyn did an extensive study of the Progressive Doctrine in Volume II of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn wrote,

In this study, if nothing prevents us, we intend to make an important scientific discovery. In the development of our hypothesis we would in no way wish to come into conflict with the Progressive Teaching. The author of these lines, attracted by the enigma of the native tribe populating the Archipelago, undertook a lengthy scientific expedition there and collected abundant material. And as a result it is very easy to prove that the zeks [prisoners of the gulag]^[5] of the Archipelago constitute a class of society. For, after all, this multitudinous group (of many millions) has a single (common to them all) relationship to production (namely: subordinate, attached, and without any right to direct that production). It also has a single common relationship to the distribution of the products of labor (namely: no relationship at all, receiving only that insignificant share of the products required for the meager support of their own existence). And, in addition, all their labor is no small thing, but one of the principal constituents of the whole state economy.^[6]

Solzhenitsyn explains the role of thieves and criminals in a socialist society. As oppressed victims of the propertied oppressor class, thieves were "socially friendly" or "class allies" of progressives in the class war between "the haves and have nots".

The fathers of the Archipelago, having, in accordance with the Progressive Doctrine, multiplied these socially friendly elements beyond all rhyme and reason...How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police, didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed cases - why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be given only six months, and then be given three months off for good behavior? And anyway, it wasn't certain that the bandits would even be tried when caught. After all, prosecutors "lowered the crime rate"—something demanded of them at every conference—by the curious method of simply quashing cases, especially if they foresaw that there would be many defendants. Finally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course for habitual criminals especially. Watch out there now .. witness in the courtroom! They will all be back soon, and it'll be a knife in the back of anyone who gave testimony! Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window, or slitting a pocket, or your neighbor's suitcase being ripped open—shut your eyes! Walk by! You didn't see anything! That's how the thieves have trained us—the thieves and our laws! The·thieves flourished because they were encouraged.^[7]

Elsewhere Solzhenitsyn documents how forced labor, a cruelty of Czarist times that led to the Russian Revolution, was adapted to Progressive Doctrine.^[8]

Solzhenitsyn goes into some detail how progressives deal with political opposition and dissenters in socialist re-education camps (gulags):

It has been known for centuries that Hunger . . . rules the world! (And all your Progressive Doctrine is, incidentally, built on Hunger, on the thesis that hungry people will inevitably revolt against the well-fed.) Hunger rules every hungry human being, unless he has himself consciously decided to die. Hunger, which forces an honest person to reach out and steal ("When the belly rumbles, conscience flees"). Hunger, which compels the most unselfish person to look with envy into someone else's bowl, and to try painfuIly to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor is receiving. Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to allow it to be distracted by anything else at all, or to think about anything else at all, or to speak about anything else at all except food, food, and food. Hunger, from which it is impossible to escape even in dreams—dreams are about food, and insomnia is over food. And soon—just insomnia. Hunger, after which one cannot even eat up; the man has by then turned into a one-way pipe, and everything emerges from him in exactly the same state in which it was swallowed.^[9]

Solzhenitsyn anticipated the response of his critics:

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, none of this amounts to much. 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.^[10]

The role of organizers[edit]

Two of the most famous organizers in contemporary America are Barack Hussein Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Solzhenitsyn repeatedly refers to the organizers who ran the camps. In this excerpt, Solzhenitsyn describes how progressive organizers break the will of Article 58 resisters (political prisoners were sentenced under Article 58 of the Soviet Constitution and referred to as 58's). The attempt to organize resistance to the progressive takeover itself was a crime. 58's were shipped off to the gulag to be housed along with thieves and murderers.

Having passed through the meat grinder of political interrogation, the human being was physically crushed in body: he had been starved, he hadn't slept, he had frozen in punishment cells, he had lain there a beaten man. But it wasn't only his body. His soul was crushed too. Over and over he had been told and had had demonstrated to him that his views, and his conduct in life, and his relationships with people had all been wrong because they had brought him to ruin. All that was left in that scrunched-up wad the engine room [a metaphor for interrogation room] of the law had spewed out into the prisoner transport was a greed for life, and no understanding whatever. To crush him once and for all and to cut him off from all others once and for all - that was the function of interrogation under Article 58. The convicted prisoner had to learn that his worst guilt out in freedom had been his attempt somehow to get together or unite with others by any route but the Party organizer, the trade-union organizer, or the administration. In prison this fear went so far as to become fear of all kinds of collective action: two voices uttering the same complaint or two prisoners signing a complaint on one piece of paper. Gun-shy now and for a good long time to come of any and every kind of collaboration or unification, the pseudo politicals were not prepared to unite even against the thieves. Nor would they even think of bringing along a weapon - a knife or a bludgeon - for the Stolypin car^[11] or the transit prison. In the first place, why have one? And against whom? In the second place, if you did use it, then, considering the aggravating circumstance of your malevolent Article 58, you might be shot when you were retried. In the third place, even before that, your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief's. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn't know any better. But for you to have one was "terrorism."

A parallel might be found in the Progressive use of modern technology for political repression - in Soviet times it was the use of railways for mass deportation to gulags, in contemporary times it is the use of social media to isolate and ban dissenters of Progressive thought.

Putting people first[edit]

In the socialist utopia of the Soviet Union,the exploitation of one's labor by private capitalists was outlawed, and all jobs were guaranteed by the state. Unemployment, a feature of capitalism, was outlawed. Initially, so was money, a feature of bourgeois society and the profit motive. People before profits, with the government guaranteeing all workers' jobs and sustenance.

Any sort of private enterprise or entrepreneurship in the black market or underground economy was not considered merely tax evasion, but treason (anti-Soviet activity), a political crime that attacked the very underpinnings of Socialism and foundation of the state. One person could not employ another (exploiting their labor); the government owned the means of production and only the government (i.e. party members and civil servants) could hire people or make a profit.

With the profit motive removed, government economic planners established production quotas, or "work norms." Additionally, with the profit motive and money banned, no one wanted to work - especially young men of marriageable age who wanted to impress a girl and court her for a wife. With unemployment outlawed, prison camps were expanded beyond anything recognizable from the Czarist era to create employment for the millions of shirkers of socialist ideals and to provide profit for the state, overseeing the economy. Critics of the system were classified as Article 58 political prisoners, and imprisoned alongside the shirkers. Common thieves, who were considered victims of the bourgeois class and not as enemies of collectivism, enjoyed special privileges and were scattered among political prisoners and shirkers to sow chaos and mistrust between dissenters to prevent them from organizing.

Historical context[edit]

True to leftwing politically correct censorship, Solzhenitsyn refers to the internal agencies tasked with political surveillance and repression as "our beloved organs" of state security, and begins tracing The History of Our Sewage Disposal System to deal with dissenters of political correctness, leftism, and Progressive ideology.

Even in Czarist times, much of Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Caucuses and other territories were settled by banishing people who were deemed as socially undesirable from the urban areas of Moscow and St. Petersberg to labor colonies. These colonies would never have appeared on their own and were located in remote areas for resource extraction and harvesting. If a slave camp closed, the entire settlement disappeared. For people targeted for extermination, rather than running trains to death camps with gas chambers as the Nazis did, a trainload of people could be dumped off the Trans Siberian Railroad in the dead of winter with no supplies.

Should a person be deemed to have some economic value to the state, the severity of one's sentence could be determined by how many kilometers they were banned from the Moscow Center (Red Square). 3000 kilometers meant the salt mines of Kazakhstan; 5000 kilometers meant the logging camps of the Lena River where Lenin had been imprisoned in Czarist times and from which he took his name as a proud monarchical resister; 7,000 kilometers meant the Kolyma, the equivalent of a death sentence in a society that abolished capital punishment, yet few ever returned. Even after serving the sentence, the ban remained in place. The Progressive leftists expanded the gulag system, not only in size but the types of supposed offenses to land a person there far beyond what their oppressive, absolutist, and authoritarian predecessors ever had.

Prior to its publication, many liberal Western academics respected Lenin as the heir of Karl Marx, standing above Stalin and Hitler who supposedly corrupted socialist ideas. Solzhenitsyn documented how Lenin himself had signed mass execution orders. Many American and Western European professors remained in denial of Lenin's role in the history of socialism, even beyond the collapse of Soviet communism. It was Solzhenitsyn who set in motion that ultimate collapse.

Mass deportations[edit]

Solzhenitsyn brought to light Vladimir Lenin's terror tactics and the mass deportation of kulaks (kulaks were residents of small farming villages who were not employed directly in agricultural field work, and thus considered greedy "bourgeois" class enemies in progressive Marxist ideology). Kulaks tended to be village merchants who provided credit to Russian and Ukrainian farmers until the harvest came in. When the kulaks disappeared, Soviet agriculture collapsed, and the Russian people's ability to feed themselves under the leftwing anti-capitalist measures faltered. The purpose of destroying the capitalist economy that existed for a millennium in Russian farming villages (the name "Russia" literally means "land of villages") and served them well, was to make people who inhabit the vast rural areas of Russia, and in cities as well, dependent on government.

In Solzhenitsyn's imagery, the Archipelago of forced labor camps is seen as scattered islands in the sea. The constant mass arrests and deportations of people flowing into the gulags to provide labor to keep the leftist idea of an economy functioning, Solzhenitsyn employs the metaphor of waves, floods, rivers, and tidal waves.

And so the waves foamed and rolled. But over them all, in 1929-1930, billowed and gushed the multimillion wave of dispossessed kulaks. It was immeasurably large and it could certainly not have been housed in even the highly developed network of Soviet interrogation prisons (which in any case were packed full by the "gold" wave). Instead, it bypassed the prisons, going directly to the transit prisons and camps, onto prisoner transports, into the Gulag country. In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave (it was an ocean) swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system of even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with it in all Russian history. It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe. But yet so cleverly were the channels of the GPU-Gulag organized that the cities would have noticed nothing had they not been stricken by a strange three-year famine - a famine that came about without drought and without war.

This wave was also distinct from all those which preceded it because no one fussed about with taking the head of the family first and then working out what to do with the rest of the family. On the contrary, in this wave they burned out whole nests, whole families, from the start; and they watched jealously to be sure that none of the children - fourteen, ten, even six years old-got away: to the last scrapings, all had to go down the same road, to the same common destruction. (This was the first such experiment - at least in modern history. It was subsequently repeated by Hitler with the Jews, and again by Stalin with nationalities which were disloyal to him or suspected by him.)^[12]

Having destroyed the Russian economy, the hunt for scapegoats, "saboteurs", and "wreckers" was on to provide more grist for the leftwing mill.

Concentration camps[edit]

The Roosevelt administration, which granted diplomatic recognition and legitimacy to the leftist regime in 1933, was aware of the human rights violations, systematic malnutrition ("systematic malnutrition" was deemed a Crime Against Humanity by Soviet, American, UK and French prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal), and mass murder occurring in the Soviet concentration camps before the U.S. entrance into World War II, and before Adolf Hitler's implementation of the holocaust. An April 14, 1941 Memorandum from the U.S. Military Attache (G-2) in Moscow, found in the Harry Hopkins Papers at the FDR Presidential Library, entitled NKVD of the USSR, states in part,

In Volume III Solzhenitsyn discussed the motivations of the Russian National Army (also known as the Vlasov movement) organized during World War II by the Germans and consisting of POWs from the Soviet Union. The Vlasovites, led by Gen. Anatoly Vlasov to fight against the Red Army and liberate Russia from Soviet communism, ended up in the gulag.

Remember Lenin's words: "An oppressed class which did not aspire to possess arms and learn how to handle them would deserve only to be treated as slaves" (Fourth Edition, Volume 23-, page 85). There is, then, reason to be proud if the Soviet-German war showed that we are not such slaves as all those studies by liberal historians contemptuously make us out to be. There was nothing slavish about those who reached for their sabers to cut of 'Daddy Stalin's head (nor about those on the other side, who straightened their backs for the first time when they put on Red Army greatcoats - in a strange brief interval of freedom which no student of society could have foreseen).

These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism - no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else. Came the time when weapons were put in the hands of these people, should they have curbed their passions, allowed Bolshevism to outlive itself, steeled themselves to cruel oppression again - and only then begun the struggle with it (a struggle which has still hardly started anywhere in the world)?...^[15]

In 2001, a Russian Federation-based patriot organization applied to the Russian Federation's military prosecutor for a review of Gen. Vlasov's case,^[16] saying that "Vlasov was a patriot who spent much time re-evaluating his service in the Red Army and the essence of Stalin's regime before agreeing to collaborate with the Germans". The military prosecutor concluded that the law of rehabilitation of victims of political repressions did not apply to Vlasov and refused to consider the case again. However, Vlasov's Article 58 RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic) Penal Code conviction for anti-Soviet agitation (ASA) and propaganda was vacated. A memorial dedicated to Gen. Vlasov and the participants in the Russian Liberation Movement was erected at the Novo-Diveevo Russian Orthodox convent and cemetery in Nanuet, New York. Twice annually, on the anniversary of Vlasov's execution and on the Sunday following Orthodox Easter, a memorial service is held for Vlasov and the combatants of the Russian National Army. While Solzhenitsyn was a Red Army captain who served with distinction, by the personal stories of Vlasovites and what happened to their families in the decades before World War II under the leftwing ideology and regime, Solzhenitsyn came to understand why they took arms against the Red Army.

Post-War New Order[edit]

Commenting on the Yalta and Teheran Conference, where much of a post-World War II, New World Order was worked out, Solzhenitsyn remarked,

Solzhenitsyn brought to the attention of Western readers for the first time The Keelhaul Agreement (Keelhauling is defined as a form of punishment once used for sailors at sea. The sailor was tied to a line looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard, and dragged under the ship's keel; keelhauling amounted to a death sentence by extreme torture, or physical trauma resulting in permanent maiming.) Mass deportation of populations was another Crime Against Humanity charged by the U.S., the USSR, the British Empire, and France at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, however the practice was in place in the Soviet Union from its earliest days. The secret Keelhaul Agreement worked out at the Yalta Conference resulted in the mass deportation of over two million refugees fleeing communism. Many of these refugees were executed upon repatriation; the rest ended up in the gulag.

The Keelhaul Agreement ran counter to President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points for peace barring secret agreements, and President Franklin Roosevelt's main war objective of self determination of peoples.

The book, written in secret and published in samizdat, Solzhenitsyn notes while finishing it in exile in 1956, wrote that he never had all 1,800 pages on his desk in front of him at one time over the dozen years or so that he worked on it. Before publication in the West in 1973 Solzhenitsyn added this footnote in Volume I:

It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot be kept long, since they inevitably come out in print or are disclosed, the secret of this particular act of betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British and American governments. This is truly the last secret, or one of the last, of the Second World War. Having often encountered these people in camps, I was unable to believe for a whole quarter-century that the public in the West knew nothing of this action of the Western governments, this massive handing over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death. Not until 1973 - in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21 - was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. "After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise. . . . They did not realize they were being repatriated .... They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks." The English authorities gave them the treatment "reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial." They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. (Author's note, dated 1973.)^[20]

The Soviet Union boasted of having 137 nationalities living peaceably in one multicultural state. During and particularly after World War II, whole nations were deported and relocated to remote areas of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn comments on how the Marxist use of identity politics was used to ascribe collective guilt based on race and ethnicity:

Only when the twentieth century - on which all civilized mankind had put its hopes -- arrived, only when the National Question had reached the summit of its development thanks to the One and Only True Doctrine [Marxism], could the supreme authority on that Question [Stalin] patent the wholesale extirpation of peoples by banishment within forty-eight hours, within twenty-four hours, or even within an hour and a half. Even to Him. of course, the answer did not become clear quite so suddenly. He once even committed himself to the incautious view that "there never has been and never can be an instance of anyone in the U.S.S.R. becoming an object of persecution because of his national origin." In the twenties all those minority languages were encouraged; it was endlessly dinned into the Crimea that it was Tatar. Tatar. and nothing but Tatar; it even had the Arabic alphabet, and all the signs were in Tatar.

Then it turned out that this was ... all a mistake.

Even when he had finished compressing the exiled peasant mass, the Great Helmsman [Stalin] did not immediately realize how conveniently this method could be applied to nations. His sovereign brother Hitler's experiment in the extirpation of Jews and Gypsies came late, when the Second World War had already begun, but Father Stalin had given thought to the problem earlier.^[21]

Publishing history[edit]

The original manuscripts were circulated in single, type written pages without the official Soviet Imprimatur stamp, making the pages contraband and its possessor or producer subject to arrest. When questioned by the KGB about it in 1974, Solzhenitsyn claimed that he had no control over who was producing the type written copies, or how they were being circulated. A full manuscript had made its way to the West by that time and was published in book form, winning Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize for Literature (the same year Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics, marking an end of Keynesianism). Due to widespread publicity, it would have created an international scandal for the KGB to re-imprison him, and Solzhenitsyn was given the rare opportunity to leave the Soviet Union.

In 1985 a single-volume abridgement sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages.

Solzhenitsyn always resented being forced to leave his homeland, and returned later after the collapse of progressive communism in Russia.

See also[edit]

• Samizdat

References[edit]

External link[edit]

• A Day in the Life of Jordan Peterson (Fan Parody)