Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

An Island Chain Of Evil

"You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago was written by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn to chronicle the vast network of hard labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1953. The camps were called gulags, and the network of them he compared to a chain of islands, an archipelago. I confess that I read the abridged version, and that was bad enough.

We are constantly reminded of the horrors of the NAZIs, but little mention is made of the horrors of the Communists, the silence about which gives evidence of the nature of the thoughts of powerful in media and government. (Silence is violence?) Many more people were killed in the Communist countries than in NAZI Germany, assuming the numbers are right, but one could argue that the Germans ran out of time. In the Soviet Union they were not only murdered outright, but were often sent to hard labor camps where the odds were against them surviving their sentences.

For a look at some numbers, this is the link to the University of Hawaii Democide Project;

https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html

My essay on democide: https://drp314.substack.com/p/democide

The operation seemed to be run with the purpose of putting as many people in the camps as possible, maybe because it was free labor. Solzhenitsyn explains that in the interrogation after arrest one would be tortured into naming one's associates in one's “conspiracy” so that they could be arrested and similarly tortured, allowing for a constant inflow of laborers. No doubt for the “greater good.” (To me, the phrase “for the greater good” is the most chilling phrase in the English language. You can use it to justify anything. J6, anyone?)

You might be walking down the streets of your Russian city one day when you are suddenly arrested by a number of men in a spectacular fashion reminiscent of our use of SWAT teams against the political opposition. You would be held in jail and interrogated with torture techniques until you confessed to whatever crime of which you had been wrongly charged. You would be tortured until you gave up the names of your “co-conspirators,” who would then be similarly arrested and would give up more names. This provided a lot of manpower to the labor camps and kept criticism of communism to a minimum.

Roger Stone, a Trump associate, was both elderly and unarmed when the justice department sent a swat team to arrest him before daylight.

The book can be found at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn/dp/0060007761

Solzhenitsyn explains life in the gulags as well as the whole system, how one may come to be arrested and the process from there.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

And Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Gulag-Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn had been arrested while serving as an artillery officer in the Red Army during World War 2. He had made a comment in a letter to friend about “the man with the mustache,” an obvious reference to Stalin, and as a result spent eight years at hard labor in a Gulag. An excerpt from the Britannica source:

Solzhenitsyn’s own eight years in Soviet prison camps, on other prisoners’ stories committed to his photographic memory while in detention, and on letters and historical sources. The work represents the author’s attempt to compile a literary and historical record of the Soviet regime’s comprehensive but deeply irrational use of terror against its own population. A testimonial to Stalinist atrocities, The Gulag Archipelago devastated readers outside the Soviet Union with its descriptions of the brutality of the Soviet regime. The book gave new impetus to critics of the Soviet system and caused many sympathizers to question their position.

The first two volumes describe the arrest, conviction, transport, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims from 1918 to 1956. Solzhenitsyn alternates dispassionate historical exposition with harrowing personal accounts from prison life. The third volume documents attempted escapes and subversions from within the system.

The Wikipedia article includes this quote from Solzhenitsyn:

At Chapter 4, Solzhenitsyn writes: "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes.... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."[4]

So, do no evil.

Solzhenitsyn also wrote a short novel entitled One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, a story that covers one day in a gulag as as experienced by one Ivan Denisovitch Shukhov, a Russian soldier who escaped from German captivity and was then charged with being a spy. Apparently, they would just lock up all such cases thinking that some might be spies, coercing them into confessing, and by coercing I mean confess or be beaten to death.

It gives a good overview of life therein.

https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451228146

It's a short novel and interesting, while The Gulag-archipelago is a real slog. It lets you see the day to day life in a gulag, so I suggest reading it before The-Gulag-Archipelago.

The Gulag-Archipelago gives us insights into what of the powerful who are with us today might do if they have the chance. The Communists well before Solzhenitsyn's time had declared that all firearms by registered with them and all firearm owners licensed. A couple of years or so after this was initiated they declared most licenses void and that everyone so affected must turn in their weapons, and of course they knew who had them and where they were. (Farmers and hunters, with tight controls, would have a few.) I guess you just can't run a decent terror campaign with all of those guns in the hands of your victims. (Universal background checks, anyone?)

https://drp314.substack.com/p/be-a-warrior-in-a-garden

"The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." - George Orwell

"Surrender one hair, and you'll end up beardless." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"A government which does not trust its citizens to be armed is not itself to be trusted." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

https://drp314.substack.com/p/some-second-amendment-thoughts

The Zeks, as they called themselves, would spend their days at hard labor, and a large fraction would die from accidents, disease or execution. There was much brutality and evil, and the conditions of life were dangerous in the extreme cold, lack of safety, lack of food and sleep and probably a general desire from on high to see them dead. And the general run of criminals were in there with you. (Solzhenitsyn remarked that the criminals were an unrepentant lot, always talking among themselves of the capers in which they had engaged, and anxious to resume their lives of crime upon release.)

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

The entire world is now drifting toward some sort of international Communism, or Fascism, there not being that much difference between the two. Camps were set up during the Covid lock-downs even here in America, with unarmed Australia perhaps being the worst. And what about our J6 prisoners, is that not a step in the wrong direction?

"If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is perhaps sliver lining in The-Gulag-Archipelago. As expressed by Solzhenitsyn, life has the purpose of maturing the soul, which is true whether of not one finds oneself in an actual gulag.

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

"The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul..." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Stay Brave, Stay Free