The book is Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was originally published in 1985 by Harper and Row Publishers. I read the 2007 author authorized abridged paperback edition. I read it in August of 2023.
The title refers to the chain of island gulags in the soviet union. These were the prison camps that Stalin sent prisoners to during his reign.
I first heard about this book from Jordan Peterson. He references Solzhenitsyn quite a bit in his writings and speeches. He brings up the book as a cautionary tale against totalitarianism. He also often quotes Solzhenitsyn when he says “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
That’s a great quote. To say people’s motivation for doing things is just because they’re evil or because they’re good is too simplistic. Solzhenitsyn and Jordan Peterson understand there’s more to it than that. I agree to an extent but I’ll write more about that later.
Solzhenitsyn retells his account and the account of many others of their time in the Soviet gulag work camps in the 1960s. He talks about the arbitrary reasons they would arrest people as political criminals. He talks about the torture interrogations, the fear and paranoia and betrayal of the citizens under the Red Terror. It’s a memoir that includes so many other people’s true stories. He rails against totalitarianism, censorship, and government oppression.
Of course Solzhenitsyn is saying that this is all evil and terrible. But he’s also warning against anyone in any other society that would say “that can’t happen here.” He tosses out any attempts to psychologize this sort of evil away. He understands deeply that these sort of atrocities are capable of being done by otherwise normal and ordinary people.
My main takeaway was gaining a deeper urgency in defending truth. The most troubling section was when Solzhenitsyn talks about the Soviet standard of evidence in convicting someone of a “crime.”
“Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only.
…that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative.
…Relative or unchallengeable witnesses for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative,
…In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute.” (p43)
This gives a new weight to absolute truth. The nonsensical, self-contradictory idea that truth is relative could creep into our courts and judicial system and destroy a society. If truth is relative then true evidence to convict someone of a crime is relative.
If truth is relative then it can no longer be the standard by which to judge people. So then a new standard takes over, in the case of the Soviet Union that new standards was party politics. Someone’s goodness or innocence was based on whether or not they were completely loyal to communism. People’s ideology, not their guilt, had to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.
This book made me think about today’s postmodern culture that says truth is relative and how dangerous that really is. Everyone believes in relative truth until it comes to something they actually care about, their money or their loved ones.
The entire book was interesting but depressing. Solzhenitsyn is a strange writer. Maybe there was a translation issue but sometimes he sounded corny or leaned into puns and cliches.
Keeping track of the Russian names and cities wasn’t too hard. They aren’t so important to the narrative anyway.
I learned a lot about concentration camps and how they came to be. I learned a little about how Stalin came to power. I read the abridged version of this book approved by the author. The unabridged version is three volumes totaling well over a thousand pages. I can’t imagine reading that.
I’d recommend this authorized abridged version to all Americans who are concerned with free speech and human rights. We can never say “that can’t happen here.” We can’t psychologize away this sort of evil thinking that the soviets were all deranged or had some special clinical pathology. This book is a good reminder and warning against denialism.
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Notable Quotables
A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. (p10)
But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. (p19)
The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called “nuns” in transit prisons and in camps…(Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) (p23-24)
interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”): that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, (P39)
Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only.
…that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative.
…Relative or unchallengeable witnesses for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative,
…”basing and only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral ips it ackforces”
In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute. (p43)
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? (p75)
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. (p77)
In August, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in a telegram to Yevgeniya Bosh and to the Penza Provincial Executive Committee (they were unable to cope with a peasant revolt): “Lock up all the doubtful ones [not “guilty,” mind you, but doubtful -A.S.] in a concentration camp
mass terror”. outside the city. (And in addition “carry out merciless this was before the decree.)
“Secure the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” So that is where this term–concentration camps was discovered and immediately seized upon and confirmed-one of the principal terms of the twentieth century, and it was to have a big international future!
The word itself had already been used during World War I, but in relation to POW’s and undesirable foreigners. But here in 1918 it was for the first time applied to the citizens of one’s own country. (p179)
But why like this? Couldn’t they have done it at night quietly? But why do it quietly? In that case a bullet would be wasted. In the daytime crowd the bullet had an educational function. It, so to speak, struck down ten with one shot. (p187)
Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time (“Critique of the Gotha Program”), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred here to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructure!)-but productive labor. He himself had never in his life taken a pick in hand. To the end of his days he never pushed a wheelbarrow, mined coal, felled timber, and we don’t even know how his firewood was split—but he wrote that down on paper, and the paper did not resist. (p215)
There was a famous incantation repeated over and over again: “In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline of the stick on which serfdom was based, nor the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based.”
And there you are the Archipelago managed miraculously to combine the one and the other. (p217)
And in a state farm bookkeeping office the slogan hung: “Life has become better; life has become more gay. (Stalin)” And someone added letter in red pencil to Stalin’s name, making the slogan read as though life had become more gay for Stalin. They didn’t look for the guilty party—but sentenced the entire bookkeeping office. (p240)
As Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchik said, after serving seventeen years: •We believed in the Party–and we were not mistaken!” Is this loyalty, or pigheadedness?
No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government’s actions. They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness–otherwise insanity was not far off. (p243-244)
The thieves flourished because they were encouraged. Through its laws the Stalinist power said to the thieves clearly: Do not steal from me! Steal from private persons! You see, private property is a belch from the past. (p263)
But Zoya was a mere ten years old. They took her to an orphanage in Ivanovo Province. And there she declared she would never remove the cross from around her neck, the cross which her mother had hung there when she said farewell. And she tied the knot of the cord tighter so they would not be able to remove it when she was asleep.
“You can strangle me and then take it off a corpse!” Then she was sent to an orphanage for retarded children because She would not submit to their training.
In the courtyard stood one of those mass-produced plaster statues of Stalin, And mocking and indecent graffiti began to appear on it.
Finally one morning they found that the statue’s head had been knocked off and turned upside down, and, inside it were feces.
This was a terrorist act!
Zoya Leshcheva declared: “I did it all myself! What else is the head of that papa good for?” (p277)
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. (p285)
the Archipelago did not pay its own way, and it never will! The income from It would never equal the expenses, and our young workers’ and peasants’ state (subsequently the elderly state of all the people) is forced to haul this filthy bloody bag along on its back.
And here’s why. The first and principal cause was the lack of conscientiousness of the prisoners, the negligence of those stupid slaves. Not only couldn’t you expect any socialist self-sacrifice of them, but they didn’t even manifest simple capitalist diligence. All they were on the lookout for was ways to spoil their footgear-and not go out to work; how to wreck a crane, to buckle a wheel, to break a spade, to sink a pail anything for a pretext to sit down and smoke. (p293)
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either–but right through every human heart -and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . an unuprooted small corner of evil. (p312)
The mildest and at the same time most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbor, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed. (p323)
The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie. (p325)
Solomon White 
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