The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, followed by an English translation the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner. In Russian, the term GULAG is an acronym for Main Directorate of Camps.
Following its publication, the book initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia. An abridged fiftieth anniversary edition was released on 1 November 2018 with a new foreword by Jordan Peterson.
Structure
Structurally, the text comprises seven sections divided into three volumes: parts 1–2, parts 3–4, and parts 5–7. At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956. Solzhenitsyn begins with V. I. Lenin's original decrees which were made shortly after the October Revolution; they established the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor. The book then describes and discusses the waves of purges and the assembling of show trials in the context of the development of the greater Gulag system; Solzhenitsyn gives particular attention to its purposive legal and bureaucratic development.The narrative ends in 1956 at the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech. Khrushchev gave the speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era. Although Khrushchev's speech was not published in the Soviet Union for a long time, it was a break with the most atrocious practices of the Gulag system.
Despite the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront the legacy of the Gulag, the realities of the camps remained a taboo subject until the 1980s. Solzhenitsyn was also aware that although many practices had been stopped, the basic structure of the system had survived and it could be revived and expanded by future leaders. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union's supporters in the West viewed the Gulag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and many among the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture – an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project.
Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a zek, derived from the widely used abbreviation "z/k" for "zakliuchennyi" through the Gulag, starting with arrest, show trial, and initial internment; transport to the "archipelago"; the treatment of prisoners and their general living conditions; slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system; camp rebellions and strikes ; the practice of internal exile following the completion of the original prison sentence; and the ultimate release of the prisoner. Along the way, Solzhenitsyn's examination details the trivial and commonplace events of an average prisoner's life, as well as specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprisings.
Solzhenitsyn also states:
There had been works about the Soviet prison/camp system before, and its existence had been known to the Western public since the 1930s. However, never before had the general reading public been brought face to face with the horrors of the Gulag in this way. The controversy surrounding this text, in particular, was largely due to the way Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal, and practical origins of the Gulag system at Lenin's feet, not Stalin's. According to Solzhenitsyn's testimony, Stalin merely amplified a concentration camp system that was already in place. This is significant, as many Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet concentration camp system as a "Stalinist aberration".
Publication
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–1967, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript, sometimes in hiding at his friends' homes in the Moscow region and elsewhere. While held at the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in 1945, Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education, who had been taken captive after the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1944. Solzhenitsyn entrusted Susi with the original typed and proofread manuscript of the finished work, after copies had been made of it both on paper and on microfilm. Arnold Susi's daughter, Heli Susi, subsequently kept the "master copy" hidden from the KGB in Estonia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.In 1973 the KGB seized one of only three existing copies of the text still on Soviet soil. This was achieved after interrogating Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, one of Solzhenitsyn's trusted typists who knew where the typed copy was hidden; within days of her release by the KGB she was found hanged in the stairwell of her apartment; she had apparently either hanged herself or been murdered. Although he had earlier wanted it published in Russia first, after Solzhenitsyn learned of her death, he decided the next month, September, to allow its publication in Paris.
The first edition of the work was published by the French publishing house Éditions du Seuil a few days after Christmas 1973; they had received a go-ahead from Solzhenitsyn but had decided to release the work about ten days earlier than he had expected. News of the nature of the work immediately caused a stir, and translations into many other languages followed within the next few months, sometimes produced in a race against time. American Thomas Whitney produced the English version; the English and French translations of Volume I appeared in the spring and summer of 1974.
Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first, but knew this was impossible under conditions then extant. The work had a profound effect internationally. Not only did it provoke energetic debate in the West; a mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into exile.
Because possession of the manuscript incurred the risk of a long prison sentence for "anti-Soviet activities", Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Since he was under constant KGB surveillance, Solzhenitsyn worked on only parts of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the full book into jeopardy if he happened to be arrested. For this reason, he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow and the surrounding suburbs, in the care of trusted friends. Sometimes when he was purportedly visiting them on social calls he actually worked on the manuscript in their homes. During much of this time, Solzhenitsyn lived at the dacha of the world-famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and due to the reputation and standing of the musician, despite the elevated scrutiny of the Soviet authorities, Solzhenitsyn was reasonably safe from KGB searches there.
Solzhenitsyn did not think this series would be his defining work, as he considered it journalism and history rather than high literature. However, with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it is his best-known and most popular work, at least in the West.
Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal representative, Dr Fritz Heeb of Zürich, to await publication.
Solzhenitsyn was aware that there was a wealth of material and perspectives about Gulag to be continued in the future, but he considered the book finished for his part. The royalties and sales income for the book were transferred to the Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund for aid to former camp prisoners, and this fund, which had to work in secret in its native country, managed to transfer substantial amounts of money to those ends in the 1970s and 1980s.
Impact and reception
Beginning in 2009, Russian schools issued the book as required reading. In an exchange with Natalia Solzhenitsyn Russian president Vladimir Putin called the book "much-needed." while the Russian Ministry of Education said that the book showed "vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history." Arseny Roginsky, then head of the human-rights organization Memorial, welcomed Mr. Putin's backing for the Solzhenitsyn textbook.Natalia Solzhenitsyn, for her part, created an abridged version for Russian high-school students, including her probing introduction about the unique nature of Solzhenitsyn's "experiment in literary investigation".
Novelist Doris Lessing said that the book "brought down an empire" while Michael Scammell similarly said that the book was a gesture that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state, calling its very legitimacy into question and demanding revolutionary change." The philosopher Isaiah Berlin said that, "Until the Gulag, the Communists and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda." while the American diplomat George F. Kennan, said that the book was “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.” Tom Butler-Bowdon has described the book as a "Solzhenitsyn's monument to the millions tortured and murdered in Soviet Russia between the Bolshevik Revolution and the 1950s."
An edition of The Book Show said that the book helped expose the brutality of the Soviet system.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson has said that The Gulag Archipelago is the most important book of the twentieth century.
Historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft describes the book as "a fine literary masterpiece, a sharp political indictment against the
Soviet regime, and has had tremendous importance in raising the issue of Soviet repression in the Russian consciousness." He also said that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn, according to Wheatcroft, gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "that the scale of the camps was less than this."
Parallels have been drawn between the book and the treatment of Liao Yiwu, a dissident who, according to the AFP, is dubbed the "Chinese Solzhenitsyn." David Aikman has asserted that Yiwu is the first Chinese dissident writer to "come up with a very detailed account of prison conditions including torture in China in the same way that Solzhenitsyn did in “The Gulag Archipelago,”."
UCLA historian J. Arch Getty writes of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "Such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history". Gabor Rittersporn shares Getty's criticism saying "he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay inevitably towards selective bias".
In an interview with German weekly Die Zeit, British historian Orlando Figes asserted that many gulag inmates he interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish between their own experiences and what they read: "The Gulag Archipelago spoke for a whole nation and was the voice of all those who suffered".
Former Communist Party member, dissident and historian, Roy Medvedev has referred to the book as "extremely contradictory". However, in a review for the book he described it as without parallel, saying, "I believe there are few who will get up from their desks after reading this book the same as when they opened its first page. In this regard I have nothing with which to compare Solzhenitsyn's book either in Russian or world literature."
Mustafa Akyol drew a parallel between the book and the current situation in Xinjiang.