Discussing Volume I Of "The Gulag Archipelago" By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In this episode of Canonball we discuss Volume I of "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was published in 1973.

One correction: Since recording this I have found reports that Solzhenitsyn did apply for U.S. citizenship in 1985. I cannot see that he ever received it, though his wife and children did.

Get a copy of my edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at my website: 

VollrathPublishing.com

Also do not hesitate to reach out using the contact form found there.

Chapters

• 0:00 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Life
• 13:18 The Function Of A Prison System For A State
• 16:20 The Skeptical Approach To Complex Political History
• 19:45 How To Approach "The Gulag Archipelago"
• 20:37 Beginning Of Passages
• 28:54 The Waves Of Arrests
• 32:47 "Limb By Limb, Beginning With Its Owl Tail, The Ravenous Maw Would Devour Itself"
• 34:34 The Weaponization Of A Word
• 39:44 Article 58 Section 10 "Propaganda Or Agitation" And The Notions Of Guilt And Innocence
• 42:37 Interrogation And Solzhenitsyn's War Diary Burned In The Lubyanka
• 45:47 The Motivations And Status Of The Secret Police
• 48:09 "Do What You Want Without Me, I Want No Part Of It"
• 50:22 "As Though It Were A Natural Phenomenon"

Transcript

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, in the Russian Soviet Republic, which at that time was not yet part of the USSR, which would be established in 1922, but a socialist republic had been established, so it was in a kind of transitional stage at that point. His father had been killed in a hunting accident shortly after his mother became pregnant, and though his family remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church, even amid the Soviet anti-religious campaign of the 1920s, Solzhenitsyn himself lost his faith in Christianity as a teenager and embraced Marxist-Leninism as an atheist. He graduated high school and went to university to study math and physics, and also around that time he decided to write a history of the Russian Revolution in the form of a novel, and one source said that he had read War and Peace when he was about 11 years old, and that inspired him on the topic of literature, and these bits from his earlier life show that he had a general interest in writing and in literature. He didn't only take it up as a way to criticize what he saw as an unjust government, but he graduated high school in 1936. When World War II starts, he ends up as a commander of a sound ranging battery in the Red Army that saw a major action at the front, and he was decorated for it, and sound ranging is a way of determining the location of an enemy artillery battery based on information from the sound that it makes, and Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Red Star on July 8, 1944 for sound ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counter battery fire onto them, destroying them. But also while he was at the front, he was writing in letters with a friend, not only making fun of Stalin, but they were criticizing Stalin and sometimes referring to him by funny names. I don't remember if the passage about it made the cut for what we're going to be looking at today, but there's a passage where Solzhenitsyn is talking about talking to the other camp inmates and what they got arrested for, and they ask him, and he tells them, and everyone is amazed that he and his friend were so stupid. One guy said, I don't know if there's two bigger jackasses anywhere in the world or something like that, and Solzhenitsyn said, and he was right. But anyway, so on July 7, 1945, so the war has ended, Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in the gulag and to internal exile thereafter under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which prosecuted those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So sometimes he's talking about 58ers, he means people who are prosecuted under this article. And there's a gap that I don't quite understand, which is that in 1945, he was sentenced, but the next information I could find was that in 1950, he was at a camp in Kazakhstan, but I don't know where he was in between. I don't know if he was in waiting or if he was in some other camp or if he was being shuffled around the system for a while. But from 1950 to 1953, he worked at a hard labor camp in Northeast Kazakhstan. He worked as a stonemason laying bricks, and he also worked in the camp foundry. And his experience there would eventually be the inspiration for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And then his first day without an armed guard was March 5th, 1953, which happened to be the same day that Stalin died. But then he goes to serve exile for life in the village of Kokhtarek, which is in Southeast Kazakhstan. He teaches math and physics in a local school and starts to write fiction, including a novel called In the First Circle. In 1953 and into 1954, he gets cancer and he's told that he has three weeks to live. They send him to a cancer clinic in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. He survives, and this experience becomes the basis for The Cancer Ward, another novel that he wrote. So just note the strings of bad luck there. He's in World War II. The war is ending. He gets sentenced to eight years in a prison camp and then exile. He gets out of the camp. He gets cancer. He beats the cancer. But now things turn around for him a little bit. In 1956, Khrushchev, who's the first secretary of the Communist Party at that time, denounces Stalin and grants amnesty to everyone who was serving sentences under Article 58. So that means that Solzhenitsyn is no longer in exile. He returns from Southeast Kazakhstan to Western Russia, where he gets a job as a school teacher in the Vladimir region, which is near Moscow. And during this time and over the next couple years, he was also still undergoing chemotherapy for his cancer. So he hadn't totally beaten it, but theThe doctor said he'd be dead in three weeks, and he wasn't. In 1959, he writes A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1961, he submits it for publication in the Russian literary journal New World, but then there's a long process because it needs Khrushchev's personal approval for publication. Finally, in 1962, it's published, and this is when Solzhenitsyn becomes famous, not only in the Soviet Union, but in the West and worldwide. And over the next few years, between 1963 and 1967, he publishes five more short stories, but then thereafter, nothing else would be published of his in the Soviet Union until 1990, so for 23 years. Then in the few years after that, between 1967 and 1970, he gets into a more open conflict with the Soviet authorities, and during this period, he's sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who is maybe the greatest cellist of all time, certainly of the 20th century. And that was a name I hadn't heard in a while. It was interesting to see Rostropovich suddenly come up in the life of Solzhenitsyn. Rostropovich let Solzhenitsyn stay in his house when apparently he would have had nowhere else to go, and his support for Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents led to Rostropovich being disgraced by the Soviet authorities and being forbidden from touring abroad before he himself left the Soviet Union in 1974. But in 1970, Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was unable to attend the ceremony. And over the next three years, he had three sons by his wife, Natalia. In 1971, the KGB reportedly tried to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using ricin, but the attempt of course failed. Solzhenitsyn was sick for a while and then he got better. That kind of thing is hard to verify, but there are a couple things that make this plausible. One is that it's pretty well established that in 1978, the KGB assassinated Georgi Markov, who was a Bulgarian dissident living in London at the time, also using ricin. And if you were to say, why should the KGB assassinate Solzhenitsyn, especially if he's still living in Russia at the time, they could just imprison him. But the Soviet government is at the same time negotiating a detente with the US and Solzhenitsyn is a very famous, prominent guy. And so if they wanted to get rid of him, it would have caused less of an issue if it just looks like he died suddenly rather than them putting him in prison. And also the sickness that he got at that time involved a bunch of blisters and burns on his body. It was a strange sickness. It wasn't as if he got a bad flu or something. Anyway, if you're interested, you can look up a 1992 Washington Post article titled, KGB Plot to Assassinate Solzhenitsyn Reported, and there's more information about it. The source is a Russian tabloid, they call it, and the Russian government at that time denied the claim, of course. To me, it seems plausible. And just as a note from that article, it quotes Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalia. She says, We always knew in those days that there was always the possibility that the KGB would kill Solzhenitsyn. That was never far from our minds. But when he got sick, we never thought it was an assassination attempt. It just seemed like a strange, inexplicable disease." And there's two interesting things there. One is that she's saying that it seemed like a weird sickness. It didn't seem like a normal sickness. But at the time, they didn't think it was poison. They just thought it was a weird sickness. But then also that first part where she says, We always knew that it was possible that the KGB would kill him. It's inspiring to think of a sturdy woman like that. Or maybe she didn't like him very much. Because they'd been married since 1957. So by 1971, they've been married for 14 years or so. So they've been together since before he was famous. It's not as if she married a famous guy. But she has this attitude about it. People will often say that for themselves. They'll say, well, I might die in pursuit of what I'm doing, but I'm going to keep doing it because I think it's worthwhile. But for the spouse to say that, and for her not to encourage him to stop and do something safer, is interesting. In 1973, Solzhenitsyn's assistant, Elizaveta Voronskaya, is arrested by the KGB and questioned for five days as to the location of a manuscript of the Gulag Archipelago. And she finally gives up the location, and they go and confiscate it. And she goes home and hangs herself. Solzhenitsyn somehow gets a microfilm of the Gulag Archipelago to the West. And in December of 1973, it's published in Paris. The Soviet government responds with a campaign to discredit him. And on February 12th, he's arrested, charged with treason, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled to Frankfurt in West Germany. His family then joins him, and they live in Zurich for a while, in Switzerland. And then...In 1976, he moves to Cavendish, which is a small town in Vermont, and he then lives there for almost 20 years. In 1978, Harvard gave him an honorary degree, and he spoke at the commencement, and in that speech he said, among other things, quote, Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Must one point out that from ancient times, a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end, end quote. So now, skipping ahead 15 years, the Gulag Archipelago was published between 1989 and 1991 in the USSR. And in 1991, the Soviet government lifted the charge of treason against Solzhenitsyn, and he announces that he will return to Russia. And it's worth noting that for the nearly 20 years that he was living in Vermont, because he now is able to return to Russia, but he doesn't have a life set up there yet, so he's not leaving yet, he never had American citizenship. I don't know if he applied and it wasn't given, or if he never applied. But so for those 17 years between when the Soviet government took away his citizenship and then when they gave it back, he was technically stateless, though he had a place to live. In 1993, the Soviet government gave him a 10-acre piece of land outside of Moscow, and he built a house there, and then in 1994, he moved back to Russia. He then continued to write about a number of things for the next 14 years until he died of a heart attack at the age of 89 in Moscow in 2008. So Solzhenitsyn was not only a dissident or a political critic who did a lot to expose the Soviet prison system. If he had been, that would have been plenty. But he was also a soldier who had not only seen combat, but been decorated for his actions. A teacher of math and astronomy, so he knew those subjects well enough to teach them, and he was a writer of fiction and of history. And these were all present in the same person. Physical courage, moral courage, a capacity for numbers, and a capacity for letters. When we're talking about the Soviet prison system, we're somehow talking about something essential. And a prison system is arguably essential to any state. That is, the prison system is somehow reflective of the state in general, because it's often kind of hidden. And we come here against a difference between the state and society. You might think of the prison system as what the state does to the people who harm it, except that I'm not sure that that's the ideal prison system. It might be a better goal if the prison system were for those who harm society. That if you murder somebody or steal something, you have, as we talked about in looking at Cesare Beccaria, created some kind of debt with society. You've taken something that wasn't yours, and now you have to repay that debt. And that's probably where that phrase comes from, a debt to society. And even in a balanced society, people who seek to harm the state would be in prison also. Though harming the state is not the same thing as harming society, necessarily, though it can be indirectly. If you steal something from your neighbor, you've hurt him directly. If you subvert the state somehow, you haven't necessarily hurt your neighbor, at least not yet, but you've hurt the state. And in the long run, if the state is serving society in a just way, and your subversion disrupts it so that it eventually can't do that or it collapses, and then your neighbor is worse off because he no longer has a state that's helping to organize society, then your subversion against the state is harm to society. And that's the argument for imprisonment.political opponents. Now the trouble with that is if the state is itself harming the society that it governs, then that logic falls apart because the person who subverts that state is not harming the society, he's helping it. And if the state becomes too energetic in pursuing its opponents, as is often the case with revolutions like the Bolshevik Revolution, then you have people imprisoned for making jokes about the leader in a private letter. And if we imagine, for example, that in the long run if you let jokes about the leader go then eventually they become public criticism of the leader, and if you let that flourish then it might grow into a revolution against the leader and you might topple the government. In the context of Solzhenitsyn writing a letter in 1944, Russian society arguably would have been harmed less by the loss of the Soviet government than by its continuation. And so then you have a state that is punishing its political opponents not because in the long term that will create harm to society, but only for its own continuation. But so when we look at this book about the Soviet prison system, for some reason we feel that we're reading about something essential to that system, because it's a part that is hidden and because it's how a system is dealing with its opponents. And another important thing to remember when you're looking at a document like this is that we're talking about something that is, one, very complex and two, highly politicized. That there were lots of people who, when this book came out, had a political or social reason to take it completely as gospel and there were other people who had a reason to take it as fake or exaggerated. Solzhenitsyn had personal experience with the system, which on the one hand is an advantage, he saw it firsthand, but on the other hand it's a little bit of a disadvantage because it might mean that he had a bit of an axe to grind. He knew a lot of people who were also in the system, he lived in it for a long time, he was able to talk to them, he talked to them after he was out. But having now read volume one, something that is not hugely present is documents from the archives. And that's likely because, one, the Soviet archives were mostly not open, certainly on this kind of topic, and two, even if they were, he would have been the last person to have access to them. But so as we would with approaching any other document, we want to be skeptical and ask, how does he know this? What's this based on? Particularly if we're going to zero in on certain facts and figures. And that doesn't mean that he's lying, but he might be mistaken, he might have a bad source. In trying to establish any fact, you need to triangulate it. So this is not unique to Solzhenitsyn. For any source, if we had somebody saying one thing, we could say, okay, this source says that. What other sources do we have that say the same thing? If that were true, what would also be true? Is that true, that secondary thing? If this were not true, what might be true? Is that the case? Can we find from some other source that something that would show that this first thing is not true, is true? This should be our approach to any kind of history, especially to highly politicized and complex history like what we're going to be dealing with here. Intellectual honesty has to be, in part, giving your ideological friend and foe the same level of scrutiny. You can't put down the magnifying glass because somebody is on your side, if only for the self-interested reason that that will eventually weaken your side. You might have someone on your side or some argument on your side that's weak and you should get rid of it. You shouldn't use that argument or that person's account. But also, if you do that enough, you might actually be on the wrong side. You might lose track of what is true. And this is a hard impulse to overcome, this impulse to agree more readily with what conforms to your worldview, with what confirms your biases. But we have to always strengthen that muscle, that even when something comes along and it looks like it confirms everything that you want to be true, to look at that as closely, to pop the hood and check everything the same way that you would with a person or a source or a fact whose account or narrative goes against your worldview. And it's worth remembering that the subtitle of the book is An Experiment in Literary Investigation. I'm not sure exactly what Solzhenitsyn meant by that subtitle, but the subtitle is not an exhaustive and comprehensive documentary account. And that clearly is not Solzhenitsyn's goal here. And if it were, it would be a very different book. But so we can approach this book in two ways. One is that we can say all of this is what Solzhenitsyn says. So then if we go on to read more about the Soviet Union, we can keep in mind that this or that coincides or conflicts with what Solzhenitsyn says.says. And then gradually from more and more different sources, an increasingly clear and accurate picture begins to emerge. But also we have his impressions of living in the system, his own experience, the impressions of the other people who lived in it, the people who worked in it, how they acted, how they felt, what might have motivated them based on their circumstances. We can take this book of Solzhenitsyn not as gospel or as the final truth, but as what it was, which was the impressions of research of a guy who lived through this system. There are likely flaws in it, but there's a lot to take from it as well. But now we can get into some passages from volume one of the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He dedicates the book to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it. A lot of the beginning of the book is about the arrests, how they were done, who did them, where, how, the psychology of it. And at one point he's talking about how since the arrests were often almost random, people assume themselves to be innocent. They think there must be some mistake that will be cleared up shortly. And he writes, quote, universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won't take you. Maybe it will all blow over. Skipping ahead. The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake. They're already dragging you along by the collar and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself, it's a mistake. They'll set things straight and let me out. Others are being arrested en masse and that's a bothersome fact. But in those other cases, there is always some dark area. Maybe he was guilty. But as for you, you are obviously innocent. You still believe that the organs are humanly logical institutions. They will set things straight and let you out. Why then should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you'll only make your situation worse. You will only make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn't just that you don't put up any resistance. You even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won't hear. 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 goodbye 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. After all, you knew ahead of time that those blue caps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat." End quote. And right here he uses the term Black Maria, which is a word for a police car. Back to the text. Quote, Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur? What if it had been driven off? Or its tires spiked? 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 spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter. And there seems no point in arguing about any one of them individually, especially at a time when the thoughts of the person arrested are wrapped tightly about the big question. What for? And yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest. Resistance. Why didn't you resist? Today, those who have continued to live on in comfort scold those who suffered. Yes, resistance should have begun right there at the moment of the arrest itself, but it did not begin." And he talks about types of arrests. Some people were arrested at home at night, but other people would be arrested in broad daylight in public, though it wasn't done very obviously. Somebody would come up to you and say, hey, why don't you come with me? And you'd know it was a government person, and you'd follow them, and then you'd be arrested. And he's talking about why people don't yell and shout and make a fuss at that moment to try to get the help of the crowd maybe, or even just signal that you are being arrested and you don't know why. And here he gives his own reason why he didn't shout at that moment. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances byan outcry. For after all, we got no news from that other world, and we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest, our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse. Others have not yet attained the mature concepts on which a shout of protest to the crowd must be based. Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are crying to be uttered aloud, and where would the uninvolved, peaceable, average man come by such slogans? Skipping ahead, as for me, I kept silent for one further reason. Because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me. Too few. Here, my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200. But what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million. But for the time being, I did not open my mouth, and the escalator dragged me implacably down into the netherworld." And in this next passage, he's talking about the different waves of arrests. And he says that 1937 and 1938 gets the most attention. And that's the one in English that I've heard called the Great Purge. But what Solzhenitsyn says is that that wasn't the only wave of arrests and it wasn't even the biggest one. He says it might have been in the top three. And he talks about waves of arrests in 1929, in 1935 in Leningrad, in 1944 to 1946, toward the end of the war, in 1948 and 1949 in the Baltic countries. And he says that a lot of these other waves of arrests were dealing with peasants, ordinary people who didn't write books and memoirs. But the wave of 1937 and 1938 arrested more educated people and party functionaries and members. And so, those people went on to write books about it. And so, that's the wave of arrests that gets the most attention. But there were many other waves that were as significant, if not more significant. But they're overlooked even in Russia, where they were overlooked at the time that Solzhenitsyn was writing because the people who were arrested didn't write books about it. And a metaphor that he uses throughout the book alongside that of an archipelago of a chain of islands and ports is that of sewer pipes, that the prison was the sewers of the Soviet system. And he also talks about waves here and compares the various waves to different Russian rivers. And so, then the result is that you have this image of Russian rivers going into the sewer pipes of the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, when people today decry the abuses of the cult, they keep getting hung up on those years which are stuck in our throats, 37 and 38. And memory begins to make it seem as though arrests were never made before or after, but only in those two years. Although I have no statistics at hand, I'm not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one, nor even the main one, but only one perhaps of the three biggest waves which strained the murky stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting. Before it came, the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good river Ob, which drove a mere 15 million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are a silent people without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. No interrogators sweated out the night with them, nor did they bother to drop formal indictments. It was enough to have a decree from the village Soviet. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin, and you and I as well, committed no crime more heinous than this. And after it, there was the wave of 1944 to 1946, the size of a good Yenisei, when they dumped whole nations down the sewer pipes, not to mention millions and millions of others who, because of us, had been prisoners of war or carried off to Germany and subsequently repatriated. This was Stalin's method of cauterizing the wounds so that scar tissue would form more quickly, and thus the body politic as a whole would not have to rest up, catch its breath, regain its strength. But in this wave too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote no memoirs. But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the archipelago people of position, people with a party past, yes, educated people, around whom were many who had been wounded and remained in the cities. And what a lot of them had pen in hand, and today they are all writing, speaking, remembering. 1937, a whole volga of the people's grief. But just say 1937 to a Crimean Tatar, a Kalmyk, a Chechen, and he'll shrug his shoulders. And what's 1937 to Leningrad when 1935 had come before it? And for the second timers, i.e. repeaters, or people from the Baltic countries, weren't 1948 and 1949 harder on them? And if sticklers for style and geography should accuse me of having omitted some Russian river-And of not yet having named some of the waves and just give me enough paper There were enough waves to use up the names of all the rivers of Russia end quote in this next passage He's talking about a few different things. One is how After it got control the Bolshevik Revolution actually treated Revolutionaries worse than the czarist government had treated them and then he points to an example of a guy in Germany Maximilian Hawke about whom I couldn't find any information Who was sentenced to two years for membership in the Communist Party and then was simply let out and thereafter he continued to build an underground organization So he's comparing the Soviet system with other systems that are generally thought of as being worse than it and he cites a Russian Newspaper that's still in circulation today is Vestia Solzhenitsyn writes quote and without any noise Without any outcry the members of all the other parties slipped gradually out of sight lost all connection with the places and people where They and their revolutionary activities were known and thus imperceptibly and mercilessly was prepared the annihilation of those who had once raged Against tyranny at student meetings and had clanked their czarist shackles in pride and then in a footnote VG Korolenko wrote to Gorky June 29 1921 history will someday note that the Bolshevik Revolution used the same means to deal with true revolutionaries and socialists as did the czarist regime in other words purely police measures Back to the main text in this game of the big solitaire the majority of the old political prisoners Survivors of hard labor were destroyed for it was primarily the socialist revolutionaries and the anarchists not the social Democrats who had received the harshest sentences from the czarist courts They in particular had made up the population of the czarist hard labor political prisons There was justice in the priorities of destruction However in 1920 they were all offered the chance to renounce in writing their parties and party ideologies Some declined and they naturally came up first for annihilation others signed such renunciations and thereby added a few years to their lifetimes But their time too came implacably and their heads rolled implacably from their shoulders and in another footnote Sometimes reading a newspaper article one is astonished to the point of disbelief in is Vestia of May 24th 1959 one could read that a year after Hitler came to power Maximilian Hacke was arrested for belonging to none other than the Communist Party was he destroyed? No, they sentenced him to two years after this was he naturally sentenced to a second term? No, he was released. You can interpret that as you please He proceeded to live quietly and build an underground organization in connection with which the is Vestia article on his courage appeared End quote and in this next passage He's talking about how after the revolution the group of people who were arrested Expanded and he says initially it was those people But eventually it spread to the Trotskyites who were party members Trotsky was a major leader in the revolution But by the late 20s, he had been expelled from the party. And so then all the party members who Supported him the most they were then targeted for arrest And he says just as the Trotskyites had looked on while the members of other parties had been arrested the more central core of the party the Stalinist core looked on as the Trotskyites were arrested, but then of course later even Stalinist would be arrested So he's giving this picture of how it looks like the people to be arrested are just those ones over there but the group of people subject to arrest keeps expanding even to those who thought they were safe from it or thought they were sufficiently loyal and safe and even Enthusiastically participated in the revolution Solzhenitsyn writes quote then came the time slowly It is true But surely when it was the turn of the members of the ruling party to do time in prison at first from 1927 to 1929 It was a question of the workers opposition In other words the Trotskyites who had chosen themselves such an unsuccessful leader They numbered hundreds at the start, but soon there would be thousands, but it's the first step That's the hardest just as these Trotskyites had observed with approval the arrest of members of other parties So the rest of the party now watched approvingly as the Trotskyites were arrested But everyone would have his turn the non-existent rightist opposition would come later and limb by limb Beginning with its own tail the ravenous maw would devour itself right up to its head and quote later He talks about the use of a term as a political tool This is a very interesting historical case of the manipulation of language for political control He's here talking about the term Kulak and he mentions a land decree which was issued in November of 1917 long before the new system was well established Everything was still very much in flux. The Russian Civil War was still ahead, but the BolsheviksIssue a land decree according to which all of the estates in the country all of the big blocks of land that are owned by Families are to be divided up among the peasantry and of course they don't at that time have enough Control over the territory to actually make this happen, but they're decreeing this gets many of the peasants on their side But he points this out because there was this reset where peasants were all given a plot of land but then naturally some of them ended up more prosperous than others and he says Maybe in some cases this was because some people had bigger families had more luck But he says wouldn't in most cases this be because some people are more hard-working than others and the term Kulak Expanded to include people who had more wealth even after this land Redistribution and then there's another term for people who are supporters of Kulaks So whatever its original meaning Kulak becomes a term that's used to demonize Opponents of the system Solzhenitsyn writes quote in Russian a Kulak is a miserly Dishonest rural trader who grows rich not by his own labor But through someone else's through usury and operating as a middleman in every locality even before the revolution Such Kulaks could be numbered on one's fingers and the revolution totally destroyed their bases of activity Subsequently after 1917 by a transfer of meaning the name Kulak began to be applied in Official and propaganda literature once it moved into general usage to all those who in any way hired workers Even if it was only when they were temporarily short of working hands in their own families But we must keep in mind that after the revolution It was impossible to pay less than a fair wage for all such labor The committees of the poor and the village Soviets looked after the interests of landless laborers Just let somebody try to swindle a landless laborer to this very day In fact, the hiring of labor at a fair wage is permitted in the Soviet Union the inflation of the scathing term Kulak Proceeded relentlessly and by 1930 all strong peasants in general were being so called all Peasants strong in management strong in work or even strong merely in convictions The term Kulak was used to smash the strength of the peasantry. Let us remember Let us open our eyes only a dozen years had passed since the great decree on the land that very decree without which the peasants would have refused to follow The Bolsheviks and without which the October Revolution would have failed The land was allocated in accordance with the number of mouths per family equally It had been only nine years since the men of the peasantry had returned from the Red Army and rushed on to the land They had rested for themselves. Then suddenly there were Kulaks and there were poor peasants How could that be? Sometimes it was the result of differences in initial stock and equipment Sometimes it may have resulted from luck in the mixture of the family But wasn't it most often a matter of hard work and persistence and now these peasants whose bread grain had fed Russia in 1928 were hastily uprooted by local good-for-nothings and city people sent in from outside like raging beasts Abandoning every concept of humanity abandoning all humane principles, which had evolved through the millennium They began to round up the very best farmers and their families and to drive them stripped of their possessions Naked into the northern wastes into the tundra and the taiga such a mass movement could not help but develop subsequent ramifications It became necessary to rid the villages also of those peasants who had merely Manifested an aversion to joining the collective farms or an absence of inclination for the collective life Which they had never seen with their own eyes About which they knew nothing in which they suspected we know now how well-founded their suspicions were Would mean a life of forced labor and famine under the leadership of loafers Then it was also necessary to get rid of those peasants some of them not at all prosperous who because of their daring their physical strength their determination their outspokenness at meetings and their love of justice were favorites with their fellow villagers and by virtue of their independence were therefore Dangerous to the leadership of the collective farm beyond this in every village There were people who in one way or another had personally gotten in the way of the local activists This was the perfect time to settle accounts with them of jealousy Envy insult a new word was needed for all these victims as a class and it was born by this time It had no social or economic content whatsoever But it had a marvelous sound pod kulaks nick in other words I consider you an accomplice of the enemy and that finishes you the most tattered landless laborer in the countryside could quite easily be Labeled a pod kulaks nick and in a footnote. I remember very well that in our youth this term seemed quite logical There is nothing in the least unclear about it and quote and we had mentioned article 58 He goes over that in some more detail Describing the various sections and one of those that he talks about is Section 10 and in talking about it. He quotes a line of a Russian poet from that era named Vladimir Mayakovsky Solzhenitsyn writesQuote, its definition was, propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet power, and equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content. For this action in peacetime, a minimum penalty only was set. Not any less, not too light. No upper limit was set for the maximum penalty. Such was the fearlessness of the great power when confronted by the word of a subject. Skipping ahead. Weakening and weakening, the government, could include any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any particular day. After all, anything which does not strengthen must weaken. Indeed, anything which does not completely fit in, coincide, subverts, and he who sings not with us today is against us. Mayakovsky. The term, preparation of literary materials, covered every letter, note, or private diary, even when only the original document existed. Thus, happily expanded what thought was there, whether merely in the mind, spoken aloud, or jotted down, which was not covered by section 10." Giving an example of how the revolution abolished not only institutions, but entire concepts, Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted, saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and at the beginning of the 30s was defined as rightist opportunism. So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt, and innocence, end quote. In another passage, he talks about how pathetic and weak many of the Bolshevik leaders were in the late 30s when the system finally turned against them. He writes, quote, Perhaps 1937 was needed in order to show how little their whole ideology was worth. That ideology of which they boasted so enthusiastically, turning Russia upside down, destroying its foundations, trampling everything it held sacred underfoot. That Russia were they themselves had never been threatened by such retribution. The victims of the Bolsheviks, from 1918 to 1946, never conducted themselves so despicably as the leading Bolsheviks when the lightning struck them. If you study in detail the whole history of the arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal revulsion you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly repulsive defendants, nausea at their spiritual baseness after their former pride and implacability, end quote. Later, when he's talking about arrest and interrogation, he gives some advice on how to face that situation if you're ever in it. He writes, quote, So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain? When people you love are still alive? When you are unprepared? What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap? From the moment you go to prison, you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself, my life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die, now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me, those I love have died, and for them, I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me. Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory, end quote. He talks about his own interrogation, and at one point, he says that he had a war diary, a journal that he kept when he was at war, and the diary gets burned when he's at Lubyanka, the big prison in Moscow, which used to be the headquarters of the KGB, and now I imagine there's something else there besides the prison, but it's still a prison as well. And he describes how while he's in the prison, from the yard, they can see the chimney, and there's always smoke coming out of the chimney, and they think there's files being burned or other books or lots of different things, and he wonders how many different books or ideas were lost because they were burned like his diary was in that furnace in Lubyanka. And after all, that's not just something that happened to him. That's a tangible and certain loss. Solzhenitsyn later became a writer. He almost certainly would have published his war diary in some form, but it was burned. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, In the fourth month, all the notebooks of my war diary were cast into the hellish maw of the Lubyanka furnace, where they burst into flame, the red pyre of one more novel which had perished in Russia, and flew out of the highest chimney in black butterflies of soot. We used to walk in the shadow of that chimney, our exercise yard a box-like concrete enclosure on the roof of the big Lubyanka, six floors up. The walls rose around us to approximately three times theman's height. With our own ears, we could hear Moscow, automobile horns honking back and forth. But all we could see was that chimney, the guard posted in the seventh floor tower, and that segment of God's heaven whose unhappy fate it was to float over the Lubyanka. Oh, that soot. It kept falling on and on in that first post-war May. So much of it fell during each of our walks that we decided the Lubyanka must be burning countless years of files. My doomed diary was only one momentary plume of that soot. Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building, a whole lost culture. Oh, soot, soot from the Lubyanka chimneys. And the most hurtful thing of all was that our descendants would consider our generation more stupid, less gifted, less vocal than in actual fact it was." He writes a lot about the blue caps, who are the secret police who arrest and interrogate people. I guess they must've been some branch of the NKVD of the interior ministry. And he talks about how the blue caps are more interested in an interrogation in getting confession than they are in getting at the truth of whatever they're supposedly investigating. And then he starts talking about why that is, the incentive structure around it, and then the resulting behavior toward a defiant prisoner as a result of that incentive structure. He writes, quote, "...what prompted them all to slip into harness and pursue so zealously not truth, but totals of the processed and condemned? Because it was most comfortable for them not to be different from the others, and because these totals meant an easy life, supplementary pay, awards and decorations, promotions in rank, and the expansion and prosperity of the organs themselves. If they ran up high totals, they could loaf when they felt like it, or do poor work, or go out and enjoy themselves at night. And that is just what they did. Low totals led to their being kicked out, to the loss of their feedback. For Stalin could never be convinced that in any district or city or military unit, he might suddenly cease to have enemies. That was why they felt no mercy, but instead an explosion of resentment and rage toward those maliciously stubborn prisoners who opposed being fitted into the totals, who would not capitulate to sleeplessness or the punishment cell or hunger. By refusing to confess, they menaced the interrogator's personal standing. It was as though they wanted to bring him down. In such circumstances, all measures were justified. If it's to be war, then war it will be. We'll ram the tube down your throat. Swallow that salt water." And later he talks about the deference that the blue caps get, that they have a very special high status above everybody else in the society because of the power they have. And he says, "...no one dares speak about you at meetings, and no one will ever dare write about you in the newspaper. Not only something bad, but anything good. They don't dare. Your name, like that of a jealously guarded deity, cannot even be mentioned. You are there. Everyone feels your presence, but it's as though you didn't exist." Skipping ahead, "...no one dares check up on what you do, but no one is exempt from your checking up on him." And he's thinking about these guys, and how they ended up that way. And he says, "...and just so we don't go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself, if my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? It's a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly." And when he's in prison, he has time to think about how he acted when he was an officer. And he talks about thinking he was better than his subordinates, and having somebody else carry his bag, and pointing out that the potential for this kind of behavior is in everybody. But when he was a student, he was invited to join the NKVD schools, and he says, "...it would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal..." to enter the schools. And later, "...it was not our minds that resisted, but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides, you must, and your own head can be saying also, you must. But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don't want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me. I want no part of it." And later summarizing this point, he writes, "...so let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. 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? During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place. Sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil, and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being adevil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. Socrates taught us, know thyself. Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb. It is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't." And one of the messages that you get from this book in general is the danger of it happening again in any country. I've never heard a convincing argument that there was anything about Russia that made it especially conducive to communism. In fact, there was a lot that was very similar going on in Germany at the same time, and who knows, maybe the only reason it didn't stick the way that it did in Russia is because Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Levy didn't have the presence of mind to issue a land decree. But a similar system was established in other parts of Europe, in China, in parts of South America, and there's no particular reason that it couldn't happen in Western Europe or North America either. It's just a matter of the wheels starting to turn in a certain way. And we can close out with a couple of short passages to that end. He writes at one point, quote, you look at your neighbors, your comrades, let's either resist or protest, but all your comrades, all your fellow article 58s who have been plundered one by one, even before you got there, sit there submissively hunched over and they stare right past you. And it's even worse when they look at you the way they always do look at you as though no violence were going on at all, no plundering, as though it were a natural phenomenon, as though it were the grass growing and the rain falling. And the reason why, gentlemen, comrades, and brothers, is that the proper time was allowed to slip by. You ought to have got hold of yourselves and remembered who you were back when Strushinsky burned himself alive in his Vyatka cell, and even before that, when you were declared counter-revolutionaries, end quote. And then finally, quote, 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. End quote. And those were some of the passages I wanted to show you from volume one of The Gulag Archipelago. If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you will send it to a friend who you think will enjoy it as well. And go to my website, vollrathpublishing.com. The link is in the description. And pick up some books for yourself, for your family, for your friends. I have them at a good price with free shipping. So do your part to support independent book publishing and go over there and get some books right now. Farewell until next time. Take care and happy publishing.