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Canonball
Discussing Volume II Of "The Gulag Archipelago" By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In this episode of Canonball we discuss Volume II of "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was written between 1958 and 1968 and published in 1973.
Here is a recording of Liebestod, from Tristan and Isolde, which I mentioned:
https://youtu.be/07YFIWL_XSI?t=292
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.
Hello and welcome back. This week we're going to be looking at Volume 2 of the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Last week we looked at Volume 1, and I usually start these off with a short summary of the highlights of the writer's life, but I already did that last week, so if you're interested you can go check out the episode about Volume 1, and I have it at the beginning there. One thing that I didn't mention last week was that while this book was published in 1973, Solzhenitsyn had written it between 1958 and 1968, so by 1968 he had finished it as far as I understand, but he held on to it possibly because there was not a suitable way to publish it because he was still living in the Soviet Union at the time. But then as we saw last week, the Soviet authorities got a hold of it, and so he was worried that it would be totally lost, and so he somehow got it to the West and it was published in Paris. Now before getting into the passages that we're going to look at this week from Volume 2, I want to talk a little bit about why I wanted to read this book. I had first heard of it probably in 2015 or 2016, which is a little embarrassing because it shows that I managed to get through an international relations degree, never mind without having read this book, but without having even heard of it, though that's maybe not that surprising. I value my degree, but I definitely feel that more of the most valuable stuff that I've learned, I learned outside of that context. But it's one of these books that seems interesting and that you want to read it, but then when you look into it, you find that it is quite long, and so then you say, well, I'll read it later. I'll get to it. It's not quite worth the purchase of that much time right now, but I decided to go for it recently because I had put it off for long enough. And I think part of the reason why this book is in the air these days, people read it, talk about it, or at least interested in it, curious about it, is that some people are concerned that some of the things that are happening politically in the world right now maybe resemble the Soviet Union or communism in some way. And this book, this set of books, looks a lot at the human side of what was going on in the Soviet Union, both the people who were the victims of its system and its functionaries. And we have to walk a narrow path here because on the one side, if we open up the newspaper and see that they've passed a law to make the post office more efficient and say, oh, that's what the Soviet Union did. They also had a very efficient postal service. Then we'll be getting carried away about nothing. We might be drawing comparisons that are not valid, or if they are valid, they're not relevant. We might be mischaracterizing what's going on, and we might be missing some other more important problem, which we also don't want to do. And by the way, I was just making up an example. I've not heard that the Soviet Union had a particularly efficient postal service. But on the other hand, history ebbs and flows. Everything doesn't always get better. And if we can learn something from history, if we can be equipped, guarded, armed with knowledge against society or politics or government going in a bad direction, we would be fools to just blindly walk into it while material that could potentially warn us about it is readily available. And we're ignorant of it only because of our own neglect. And even if there's no modern comparison to be drawn, it's always valuable to learn about the past, about history, about what other people have gone through, because it gives us a higher resolution image of the world and our place in it. And especially with highly politicized topics like the Soviet Union, it's always better to get a more accurate picture than this sort of scary cartoon that you pick up from popular culture. And that's not to say that the Soviet Union was not bad. On the contrary, that it's worthwhile to know precisely how bad it was. Though this kind of reading and study comes with other difficulties that we went over last week in looking at Volume 1. If you're interested, again, I recommend you check that out. With all that in mind, we can now look at some passages from Volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In this first passage, he mentions an M. Mihailov, which must be a reference to Mihailo Mihailov, who was a Serbian writer who was one of the most prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe after he was arrested and convicted in 1965. He spent seven years in prison and had his passport revoked. It also mentions the Aurora, which is a Russian cruiser. Today, it's a museum ship in St. Petersburg. But on October 25th, 1917, the Aurora fired a single blank shell that was the signal for the Bolsheviks to storm the Winter Palace, which was the official...residents of the House of Romanov, and of emperors before them, from 1732 until 1917. And it's hard to pick dates when major political events started, but this event, the Aurora firing this shell, and the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace, was certainly a significant step in the Bolshevik Revolution. Though don't hang your hat on the date of October 25th, because at that time Russia was still on the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar, it would switch to the Gregorian calendar later. And so October 25th for them was more like November 6th or 7th in much of the rest of the world. There was a difference of about 11 days. And in this passage, Solzhenitsyn is talking about the origins of the archipelago, both the date when it started, as well as the ideological source for it. And he connects it both to Marx, saying that Marx and Engels taught that the old bourgeois system and its whole state apparatus, including its prison system, had to be thrown out and rebuilt. And Solzhenitsyn points out how the other new replacements for the components of that apparatus were all set up very quickly after the revolution. And so it's not surprising that the prison system would have been as well. And he also specifically quotes Lenin a couple of times saying things that would directly lead to the establishment of this prison system. And that shows that the Gulag archipelago was not this monster that Stalin made up later. It was ideologically central to what the Bolsheviks were doing from the beginning. And here, since it's a quote within a quote, I'm quoting Solzhenitsyn, quoting Lenin. I'm not going to say quote again when he quotes Lenin, because that might become confusing, but hopefully it'll be clear what parts are Lenin's quotes. It's just a line or two, and he mentions them in both cases. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, When our compatriots heard via the BBC that M. Mikhailov claimed to have discovered that concentration camps had existed in our country as far back as 1921, many of us, and many in the West too, were astonished. That early? Really? Even in 1921? Of course not. Of course Mikhailov was in error. In 1921, in fact, concentration camps were already in full flower, already even coming to an end. It would be far more accurate to say that the archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser Aurora. And how could it have been otherwise? Let us pause to ponder. Didn't Marx and Engels teach that the old bourgeois machinery of compulsion had to be broken up and a new one created immediately in its place? And included in the machinery of compulsion were the army, we are not surprised that the Red Army was created at the beginning of 1918, the police, the militia was inaugurated even sooner than the army, the courts, from November 22, 1917, and the prisons. How, in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, could they delay with a new type of prison? That is to say that it was altogether impermissible to delay in the matter of prisons, whether old or new. In the first months after the October Revolution, Lenin was already demanding the most decisive draconic measures to tighten up discipline. And are draconic measures possible without prison? What new could the proletarian state contribute here? Lenin was feeling out new paths. In December 1917, he suggested for consideration the following assortment of punishments. Confiscation of all property, confinement in prison, dispatch to the front, and forced labor for all who disobey the existing law. Thus, we can observe that the leading idea of the archipelago, forced labor, had been advanced in the first month after the October Revolution." In this next passage, he's talking about the origin of the Red Terror, which was the first, but not the only, wave of political killings and arrests in the Soviet Union. It's generally taken to have started in 1918. Here Solzhenitsyn cites some communications in August and September of that year, and to have gone on until 1922. And he also talks about the origin of the term and the policy of concentration camps. And he mentions a few things here. One is Fanny Kaplan, who on August 30th, 1918, tried to assassinate Lenin by shooting with a pistol. She fired three shots. Two of them hit him. One of them somehow hit him both in the neck and in the left lung, which makes me think she must have somehow been standing above him or something. But Lenin didn't die, and she was put to death soon after. And there are a couple things to talk about here. One is that this example shows how tumultuous and uncertain this whole process was. Lenin is this major historical figure now, and maybe he would have been even if Fanny Kaplan had killed him that day. But it's also possible that he would have become a much more secondary character in this drama, and somebody else would have taken over much earlier, maybe Trotsky or somebody else. And Lenin would be not a household name, but somebody who people would think of as a hero.study this period know about. And this also makes me think of the example of Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, in Germany, who organized the socialist revolution that overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy, which had been ruling Bavaria for over a century by that time. Eisner's revolution overthrew it in November of 1918. So only a few months after this assassination attempt on Lenin, these things were going on at the same time. But Kurt Eisner is not nearly as well known, probably at least in part because he was successfully assassinated three months later in February of 1919. So on the one hand, we look at this assassination attempt against Lenin and say, he was shot in the neck and the lung. History was maybe only a hair away from being very different. Not that the revolution would have failed, but maybe that Lenin wouldn't have been remembered the way that he is now. But then on the other hand, we can't help but wonder maybe if Kurt Eisner hadn't been assassinated, things might've turned out differently in Bavaria and there might've been a little country or maybe the revolution would have spread to the rest of Germany. And that period would have resulted not in the Weimar Republic, but in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Germany or something. It's interesting to think about how in play everything was during this period and how things very easily could have been different. Another thing about this assassination attempt is that Solzhenitsyn says that it came after a significant telegram that he's going to talk about. And when I first read that, I wondered if Solzhenitsyn might've gotten this wrong. And last week we were looking at how you have to be skeptical in looking at any kind of history and ask how a person knows a certain thing, especially when it's highly politicized like this. And so I looked at this sequence of events. Lenin sends a telegram, as we'll see, with a very harsh order. And then a few days later, Kaplan tries to assassinate him. We're talking about a very confusing time. It's hard to see what happened before or after. You have this issue of the Russian calendar. Maybe these two dates got switched. In fact, first there's the assassination attempt. Lenin got really freaked out. And then he sends this telegram. Not of course, because I know better than Solzhenitsyn, but the human mind has this desire for coherence. It has a desire for narrative, for things making sense in a sort of linear way, which is a bad impulse because history is often incoherent. Not that it's a confusing mess, but things don't always happen in that neat linear way. So the human mind trying to put it into that order can bring it to bad conclusions. And I'm saying here that my initial doubt about these two days, as Solzhenitsyn lays it out, is an example of the human mind trying to organize things in a way that makes sense, not that Solzhenitsyn was doing this, but that I was doing it. Because you can also find a coherent explanation for why what Solzhenitsyn says totally makes sense. Nevermind the sources for the dates, which are the critical thing. But even if we're just looking at the narrative, you also have to keep in mind that if you know a bit about Fanny Kaplan, she herself was a socialist revolutionary. She wasn't a czarist or something. So who knows? This is pure speculation. It might be that Lenin issued this telegram and Kaplan was in the right circles and she heard about it and she thought it was a bad move and she decided to try to kill Lenin because he was going to ruin the revolution. That's pure speculation. She was a revolutionary, but I have no idea what her thought process was or if she had any extra information or anything. I'm just giving an example of how, at first glance, the order of events that Solzhenitsyn asserts sounds a little strange, but that's what he says. And also it's entirely possible that that's exactly how it happened. But so now we can get to this passage and this one also has quotes within quotes and I've changed my mind on this one. I'm going to say quote again. So I'm going to say quote to start the passage from Solzhenitsyn and then I'm going to say quote again when he's quoting Lenin and also the decree on the red terror thereafter. And then I'm going to say end quote, but that's just to close those quotes. And then I'll say end quote again to close the passage of Solzhenitsyn. So there's just two levels of quotes. There's Solzhenitsyn quoting Lenin and then he talks a little bit more and then he quotes the decree a little after that and then he talks a little more and that's the end of it. Because here knowing exactly what is quoted text is relevant. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, in August 1918, several days before the attempt on his life by Fania Kaplan, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in a telegram to Yevgenia Bosch and to the Penza Provincial Executive Committee they were unable to cope with the peasant revolt, quote, lock up all the doubtful ones, not guilty mind you, but doubtful in a concentration camp outside the city, end quote. And in addition, quote, carry out merciless mass terror, end quote. This was before the decree. Only on September 5th, 1918, 10 days after this telegram, was the decree on theRed Terror published, which was signed by Petrovsky, Kursky, and Bonch-Buryevich. In addition to the instructions on mass executions, it stated in particular, quote, secure the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, end quote. So that is where this term, concentration camps, was discovered and immediately seized upon and confirmed, one of the principal terms of the 20th century, and it was to have a big international future. And this is when it was born, in August and September 1918. The word itself had already been used during World War I, but in relation to POWs and undesirable foreigners. But here in 1918, it was for the first time applied to the citizens of one's own country. The switch in meaning is easily comprehended. Concentration camps for POWs were not prisons, but a necessary precautionary concentration of the POWs. And so too, for doubtful compatriots, extrajudicial precautionary concentration was now proposed. For an energetic mind which could visualize barbed wire surrounding prisoners who had not been tried, the necessary term was right at hand, concentration camps, end quote. In this next passage, he's talking about people outside of Russia writing favorably about the prison system and the harm that this caused. And he cites a Supreme Court Judge Leibowitz of New York State, who I guess is Samuel Leibowitz. And Solzhenitsyn doesn't give his first name, but Samuel meets the description that Solzhenitsyn gives. And if it is the same guy, in addition to visiting and writing favorably about the Soviet Union, as Solzhenitsyn describes, the International Labor Defense, which was an organization that was an arm of the Communist International, which itself was operated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, got Leibowitz to work on a notable case at that time called the Scottsboro Boys. So he's writing favorably about the Soviet Union in Time Magazine, and he's also doing legal work for an arm of the Communist International. Because he didn't know that second part, Solzhenitsyn characterizes Leibowitz as just being clueless or trying to look smart or something. But those two things together, to me, suggests that he might have been ideologically motivated. Or at least, if you wanted to really answer that question, you could look more into his life. But there is initial cause to think that that might be the case. And he also, in this passage, uses the name, which is a reference to a certain transit camp, and also zek, which is a kind of slang term for the prisoners in the camps. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, Later, he's talking about a universal blanket pardon of deserters in wartime. And maybe I missed it, but I couldn't see exactly when this was, but it's some order that Stalin gave pardoning deserters. And speculating about that order, Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, And sometimes when we're looking at the lives of great writers or artists or scientists or thinkers, we encounter some junction where the person was almost killed when they were very young. They got into some tight scrape in combat or something happened, a ship sank, and they almost died. And it's some famous person. And we try to imagine what it would be like if that person had just been snuffed out when they were 25 or whatever, and everything that they were going to do is left completely undone. And we have this ghost of a sense that that would have been a big loss, though it's very difficult to imagine. And then the flip side of that is that there must logically be all kinds of people who were killed at a young age in one way or another who would have gone on to do great things, but we never knew about it. And in this next passage, we get a little glimpse of that. And in volume one, Solzhenitsyn also talks about the creative loss that resulted from Soviet governance. But there he talks about it more in the abstract. And here we see a specific example of a guy who, it's not obvious that he was a poetic genius or anything.he almost certainly would have had some kind of creative output if he weren't in the camps. And this is true of any period of really oppressive government on a people that humans have a natural creativity that bad governance can suppress or even extinguish. But it seems especially bitter in the Russian case because Russians are historically so creative that in modernizing, Russians were kind of coming up behind some other European countries. They were a little bit late to the party in certain ways. But certainly by the 19th century, the avalanche of music, painting, literature, science, math that came out of Russia compared to Russian art in the 20th century almost makes you think of the whole country in that sense. That we're not talking about one artist or one poet who died at a young age and so they weren't able to do what they were going to do, but the whole country was creatively muzzled in that way. And that otherwise we might have artistically had a Russian 20th century that outshined even the 19th century. For example, German music in the 18th century is amazing. Bach, Mozart, Telemann, Haydn, Gluck. And in the 19th century, it changed and developed, but it remained extremely high quality. You have Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Strauss. It's not as if a culture burns itself out and then has nothing left. We might have seen a second 12-cylinder century of Russian art in the same way the second century of German music kept ascending. And yes, I know Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. There were certainly notable Russian artists in the 20th century. There was a tremendous amount of scientific research in Russia in that period. And this is of course conjecture, but that all seems to me to suggest what more there could have been. And in this next passage, we see one personal example of what was probably several generations of snuffed out creativity. Solzhenitsyn is writing about Boris Gamirov, whose name, who knows, otherwise we might have known. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, end quote. In this next one, he's talking about logging as one of the jobs that they do in the labor camps. And he describes how after doing that kind of work, even the forest becomes a cause for revulsion. And to me, a forest is something that's just universally beautiful. In the winter, in the summer, it doesn't matter. But it's not hard to imagine that the kind of work that he's talking about could twist your perception even of something like a forest. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, end quote. And I'm not going to read this passage, but Dostoevsky also spent four years in a forced labor camp in Siberia, but he did it under the Tsar, not under the Soviet system. And in the House of the Dead, the characters are apparently at one point in a forced labor camp. I haven't read it, but Solzhenitsyn talks about it. And Solzhenitsyn notes how Dostoevsky talks about the characters walking around in white shirts. And Solzhenitsyn says that in the camps that he was in, they had a phrase, white collar. And that meant to be doing easy work because it meant probably that you weren't getting dirty. And Solzhenitsyn says, nevermind a white collar in Dostoevsky's camp, they had white shirts. And he also points out how the characters, after working hours, spend a bunch of time walking around the camp, which means they weren't completely exhausted from the work. And this topic comes up a number of times throughout these books. But Solzhenitsyn compares the Tsar's system, even the prison and police systems, favorably to the Soviet system. In this next one, he's talking about hunger. And on the one hand, he's talking about how hunger turns.human being into an animal. But he's also talking about how hunger is more theoretically and intellectually foundational. It's more important in our lives than we usually acknowledge because most of the time, thank goodness, we aren't hungry. But he says that hunger is even the basis for political theory in certain ways. He writes, quote, philosophers, psychologists, medical men, and writers could have observed in our camps as nowhere else in detail and on a large scale the special process of the narrowing of the intellectual and spiritual horizons of a human being, the reduction of the human being to an animal and the process of dying alive. But the psychologists who got into our camps were for the most part not up to observing. They themselves had fallen into that very same stream that was dissolving the personality into feces and ash. Skipping ahead. And among the surviving, the orthodox communists now write me lofty protests. How base are the thoughts and feelings of the heroes of your story one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich? Where are their anguished cogitations about the course of history? Everything is about bread rations and gruel, and yet there are sufferings much more unbearable than hunger. Oh, so there are. Oh, so there are indeed much more unbearable sufferings, the sufferings of orthodox thought. You in your medical sections and your storerooms, you never knew hunger there, orthodox loyalist gentlemen. 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 painfully 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." And this next passage is a little bit more funny. It's from a chapter called Women in Camp, and the whole chapter deals with special issues about women because there were female prisoners, of course, in the system. And of course, if you're a guy in jail, you're dealing with everything. You've been arrested, you're being interrogated, you don't know what's gonna happen, you're probably going to prison, but still women are on your mind. You're in the Lubyanka, and sometimes you're thinking, there's gotta be some women in here, but you haven't seen them. And here he describes an instance where the guys see some women and how they feel about it. I'll read it first and we can talk a little bit more about it. He writes, quote, "'And how could one not think of them, even back during interrogation? After all, they were somewhere here in neighboring cells, in this very same prison, under this very same regimen, enduring this unbearable interrogation. And how could they bear it, such weak beings? The corridors were soundless, and you could not distinguish their walk or the rustle of their dress. But one day, one of the Butyrki jailers was fussing with a lock and left our men's cell to stand half a minute at the windows in the well-lit upper corridor. And peering underneath the muzzle of the corridor window, we suddenly saw down below, in the little green garden, on a corner of asphalt, standing in line in pairs like us, and also waiting for a door to be opened, women's shoes and ankles. All we could see were just ankles and shoes, but on high heels. And it was like a Wagnerian blast from Tristan and Isolde. We could see no higher than that, and the jailer was already driving us into the cell. And once inside, we raved there, illumined and at the same time beclouded, and we pictured all the rest to ourselves, imagining them as heavenly beings dying of despondency. What were they like? What were they like? But it seems that things were no harder for them, and maybe even easier. I have so far found nothing in women's recollections of interrogation which could lead me to conclude that they were any more disheartened than we were, or that they became any more deeply depressed." End quote. And he later says that he thinks that women actually held up a little bit better in the prisons even than men did, if for no other reason than they needed less food to feel full, and so they weren't quite as hungry so much. So he's making fun of himself a bit there. But I love that description. They can't even see the women completely. They can just see their shoes and their feet, and they go, oh my God, there's women here. And he makes the comparison to Tristan and Isolde. I think he must have been thinking of the Liebestad, which is the most famous melody in.this opera by Wagner and I think he was thinking of that melody because the climax of it is very suitable for this situation and it makes it even funnier. Maybe I'll put a link in the description to that in case you want to check it out. It's very nice music. It takes a couple minutes to build up to what I'm talking about but it's funny that he's been describing for hundreds of pages these camps and the interrogations and the way that the interrogators are torturing people and then when the guys see the ankles and high heels of these women through a window just for a couple of seconds they experience this blast of emotion. So one of the things that these three books do is show us human nature a little more clearly and that right there is certainly part of it. Later he's talking about a dynamic of survival in the camps which is in part that if you are still alive it's because someone else has died in your place when maybe you would have died otherwise. And a term that sometimes comes up in this kind of context is survivor guilt. That people who get through something really terrible feel guilty because some other people didn't. And that's a complicated topic and I don't know anything about it but I would guess that in that context what psychologists are talking about is something irrational. Of course the other people who survived something didn't cause the deaths of the people who died because they didn't create the situation that killed them. The people who survived the camps didn't put the people who didn't survive into the camps. Someone else did. But at the same time there is this strange tension where if you were willing to survive at any price, and he uses that phrase later and talks about it more, we might get to it, then that will sometimes mean that you eat the bread instead of giving it to someone else. And it might be your ration of bread. You have no reason to give it to somebody. Except that if you had given it to the other guy he might have lived but then you might have died. Or if you had done that enough times you would have. And just in case we don't get to it he says that we use this phrase at any price. We say that and it has a certain ring to it but we don't think about what it really means. He writes, quote, if I am alive today that means someone else was on the list for execution in my place that night. If I am alive today it means that someone else suffocated in the lower hold in my place. If I am alive today it means that I got those extra seven ounces of bread which the dying man went without. All this is written not in reproach. The basic viewpoint of this book has been already set forth and will be held to until the end. All who suffered, all who were squeezed, all who were forced to make a cruel choice ought rather to be vindicated than accused. The more correct thing will be to vindicate them. But in forgiving oneself the choice between dying and being saved, do not forgetfully cast a stone at the one whose choice was even harder. We have already met such people in this book and there will be more. End quote. Later he makes an observation that is useful to writers or to anybody who's trying to understand society generally. And he says that when you get mad about something or at a person that you stop listening and that it will then be outside of your ken, your understanding. And you may have needed that information, that perspective someday. And that if you do this for your whole life the aggregate result is that you will always be seeing society only from one side, from the side that you like. And he makes that point in an interesting way. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, I know that a writer cannot afford to give in to feelings of rage, disgust, or contempt. Did you answer someone in a temper? If so, you didn't hear him out and lost track of his system of opinions. You avoided someone out of disgust and a completely unknown personality slipped out of your ken, precisely the type you would have needed someday. But however tardily, I nonetheless caught myself and realized I had always devoted my time and attention to people who fascinated me and were pleasant, who engaged my sympathy, and that as a result I was seeing society like the moon, always from one side, end quote. In this next one he's talking about the relationship between truth and political power. And here rather than talking about it in the abstract, he's saying that those who benefit from the political system will suppress truth, even fundamental, obvious, proven, foundational truths, in order to protect their creature comforts and the status that they enjoy as a result of the system continuing to function. Here he's not talking about some ideology or vision of the future, he's only talking about the benefits that the people who make the system run get from it and the lengths they will go to suppress a truth that threatens those benefits, those comforts. And he finishes with a line or two about this theme that comes up a few times in the book. I don't think we've talked about it yet for volume two, but it came up in volume one. This idea that there isn't necessarily anything individually special about the enforcers of the system. They're not somehow uniquely sadistic, that instead you could probably take almost any ordinary person and incentivize them in a certain way for long enough to get them to act like the interrogators, for example.And he does sometimes give examples of people who keep their morality or their principles intact when they get to the camp. So he might say that there are some people at the far end morally who would just be willing to die in order to not compromise themselves at all. And he says those people do die, but any ordinary person is a potential blue cap, a potential NKVD officer. And the message of the book seems to not be nihilistic, that people are just depraved and irrecoverably evil, but to ask, how do you make it so that's not the case? How do you be somebody who, given the option to become an NKVD officer and not just encouraged to join as Solzhenitsyn was, I think we looked at that in volume one. Some people did try to get him to join the NKVD school, but somebody who, when the road toward that requires not active action, that you go and join the school, that you take a step toward it, but only passive inaction. That somehow your life has been such that you are on this track and in order to get off of it, you need action. You need to take a step away from it and say, I'm not doing that. Solzhenitsyn writes, In this next passage, he starts out by talking about a guy named Pravdin and exactly who that is doesn't matter for our purposes here, because he's an example of a guy with a certain kind of background and a certain kind of upbringing. But Solzhenitsyn starts from him to talk about the definition of an intellectual in general. And he says first that in the time and place where he's living, all kinds of people are grouped into the class of intelligentsia, into the intellectual class, just by their profession. And it's a very big group. And he says, it's very important that we not define it that way and that we not lose this word intellectual, because it's an important word and concept. And if its definition gets watered down, we'll lose it gradually. And he gives a nice, clear, usable definition. Let's look at the passage first, and then we can talk about it a little bit more. Solzhenitsyn writes, Quote, Pravdin had grown up in a culture milieu, and all his life he had been occupied with mental work. He had been surrounded by intellectually sophisticated people. But was he really an intellectual? In other words, a person with an individual intellect of his own. Over the years, I have had much occasion to ponder this word, the intelligentsia. We are very fond of including ourselves in it. But you see, not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union, this word has acquired a completely distorted meaning. They began to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't work and are afraid to with their hands. All the party, government, military, and trade union bureaucrats have been included. All bookkeepers and accountants. The mechanical slaves of debit. All office employees. And with even greater ease, we include here all teachers. Even those who are no more than talking textbooks and have neither independent knowledge nor an independent view of education. All physicians, including those capable only of making doodles on the patient's case histories. And without the slightest hesitation, all those who are only in the vicinity of editorial offices, publishing houses, cinema studios, and philharmonic orchestras are included here. Not even to mention those who actually get published, make films, or pull the fiddle bow. And yet the truth is that not one of these criteria permits a person to be classified in the intelligentsia. We do not want to lose this concept. We must not devalue it. The intellectual is not defined by professional pursuit and type of occupation, nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is non-imitative." And that definition is useful because on the one hand, it lets us cut out a lot of the people that he lists that we would say don't qualify as intellectuals, but we might not be able to say why. Never mind a teacher in a high school who checked out decades ago. You can even be watching a talking head on television, a pundit, and even his thought is imitative. It's a copy of someone else's thought. He hasn't thought this stuff through himself. He has received memes from elsewhere and is conveying them onward for social reasons. They conform with his social allegiances, not because he has spent a lot of time in quiet.contemplation and had thoughts occur to him individually, internally, rather than only collecting and assembling them externally from other people. And maybe most importantly, if he were to draw from his own well, if he were to sit quietly with a notebook and a pen for several weeks or several months or several years and try to work out each inference in his thinking and make sure that each one makes sense, if the result of that was that the ideas based on which he had built a career, based on which he had built his lifestyle, his status, where he's on television or whatever, turned out to be wrong from this new calculation of his, that after checking it as many times as he wants and making sure that he hadn't made some mistake, that he would favor the new calculation and jettison the old one, even if it meant that the status and the career went with it. And that's not even to say that everybody who does that, who has that level of commitment to their ideas and to forming them individually is always correct. There are many, many people who are very committed to very bad ideas and there have been throughout history. But one of the dangers of the modern world and of technology is that it is increasingly easy to draw ideas externally and to avoid drawing them from your own well internally. You can flip open the news and read some editorial column and get an idea there, or you cruise around social media and you get something to think about there. Whereas in the past, accessing other people's ideas was simply more difficult and less hypnotic. It was often in a book or a physical newspaper or somebody talking to you. It wasn't on a glowing screen over which you have a tremendous amount of control. And so one result of that is that I think in the past, thoughtful people spent much more time just sitting quietly and thinking about things, which would make you by definition more likely to develop your own thoughts. Now, the trouble with Solzhenitsyn's definition is that it's not really possible to have truly non-imitative thought. We're influenced by all kinds of things, our upbringing, our environment, the people around us, the people we've read. As much as we try, and it's worthwhile to try and to work on this, it's not completely possible to give a total inventory of everything in your mind and where it all came from. It's worth it to try to do that as much as you can, but as a final goal, it's probably not really possible. But also truly non-imitative thought would be so alien and strange that it wouldn't be useful to anyone. So rather than attaining some ideal, it might be enough to try to move away from what's the opposite of an ideal, the bad example of somebody whose every thought is simply a copy of something that they've seen externally from a TV show, from a book, from a movie, from a friend. And if you start trying to notice everything that you're saying and where it might've come from, you'll find there's all kinds of things that you don't know why you think that, and you don't quite know where it came from. One thing that Solzhenitsyn talks about a bit more in volume two is the committed orthodox communist and his ideology and way of thinking. And remember that when Solzhenitsyn was first arrested, he had been an officer in the military, and so he took the party line. He wasn't a theoretician, but he knew the ideology and he subscribed to it. But at one point he describes how in prison, by arguing and debating with people, he gradually found that ideology to be weak. And he started to see the problems in it when people were arguing against it. And then he himself switched sides and started to argue against it as well. This worldview, according to which he had lived his entire life up to that point. Remember he was born in 1918. He was born in the year of the revolution. He never knew anything outside of it, but when he heard people arguing against it, first he defended it as he describes in this next passage. And then he stopped and just listened. And then he found himself arguing against it. So he went through his own ideological transition. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, But people are shouting at me, that's dishonest. You must argue with real theoreticians from the Institute of Red Professors. All right, as you will, as if I'd not done it before. What else was I doing in prison and on prison transports and at transit prisons? At first I argued alongside them, taking their side, but somehow our arguments seemed to me too thin. And at that point, I began to keep silent and just listen. And then I argued against them, end quote. In this next passage, he had been talking about prisoners escaping and he's talking about how the prison system probably did some kind of cost benefit analysis and found it was more effective to let a few prisoners escape than to guard every possible way that anyone could escape anywhere. And he says, anyway, there were other things that kept people from trying to escape. And he describes one significant one. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, In all likelihood, they did some arithmetic in the Gulag one bright day and became convinced that it was much cheaper to permit a certain percentage of ZEK losses than to establish a truly strict guard over all the many thousand points of imprisonment. And at the same time,they relied on certain invisible chains which kept the natives reliably in their place. The strongest of these chains was the prisoner's universal submission and total surrender to their situation as slaves. Almost to a man, both the 58s and the non-political offenders were hard-working family people capable of manifesting valor only in lawful ways, on the orders of and the approval of the higher-ups. Even when they had been imprisoned for five and ten years, they could not imagine that singly, or, God forbid, collectively, they might rise up for their liberty since they saw arrayed against them the state, their own state, the NKVD, the police, the guards, and the police dogs." End quote. One topic that comes up a lot through all three books is the thieves. We may have talked about this a little bit in volume one, but the thieves are basically the ordinary criminals who are in the camps alongside the politicals, the 58s, the guys who are charged under article 58 of the penal code. It might be worthwhile, maybe I'll do this in looking at volume three, to go into the index and look at each passage where he mentions the thieves, because there are a number of examples where he talks about how the Soviet government used the thieves in order to keep the politicals under control, that they were an irregular counterweight. I'm now reading volume three. One of the things he mentions there is that at one point they create special prisons for the 58s, for the political prisoners, and separating the thieves from the politicals has the disastrous effect, for the prison system, of making it so the politicals can trust each other more. But so the thieves are an interesting topic that runs throughout all three books. And here he's talking about one night a thief, a common criminal, starts to sing a bunch of thief songs, and Solzhenitsyn reflects on it. He writes, Once in 1946, on a summer evening in the minicamp at the Kaluga Gates in Moscow, a thief lay stomach down on the windowsill of the third floor, and in a loud voice began to sing one thief song after another. His songs carried easily over the gatehouse and barbed wire and could be heard out on the sidewalks of Bolshaya Kaluga Street at the trolleybus stop there, and also in the nearby section of Nizhny Park. These songs glorified the easy life of murder, burglary, assault. And not only did none of the jailers, instructors, or guards on watch interfere with him, but it didn't even occur to anyone to shout at him. This propaganda of the thieves' views, it seemed, in no way contradicted the structure of our lives or threatened it. I sat there in the compound and thought, what would happen if at this moment I were to climb up to the third floor and from the same window in as loud a voice sang something about the fate of the Russian POW? Such as, Where are you, where are you? A song I had heard in counterintelligence headquarters at the front. Or what if I myself had composed something on the fate of the humiliated and trampled frontline soldier? What an uproar there would have been. How fast they would have come running. And right in all that hustle and bustle they would have run up the fire ladder to get me, not waiting until I was surrounded. They would have gagged me, tied my hands, and pasted a second term on me. Yet the thief went right on singing. And the free Muscovites listened, as if that were the most ordinary thing in the world." So this thief is in prison one night, loudly singing these songs about the easy life, about killing and crime. And not only is no one stopping him, but Solzhenitsyn proposes that what he's doing actually somehow serves the government's purpose in general. He says, This propaganda of the thieves' views, it seemed, in no way contradicted the structure of our lives or threatened it. But if he were to stand up and sing a political song, that would have brought on a swift and heavy response. Later, he's talking about the self-defense law in the Soviet Union. And he writes, In the Criminal Code of 1926, there was a most stupid Article 139 on the limits of necessary self-defense, according to which you had the right to unsheathe your knife only after the criminal's knife was hovering over you, and you could stab him only after he had stabbed you, and otherwise you would be the one put on trial. And there was no article in our legislation saying that the greater criminal was the one who attacked someone weaker than himself. This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense led to total spinelessness as a national characteristic. A hoodlum once began to beat up the Red Army man, Alexander Zakharov, outside a club. Zakharov took out a folding pen knife and killed the hoodlum. And for this, he got 10 years for plain murder. And what was I supposed to do, he asked, astonished. Prosecutor Artzishevsky replied, You should have fled. So tell me, who creates hoodlums? Later, he's talking about children in the camps. And what he heard or observed about the children is consistent with what I've read about kids sometimes when they're put in different but similar circumstances. Let's look at it first, and then we can talk about it. He writes, In the archipelago, the kids saw the world as it is seen by quadrupeds. Only might makes right. Only the beast of prey has the right to live. That is how we, too, in our adult years saw the archipelago. But we were capable ofcounterposing it to all our experience, our thoughts, our ideals, and everything that we had read to that very day. Children accepted the archipelago with the divine impressionability of childhood, and in a few days children became beasts there, and the worst kind of beasts, with no ethical concepts whatever. Looking into the calm and enormous eyes of a horse or caressing the flattened ears of a guilty dog, how can you deny that they have ethics? The kid masters the truth. If other teeth are weaker than your own, then tear the piece away from them. It belongs to you." And people have found, for example, when you have child soldiers, often they are the most vicious kinds of soldiers. They can be more merciless than the adults, because they have no ethical framework. An adult can overcome things that he's been taught by society over many years, but that inhibition will always be there. Whereas a kid at a certain age, put into certain circumstances, might simply do what kids do, which is adapt exactly to the environment that they're in, and completely reflect that environment, and be as Solzhenitsyn describes here, totally ruthless. And if you think about that, you start to realize that that reflects how malleable people are. Not that nature is not a component, and we are entirely determined by our nurturing, by how we're brought up by our environment, but that environment does have a significant effect on us, whether for good or for bad. Now, the trouble with that is that not everybody responded to the camps in the same way. There were thieves, there were little monster children, but then there were also people who, even in that environment, even when they were exhausted from the work, even when they were forbidden from doing all kinds of creative things, and they had no materials, they went out of their way to create some kind of beauty with whatever they could, under whatever circumstances they were in. And this passage was very inspiring to me. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, End quote. Talking again about the creative loss, and specifically about the fragility of prose as compared to verse, that it was easier to write poetry in the camps because you could memorize it, and he goes into great detail about how he memorized some of the poetry that he wrote. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, No one will ever tell us about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear. They can be remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with paper to pass through the vicissitudes of the archipelago. Who in camp could make up his mind to write? End quote. In this next passage, which is a bit longer, he makes an important point about the archipelago and also lays out a kind of theory of literature that's related to it, and he talks about four spheres of literature. First, he says that throughout history there have always been the upper and lower classes, the ruling and the ruled, and they've never understood each other. And then the four spheres of literature are the upper class writing about itself, the lower class writing about itself, the upper class writing about the lower class, and the lower class writing about the upper class. And he says the upper class has always had the means to learn the technique of art, how to write, how to paint, how to make music, because they've had the time and the money and the energy. But he notes, quote, one important law of life, contentment always kills spiritual striving in a human being, end quote. And so he says the upper class, because it's content, it often makes bad art. And then he talks about the fourth sphere, the lower class writing about itself. And he says this is folklore, and he talks about the formation of folklore. And he says when the lower class is writing about the upper class, it either misattributes general human failings only to the upper class, or it's very fawning and servile to the upper class. And then he says that the archipelago brought these two groups together, that for the first time in history, a very large number of upper-class people were made to live like lower-class people. They were made to live like serfs, and they didn't have the distance of pitying the serfs when they were trying to write about them or anything like that. They were in that situation. They had basically no hope of getting out of it, and it was really terrible. So there was this unique incident, unprecedented,unprecedented in scale in the history of the world where lots of educated people had this experience and so presumably they might have been able to write about it or create about it in a very interesting way and create some kind of insight and understanding between these two permanent groups in human society. But he says the tragedy is that they were never able to write about it. They didn't have the time. They didn't have the materials. They didn't have the energy. And so they just all died and some of them wrote about it like Solzhenitsyn. But the overwhelming majority of people who might have written about their experience never did and never could have. And one thing about this passage that he does not say explicitly is that he's suggesting that ordinary lower-class life resembles life in the archipelago. This one is a bit long, but it's worth it. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, In this one and only and not at all redeeming sense, open to writers a fertile though fatal path. Then he goes to a long footnote. I will be so bold as to elucidate this thought in its most general aspect. As long as the world has stood, there have always been until now two unmixable strata of society, the upper and the lower, the ruling and the ruled. This is a crude division like all divisions, but if one classifies among the upper stratum not only those superior in power, money, and social position, but also those superior in education obtained through either family effort or their own, in a word, all those who do not need to work with their hands, then the division will be almost across the board. Therefore, we can expect four spheres of world literature, and of art in general, and ideas in general. The first sphere, those in the upper stratum portraying, describing, pondering the upper stratum. In other words, themselves, their own people. The second sphere, the upper stratum depicting or pondering the lower stratum, the younger brother. Third sphere, the lower stratum depicting the upper, and the fourth, the lower portraying the lower, i.e. itself. The upper stratum always had the free times, an excess or at least a sufficiency of means, the education, the training. Those among them who wanted to could always master the artistic techniques and the discipline of thought, but there is one important law of life, contentment always kills spiritual striving in a human being, and as a result, this first sphere contained within it many satiated artistic distortions and many morbid and self-important schools, sterile flowerings, and only when writers who were either profoundly unhappy in their personal lives or had an overwhelming natural drive towards spiritual seeking entered that sphere as the bearers of culture was great literature cited. The fourth sphere is all the world's folklore. Leisure time here was broken up into tiny pieces and was available to individuals in different ways, and the anonymous contributions to this culture also came in different ways. Unpremeditated, the lucky moments of glimpsing a perfected image or turn of speech, but the actual creators of it were innumerable, and they were almost always oppressed and dissatisfied people. Everything created then passed through selection, washing, and polishing a hundred thousand times over, passing from mouth to mouth and year to year, and that is how we have come to possess our golden store of folklore. It is never empty or soulless because among its authors there were none who were unacquainted with suffering. The written literature belonging to the fourth sphere, proletarian, peasant, is altogether embryonic, inexperienced, unsuccessful, because individual know-how has always been lacking here. The written literature of the third sphere, looking upward from below, suffered from the same faults of inexperience, but even worse, it was poisoned by envy and hate sterile feelings which do not create art. It made the same mistake that revolutionaries continually make, ascribing the vices of the upper class to the class itself and not to humanity as a whole, while failing to imagine how notably they themselves inherit these vices, or else, on the other hand, it was spoiled by servile fawning. And that was the end of the footnote, now we're going back to the main text, and now he's talking about the archipelago again. He writes, millions of Russian intellectuals were thrown there, not for a joyride, to be mutilated, to die without any hope of return. For the first time in history, such a multitude of sophisticated, mature, and cultivated people found themselves, not in imagination, and once and for all, inside the pelt of slave, serf, logger, miner. And so, for the first time in world history, on such a scale, the experience of the upper and the lower strata of society merged. That extremely important, seemingly transparent, yet previously impenetrable partition preventing the upper strata from understanding the lower, pity, now melted. Pity had moved the noble sympathizers of the past, all the enlighteners, and pity had also blinded them. They were tormented by pangs of conscience because they themselves did not share that evil fate, and for that reason they continuedconsidered themselves obliged to shout three times as loud about injustices, at the same time missing out on any fundamental examination of the human nature of the people of the lower strata, of the upper strata, of all people. Only from the intellectual zeck of the archipelago did these pangs of conscience drop away once and for all, for they completely shared the evil fate of the people. Only now could an educated Russian write about an enserved peasant from the inside, because he himself had become a serf, but at this point he had no pencil, no paper, no time, no supple fingers. Now the jailers kept shaking out his things and looking into the entrance and exit of his alimentary canal, and the security officers kept looking into his eyes. The experience of the upper and the lower strata had merged, but the bearers of the merged experience perished, and thus it was that an unprecedented philosophy and literature were buried under the iron crust of the archipelago." End quote. And I'll close out here with a short one about how the full truth is a prerequisite for literature, and without the full truth you have no literature. Solzhenitsyn writes, quote, our whole country was infected by the poisons of the archipelago, and whether it will ever be able to get rid of them someday, only God knows. Can we, dare we, describe the full loathsomeness of the state in which we lived, not so remote from that of today? And if we do not show that loathsomeness in its entirety, then we at once have a lie. For this reason I consider that literature did not exist in our country in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, because without the full truth, it is not literature. End quote. And those are some of the passages I wanted to show you from volume 2 of the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you will send it to a friend who you think will enjoy it as well, and go over to my website vollrathpublishing.com, I'll put the link in the description, and pick up some books for yourself, for your family, for your friends. I have them at a good price with excellent print quality. Do yourself and your bookshelf a favor and go over there and get yourself some books right now. Farewell until next time. Take care and happy reading.