The Gulag Archipelago

The Zek Prophet and the Devil's Grin

Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.

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In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery.

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In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians.

In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Yes I read the abridged version (okay, listened to it), which despite being supervised and blessed by Solzhenitsyn himself, seems sheepish about itself:

The usual first reaction to any act of abridgment is that it is a bad business, almost a desecration.

Nevertheless, all the acclaim is worth it and readers are unfairly daunted by the size of the tomes. It’s a stunning, shocking work. I almost regret listening to the abridged version because I could have easily spent 3x the time with the full-volume work. Alas, no audio version.

One reason it’s so enthralling is its unusual voice.

Every sentence is taut with outrage. He doesn’t scold, he guides you through each circle of hell. To maintain that force across three large volumes in long hand speaks to an almost unbelievable physical and physiological feat by Solzhenitsyn. It’s as though he were writing in a trance. If Milton was this great strange Anglo seer who blind-dictated Paradise Lost, so Solzhenitsyn disgorges the burdens of the Russian people crushed underfoot.

The only Soviet copy of his manuscript was arrested with its keeper, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. She was interrogated by the KGB and subsequently found hanged. Fortunately, the manuscript had been smuggled out to the West, leading to Solzhenitsyn’s exile from the Soviet Union. The monstrous leviathan spat out its prophet.

Solzhenitsyn’s outrage is parried by another strange tone… is it incredulity? As though he were hallucinating, reporting back from a nightmarish world he can scarcely believe. Everything is deranged. Hannah Arendt wrote that Nazi Germany’s supreme commandment was Thou Shalt Kill and the Soviet Union's was Thou Shalt Bear False Witness. Nazi logic was perverse but inexorable and led to more or less efficient mass murder.¹ But the Soviet derangement was something else. It was a state of total inversion — of criminal guards and innocent prisoners, of loyal Soviet party members and soldiers and pioneers fed into its own maw. Every friend a potential foe, prepared to bear false witness against you. The constant vigilance required under such a totalising ideology of lies is not adequately expressed in its brutality. To merely describe the mass torture and murder would be to miss something essential to it.

Hence Solzhenitsyn's unique voice. It brims with comedic charge, but one never laughs. The charge runs through his bleak anthology. Solzhenitsyn's demon is the same that appears to Ivan Karamazov only to mock him. The same demon that decapitates Muscovites in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. But instead of those oblique portraits of evil, Solzhenitsyn skins the devil before us. Here are his teeth, bared into a grin, as they devour our own young — ha ha! Look how he dances to the screams of our young Russian boys as they are corrupted, incarcerated, “held at knifepoint for carnal enjoyment” by prison guards. There, in the shadows, another pile of emaciated corpses. The portrait of complete derangement is too dark to be funny, so it strains with absurdity.

It is hard to imagine a non-Russian writing something like this. Soviet humour is dark and Solzhenitsyn's portrait is pitch black. Thomas Mann's irony has nothing of this darkness. Jonathan Swift is too whimsical. What would a portrait of North Korean society look like? Who knows.

The Gulag Archipelago also sits at an odd intersection of fiction and non fiction, philosophy and polemic, history and memoir. It’s not the mere study of a man. It is the visceral regurgitation of personal brutality, of whispers in the dark, of ragged bodies on snow. These aren’t the footnoted factoids of archives. Whether one or two or fifty of the vignettes happened exactly as described or not is beside the point. It’s like those historians who labour to prove the event of this or that messiah or prophet or saint. Does it really matter? No, what matters is that this or that saint captured something true, something previously too vast and strange and inexplicable to understand. Solzhenitsyn writes as a prophet not to peer into the future but to bear witness to his present.

So much of his barrage takes the form of a joke. One inmate is put away for unfavourably comparing an approved Soviet writer to another. That other? Pushkin. A Russian man is imprisoned for preferring Pushkin. What is that if not a joke? A grand, hilarious, monstrous joke? Okay, so you don’t laugh, you recoil. There is no relief.

Another joke, more explicit this time:

(They were building an apartment building, and the free employees stole several bathtubs. But the tubs had been supplied to match the number of apartments. So how could they hand over the apartment building as completed? They could not confess to the construction superintendent, of course—he was triumphantly showing the official acceptance committee around the first stair landing, yes, and he did not omit to take them into every bathroom too and show them each tub. And then he took the committee to the second-floor landing, and the third, not hurrying there either, and kept going into all the bathrooms—and meanwhile the adroit and experienced zeks, under the leadership of an experienced foreman plumber, broke bathtubs out of the apartments on the first landing, hauled them upstairs on tiptoe to the fourth floor and hurriedly installed and puttied them in before the committee’s arrival. This ought to be shown in a film comedy, but they wouldn’t allow it: there is nothing funny in our life; everything funny takes place in the West!)

As one writer wrote about Heinrich Heine, a prominent German Jew of the 19th century, so might it apply more darkly to Solzhenitsyn:

The tragic fate of his people was the source of its humor, the mother-of-vinegar for its wit. Centuries of pain have coated the walls of their brains with thick residues of sarcastic tartar.

(Or in this case — sarcastic Tatar. Ha ha.)

What brand of hellish comedy is this:

Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the garden and slapped on the behind—an amusement, no more.² But just because this one was the “campaign wife” of the Chief of Counterintelligence, right off some deep-in-the-rear sergeant had viciously torn from three front-line officers the shoulder boards awarded them by the front headquarters and had taken off the decorations conferred upon them by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. And now these warriors, who had gone through the whole war and who had no doubt crushed more than one line of enemy trenches, were waiting for a court-martial, whose members, had it not been for their tank, could have come nowhere near the village.

What makes this vignette so eerie and dark is Solzhenitsyn’s outrage on behalf of the rank-and-file would-be rapists. It is the motherland’s betrayal of its own sons, sons who laid down their lives in unspeakable sacrifice, that really fires his belly. But more on that later.

Take Stalin’s military purges. There is a spectacular savagery to it, a comedy of terror. Soldiers reading out names of fresh conspirators extracted from interrogations suddenly read out their own names from the lists. Generals presiding over accused generals are in turn condemned themselves. Some express loyalty to Stalin in their dying breath.³

What is this? Again, Nazi crimes were in one sense far more fathomable. There was a society totally attuned to the annihilation of others. Surely deep inside each of our breasts is the potential for a murderous fever against an enemy people.⁴ And if you are an angel of modernity, immune to such imaginations, no line between good and evil winding through your breast, you can at least accept that most peoples throughout history have found reason for every violence against foreign tribes. But the strange fratricidal derangement of the Soviet Union, its purge of the loyal with the disloyal, its own sons returning from war — has there ever been a society so maniacal?⁵

And it gets more bizarre. There were quite a few very close assassination attempts against Hitler, including from within his military. One left him quite singed. Some were motivated by ideological disagreement, but most were from fear that he was leading them to defeat (he was). But Stalin? Not one. Here was a man who destroyed countless lives at every level. Total and constant purges of the top political and military brass. Generals hauled from prison straight to battlefield commands. Senior ministers doing Stalin’s bidding when their own wives and children had been disappeared, and they themselves had tasted Beria's torture chambers. Yet somehow his grip was absolute. Solzhenitsyn postulates that should civilians have cried out as innocents among them were snatched off the street instead of looking away, the whole system would have collapsed. And yet they didn’t. And it didn’t.

Solzhenitsyn’s revulsion at the regime and the horrors it inflicted on the Ukraine in its deliberate famine led to a surprisingly empathetic perspective on Soviets who fought with the Germans (including, famously, the Vlasov men). It reads bracingly today: I can’t begin to imagine how heretical this sentiment would have sounded when it was first published in 1973. The Soviet Union was such a unique monstrosity that it induced millions of its own subjects to fight alongside the Nazis who considered them subhuman.

[T]his was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy. Perhaps there is something to ponder here: Who was more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland?

This is the essence of Solzhenitsyn's outrage. A deep, heartfelt, bitter sense of betrayal. He was a patriot with an atavistic love for a country that betrayed him and millions like him. His portrait of his nation, of the archipelago of debasement that ran down its spine, is of a discarded son, painfully revealing the fetid entrails of a rabid and transfigured mother.

What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers—is that really a Motherland?

The West too has unclean hands in its complicity with the Soviets. Here Solzhenitsyn may have shared something in common with, say, the Patrick Buchanans and Sean McMeekins of the world, who claim — probably correctly — that Stalin really got one over the western powers.

In those same days, just as treacherously and mercilessly, the British extradited to the Yugoslav Communists thousands of their regime’s enemies who had been Great Britain’s allies in 1941! They, too, were to be shot and exterminated without trial.

But the West did not understand at all. The democratic West simply could not understand: What do you mean when you call yourselves a political opposition? An opposition exists inside your country? Why has it never publicly declared its existence? If you are dissatisfied with Stalin, go back home and, in the first subsequent election, do not re-elect him. That would be the honest course. But why did you have to take up arms, and, what is worse, German arms? No, we have to extradite you; it would be terribly bad form to act otherwise, and we might spoil our relations with a gallant ally. In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery.

Some subjects are closed even to Solzhenitsyn, too dark, too personal they are to every man:

Nor are women who wait faithfully for their husbands often rewarded: they have lived so long apart, long enough for a person to change completely, so that only his name is the same. His experience and hers are too different—and it is no longer possible for them to come together again.

This is a subject which others can make into films and novels, but there is no room for it in this book.

Solzhenitsyn’s power comes not from purity but from humility. He is no Joan of Arc, blazing in righteousness. He is a zek, broken and filthy, who knows he might have been a guard himself. That is his terrible insight: the capacity for evil is not out there, but in here, in us all.

Solzhenitsyn was but one man, doubtless with the many faces of fault that live within us all. But he denounced the evil that gripped his motherland at great peril. He spoke for his discarded brothers and sisters across the land. What do we fear? Today in 2025? What are you afraid to utter? Are you embarrassed? To even contemplate cowardice in our age of liberties and hedonism? I am. I writhe with shame and awe before such a giant.

1. Not to say the Nazis weren’t deranged in their own ways. Consider the time Himmler telephoned to call off the killing of a new train load of decorated German Jewish war veterans. Too late. Oh well.

2. In fact, there are plenty of documented cases of Russian and Polish women being raped, many of them having been kept in Germany as slave labourers during the war. The Eastern Front was fractally dark at every level. Maybe all war is.

3. These are literally true by the way, from Russia’s War by Richard Overy:

Stalin was in a hurry to complete the [military purge]. On June 9 the indictment was complete. Eight marshals and generals were chosen to sit on the tribunal to try the eight military defendants, all of whom they knew well. The night before the trial, set for June 11, the interrogators extracted a flurry of further confessions which incriminated the very men who would sit in judgment on the morrow. Five of the soldiers sitting on the tribunal bench were executed over the following months. (Marshal Budyenny, who was to be among them, was saved from death when he resisted arrest by force and telephoned Stalin directly.) The trial lasted a day. Tukhachevsky and his codefendants, once free of their torturers, refused to ratify their confessions until they were bullied by the prosecutor to confess again that some of it was true. Just after midnight sentence was pronounced. All eight were shot that day. Tukhachevsky and Jonah Yakir, commander of the Kiev Military District, died expressing their continued loyalty to Stalin, the man who only a few hours before had given his personal approval for their death.

4. Here someone might object again — isn’t massacring the German Jews in their midsts, long integrated parts of the German national project, war heroes and bankers and merchants and writers and politicians and professors, really not a form of deranged fratricide? And I wouldn’t disagree with you.

5. To Solzhenitsyn, the Nazis were torture dilettantes beside their Soviet Gulag maestros. Rookies.

We read in Izvestiya for May 24, 1959, that Yuliya Rumyantseva was confined in the internal prison of a Nazi camp while they tried to find out from her the whereabouts of her husband, who had escaped from that same camp. She knew, but she refused to tell! For a reader who is not in the know this is a model of heroism. For a reader with a bitter Gulag past it’s a model of inefficient interrogation: Yuliya did not die under torture, and she was not driven insane. A month later she was simply released—still very much alive and kicking.