The Gulag Archipelago 1

The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago

Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Original title Архипелаг ГУЛАГ

Translator ? (French)
Thomas P. Whitney (English)

Country France

Language French, originally Russian

Publisher Éditions du Seuil

Publication date 1973

Published in 1974
English

Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)

ISBN ISBN 0060139145

OCLC Number [1]

802879

Dewey Decimal 365/.45/0947

LC Classification HV9713 .S6413 1974

The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a massive narrative
relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner
in a Gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968 (dates given at the end of the book), it was published in the
West in 1973, thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its official
publication in 1989.
GULag or Gulág is an acronym for the Russian term Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey (Главное
Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей), or "Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps", the
bureaucratic name of the Soviet concentration camp main governing board, and by metonymy, the camp system
itself. The original Russian title of the book is Arkhipelag GULag, the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor
deployed throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet
Union with a vast "chain of islands", known only to those who were fated to visit them.
Since the Soviet Union's dissolution and the formation of the Russian Federation, The Gulag Archipelago is included
in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading.[2]
The Gulag Archipelago 2

Structure and factual basis

Structurally, the text is made up of seven sections divided (in most printed editions) into three volumes: parts 1–2,
parts 3–4, and parts 5–7. At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the Soviet concentration camp
and forced labour system from 1918 to 1956, starting with V.I. Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October
Revolution establishing the legal and practical frame for a slave labor economy, and a punitive concentration camp
system. It describes and discusses the waves of purges, assembling the show trials in context of the development of
the greater GULag system with particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic development.
The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Party
Congress of 1956 denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the
Stalin era. Though the speech was not published in the USSR for a long time, it was a break with the most atrocious
practices of the concentration camp system; Solzhenitsyn was aware, however, that the outlines of the GULag
system had survived and could be revived and expanded by future leaders.
Despite the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront this Soviet system, the realities of the camps remained
taboo into the 1980s. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union's supporters in the West
viewed the GULag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of
Soviet political culture—an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project. This view, politically unpopular
inside and outside the USSR during the Cold War because it ascribed to Lenin the theoretical and practical origins of
the concentration camp system, has become the prevalent view of most writers and scholars since the USSR's
demise.
Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a zek (a slang term for
inmate) through the concentration camp system, starting with arrest, show trial and initial internment; transport to the
"archipelago"; treatment of prisoners and general living conditions; slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp
system (where Andrei Sakharov and his team of prisoner-scientists developed the Soviet Union's first hydrogen
bomb); camp rebellions and strikes (see Kengir uprising); the practice of internal exile following completion of the
original prison sentence; and ultimate (but not guaranteed) release of the prisoner. Along the way, Solzhenitsyn's
examination details the trivial and commonplace events of an average zek's life, as well as specific and noteworthy
events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprisings.
Aside from using his experiences as a zek at a scientific prison (a sharashka), the basis of the novel The First Circle
(1968), Solzhenitsyn draws from the testimony of 227 fellow zeks, the first-hand accounts which base the work. One
chapter of the third volume of the book is written by a prisoner named Georg Tenno, whose exploits enraptured
Solzhenitsyn to the extent that he offered Tenno a position as co-author of the book; Tenno declined.
The sheer volume of firsthand testimony and primary documentation that Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble in The
Gulag Archipelago made all subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work useless. Much of the impact
of the treatise stems from the closely detailed stories of interrogation routines, prison indignities and (especially in
section 3) camp massacres and inhuman practices.
There had been works about the Soviet prison/camp system before, and its existence was known to the Western
public since the 1930s. However, never before had the wide reading public been brought face to face with the horrors
of the Soviet system in this way. The controversy surrounding this text in particular was largely due to the way
Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal and practical origins of the GULag system at
Lenin's feet, not Stalin's. According to Solzhenitsyn's testimony, Stalin merely amplified a concentration camp
system that was already in place. This is significant, as many Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet concentration
camp system as a "Stalinist aberration." [3]
The Gulag Archipelago 3

Historical impact of the text

Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet government in fact could not govern without the very real threat of
imprisonment, and that the Soviet economy depended on the productivity of the forced labor camps, especially in so
far as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned.
This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system. In Western Europe the book came, in time, to
force a rethinking of the historical role of Lenin. With The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin's political and historical legacy
became problematic, and the fractions of Western communist parties who still based their economic and political
ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof against them. George F. Kennan, perhaps the most
influential of U.S. diplomats, called The Gulag Archipelago, "the most powerful single indictment of a political
regime ever to be levied in modern times."[4]
In an Interview with German weekly Die Zeit British historian Orlando Figes claims that many Gulag inmates he
interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish
between their own experiences and what they read. Thus, he claims "The Gulag Archipelago spoke for a whole
nation and was the voice of all those who suffered".[5]

Additional remarks
Though the scope of the text ends in 1956, the last prisoners sentenced according to the political paragraphs of the
criminal code were quietly released in 1989. The exact number of Soviet citizens who went through the camp system
will never be known, especially as key documentation was deliberately destroyed as the USSR was collapsing.
Figures apparently compiled by the Gulag administration itself, and released by Soviet historians in 1989, show that
a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The true figures remain
unknown. Western estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from
15 to 30 million.[6] However, if we sum this figure with the number of deaths suffered by the URSS during the
World War II (24 million), we find out that the total amounts to 54 million, that is, more that half of soviet workforce
in 1928[7] , which raises considerable suspicion about the truth of these numbers.
One of the surprising and noteworthy elements is the powerful humor Solzhenitsyn employs throughout the text. It is
one of the reasons the book has remained so popular. Rather than a grim rendering of crimes and atrocities, The
Gulag Archipelago often contains sarcastic and ironic gallows humour. Precisely because of this dark humour, the
prose often turns human and profoundly moving without ever falling into sentimentality or self-pity.
The work is also a powerful testament to Solzhenitsyn's multi-layered, rhythmic and precise prose art. In interviews
he has often stated his wish to use all the resources of the language, old and new, proverbs, prison slang, legal style
and poetic images; this variety is masterfully used in The Gulag Archipelago, and carries over even in translation.

Publication
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965-1967, the preparatory drafts of The
Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Estonia. While in the
KGB's Lubyanka Prison, Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of
Education. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by
Arnold Susi's daughter, Heli Susi, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[8] [9]
The KGB seized one of only three extant copies of the text still on Soviet soil. This was achieved by torturing
dissident Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, Solzhenitsyn's typist[10] who knew where the typed copy was hidden; within
days of her release by the KGB, she hanged herself on 3 August 1973.[11]
Translated into English by American Thomas Whitney, the English and French translations of Volume I appeared in
the spring and summer of 1974. Solzhenitsyn had been in touch with them about the upcoming publication, which he
knew he could not put off much longer, but the final decision was taken by the YMCA Press itself with the author's
The Gulag Archipelago 4

implicit approval (two years previously, it had published August 1914).

Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first, but knew this was impossible under
conditions then extant. The international impact of the work was profound. Not only did it provoke a very vivid
debate in the West, a mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into
exile.
Because possession of the manuscript incurred the risk of a long prison sentence for 'anti-Soviet activities',
Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Due to the KGB's constant surveillance of him,
Solzhenitsyn only worked on parts of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the book as a whole into
jeopardy if he happened to be arrested. For this reason, he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow
and the surrounding suburbs, in the care of trusted friends, and sometimes purportedly visiting them on social calls,
but actually working on the manuscript in their homes. During much of this time, Solzhenitsyn lived at the dacha of
the world-famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and due to the reputation and standing of the musician, even with
Soviet authorities, he was reasonably safe from KGB searches there.
Solzhenitsyn did not think this series would be his defining work, as he considered it journalism and history rather
than high literature. However, with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it is his
best-known and most popular work, at least in the West.
Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal
representative, Dr Kurt Heeb of Zürich, to await publication (a later paper copy, also smuggled out, was signed by
Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against possible accusations of a falsified work).
Solzhenitsyn was aware that there was a wealth of material and perspectives that merited to be continued in the
future, but he considered the book finished for his part. The royalties and sales income for the novel were transferred
to the Solzhenitsyn Foundation for aid to former camp prisoners, and this fund, which had to work in secret in its
native country, managed to transfer substantial amounts of money to those ends in the 1970s and 1980s.

References
[1] http:/ / worldcat. org/ oclc/ 802879
[2] The Gulag Archipelago is included in the obligatory school program (http:/ / www. izvestia. ru/ news/ news215132?print), Izvestia,
September 2009
[3] Thomas, Donald Michael (1998). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life. London: Abacus. pp. 439.
[4] "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Speaking truth to power" (http:/ / www. economist. com/ opinion/ displaystory. cfm?story_id=11885318), The
Economist, 7 August 2008
[5] Held des Westens, Die Zeit, 7 August 2008
[6] Gulag. (2008). Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica.
[7] The Soviet Union: Facts, Descriptions, Statistics -> Labor (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ history/ ussr/ government/ 1928/ sufds/ ch17. htm)
[8] Rosenfeld, Alla; Norton T. Dodge (2001). Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression Under the Soviets, 1945-1991
(http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=r73fmcC5itkC& pg). Rutgers University Press. pp. 55, pp.134. ISBN 9780813530420. .
[9] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1997). Invisible Allies (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=5yYBZ35HPo4C& dq). Basic Books. pp. 46–64 The
Estonians. ISBN 9781887178426. .
[10] Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets Dies at 89 (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2008/ 08/ 04/ books/ 04solzhenitsyn. html?_r=1&
oref=slogin)
[11] Thomas, 1998, p. 398.
The Gulag Archipelago 5

External links
• The Gulag Archipelago in original Russian, parts 1 and 2 (http://lib.ru/PROZA/SOLZHENICYN/gulag.txt),
parts 3 and 4 (http://lib.ru/PROZA/SOLZHENICYN/gulag2.txt), and parts 5, 6, and 7 (http://lib.ru/
PROZA/SOLZHENICYN/gulag3.txt).
• The Gulag Archipelago in English, Volume 1 (http://www.archive.org/details/Gulag_Archipelago_I), Volume
2 (http://www.archive.org/details/Gulag_Archipelago_II) & Volume 3 (http://www.archive.org/details/
Gulag_Archipelago_III).
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Saving the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State" (http://english.mn.ru/english/
issue.php?2006-15-35) Moscow News (2006-05-02)
Article Sources and Contributors 6

Article Sources and Contributors

The Gulag Archipelago  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=423538945  Contributors: Abune, Acrabb, Adam Bishop, Alpta, Altenmann, Ancheta Wis, Andrei Stroe, Anna
Frodesiak, Anonymous from the 21st century, Attilios, Avillia, BanyanTree, Beyond My Ken, BigChillClassic, Boombaard, Brion VIBBER, Brookie, Bubuka, Cantus, Cesar Tort, Chairman S.,
ChrisCork, Clngre, CommonsDelinker, Comte0, Constanz, Cryptic, Dar-Ape, Detruncate, Djtodd78, DocWatson42, Duncancumming, Ed Poor, Eilish99, Eleland, Ellsworth, Esperant, Ferrierd,
Gcm, GeorgeBills, Gilsinan, GnatsFriend, Gobonobo, Goethean, Goudzovski, Handicapper, Henry Merrivale, Heron, Hersfold, Hippietrail, Humus sapiens, Immunmotbluescreen, Jamie Kitson,
Japanese Searobin, JayJasper, Kate, Kencf0618, Kpjas, Langtucodoc, LoveMonkey, MILH, MMSequeira, Ma'ame Michu, Maelnuneb, MakeRocketGoNow, Martin Kozák, Matt Crypto,
Maximus Rex, MetaManFromTomorrow, Moncrief, Moscownews, MrDarcy, MrRedwood, Nixer, Notacupcakebaker, Ortolan88, Othniel Kenaz, Patrick, Paul A, PhilipMW, Pierre.fitter, Polotet,
Prezen, Primalchaos, Protonk, QMarion II, Raul654, Rich Farmbrough, Richard75, Rjwilmsi, Rogerd, Russavia, Ruy Lopez, Sam Hocevar, Sander Säde, Sandstein, Schadenfreude, Schroeder,
SchroedingersCat, Smack, Strausszek, Supersteve1440, TallulahBelle, Termer, Tim Starling, Tjeffers, Truncated, Ufwuct, Upquark, Vanished user 05, Varlaam, Xaosflux, Ylla-ylla, Zolokin, 97
anonymous edits

Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

File:Gulag Archipelago.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gulag_Archipelago.jpg  License: unknown  Contributors: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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