The Gulag Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn continues his recollection of beginning his imprisonment: From inside the prison, Solzhenitsyn and his fellow cellmates heard celebrations. As World War II ended, prisoners of war began filling the prisons. Most were the same age as Solzhenitsyn and were accused of betraying Russia.

As Solzhenitsyn presently writes his text, however, he expresses his belief that Russia had in fact betrayed these men. Russian soldiers, returning as prisoners from the liberated German camps, were thrown into the Gulag and treated contemptuously. Due to poor treatment, many Russians were tempted to rebel against their communist homeland while in the German camps. They formed into units of the German army and fought to free Russia from communism. However, Germans feared this effort might create a new, powerful, liberated Russia, and so they stood down these military units. Solzhenitsyn regrets that the western allies—Britain, America, and France—did not back these Russian liberation fighters. Instead, the allied forces sent all Russians back to Russia, knowing that they would face the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn laments the treatment of Russians abroad, before and after the war, who accomplished great deeds but were not welcomed home because Stalin did not approve of their actions or beliefs.

The prison had a special room for frisking the prison’s new arrivals. Solzhenitsyn recalls his experiences in the so-called “frisking box” (113), whereupon he was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. Even though he believed the sentence to be unjust, he signed a confession because he felt he had no alternative.

Solzhenitsyn now explains that security services used shorthand jargon to refer to the alleged crimes of the prisoners, such as “ASA—Anti-Soviet Agitation” (116)—accusations so broad that they could be indiscriminately applied. The bureaucratic indictment was quick and could not be appealed.

Prisoners in the Gulag forgot everything, Solzhenitsyn says, particularly the public trials which began in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn reviews several of these trials but admits that they are too complicated and detailed to include in his investigation.

Solzhenitsyn describes the law in the Soviet Union in the 1920s by examining five trials in which religious leaders were found guilty and executed. As Lenin invented a new legal code, the state ransacked the church coffers.

Solzhenitsyn charts the Soviet legal system’s development in the 1920s-30s. The further removed the courts were from the Russian Revolution, the more distinct and unforgivable their humanitarian violations became. Solzhenitsyn uses the example of three high-profile trials which took place during this period. These men who were tried were former leaders of the Revolution, and the courts found them guilty of treason. While the courts tried other revolutionary leaders, these men were selected for public trial because they seemed weak and compliant.

Solzhenitsyn charts the “up-and-down” (129) history of capital punishment in Russia. Under the Tsarist regime, capital punishment existed for a variety of crimes. The use of execution depended on the tastes of whatever monarch was in charge at the time. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Provisional Government outlawed capital punishment at first but soon reinstated it for “military crimes, murder, rape, assault, and pillage” (131). This decision was popular and provided cause for the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government in the ensuing Civil War. Solzhenitsyn believes that executions increased during the rise of the Bolsheviks. He believes that Stalin’s regime conducted more than a million executions in one form or another, for crimes far less serious than at any other point in time. After World War II, the death penalty was outlawed and then reinstated within a few years. Solzhenitsyn recalls a memorial ceremony for the victims of capital punishment. He shares photographs of people he knows who were executed.

Tyurzak is the official term for prison confinement in the Soviet Union. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the revolutionaries had to decide what to do with the prisoners they had inherited. Whereas prisoners under the previous regime discovered that they could use tactics such as hunger strikes to ease their punishing living conditions, the post-Revolution prison guards developed methods to deal with any protests. From 1937 onwards, for example, people on hunger strikes were simply allowed to die.

There were certain people whom the Soviet Union did not send to the main Gulag prisons. If they were too famous or otherwise controversial, they were sent to TONs (Special Purpose Prisons). From the 1920s onward, the quality of food available to prisoners fell rapidly. Similarly, the prisons rationed lighting and even air in increasingly meager amounts. Visits from relatives were eventually forbidden, outdoor exercise strictly controlled, and punishment cells were used for even the slightest infraction. Many prisoners who experienced these conditions began to lose their sense of reality, but others developed methods and routines which allowed them to stay coherent.