The Gulag Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn outlines his use of the Archipelago as an analogy for the labor camps. He describes the archipelago of islands on the White Sea, which are spread out across the water like the labor camps are spread across Russia. Some camps were converted from monasteries, including one on the Solovetsky Islands which was the first example of the Gulag prisons. The Solovetsky Monastery became the Solovki prison camp, and its prisoners were made to balance on poles all day, thrown down steep flights of stairs, or tied naked to a tree and left to the mosquitos. Prisoners’ public executions were a warning to others.

By the 1930s, the policy of the Gulag changed. Prisoners are now worked hard for the first three months of their sentence but then become expendable. One prisoner escaped and detailed the hellish conditions in a book published in the West. The authorities try to hide the truth about their prison.

Solzhenitsyn explains that the Solovki prison camp was a prototype throughout Russia, with similar camps built in remote locations to keep their activities hidden from the public. The prison camps provided free labor for the government’s industrialization project. Prisoners worked in logging, chemical plants, build railroads, and other jobs as the camps “burst out in a rash throughout our whole great country” (195). The camps changed the purpose of imprisonment, removing the opportunity for moral contemplation and instead serving the state by the prisoners’ incarceration. Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel is considered the architect of the Gulag system; he did not invent the camps, but he brought them into their unified form. A former millionaire, spy, and inmate, Frenkel was only in Solovki for a short period before he rose to take charge of its economic future. He turned Solovki into a profitable enterprise and then turned his attention to the rapidly expanding Archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn recounts how Stalin made Frenkel head of a construction effort, and Frenkel used prison labor to build the canal—a project detailed in a Soviet history book that is difficult to obtain. The book (since banned in the Soviet Union) praises Frenkel’s use of prison labor, though Solzhenitsyn criticizes the canal as the “most savage construction project of the twentieth century” (202). Using archaic technology and poor equipment, the prisoners dug through vast swathes of stone and dirt in terrible weather conditions, surviving on meager rations. Prisoners died from exhaustion or exposure, and corpses littered the worksite. The bones of the dead were thrown into the concrete mixer. After visiting the canal in 1966, Solzhenitsyn saw that it was barely used. He mourns the lives lost for a seemingly useless project.

Solzhenitsyn continues chronicling the development of the camp system: In the early 1930s, the Gulag system became enshrined in the Soviet system but also cloaked in secrecy. Conditions continued to be brutal, and many people starved and died in the Gulag. The onset of World War II threatened to dismantle the Gulag but instead the system worsened, providing “more work and less food and less heat and worse clothes and ferocious discipline and more severe punishment” (212). The security agents ensured that they were not drafted for the war by filling the camps with prisoners and inventing new plots to justify their roles away from the frontline.

Solzhenitsyn describes how the Gulag was built on the intersection between the economic need of free labor and the theoretical justification for the camps, the latter of which he believes is endemic to communism. He also believes that the Gulag system bears echoes of the peasant-based serf system of Russia’s past, though he believes that the serfs were treated better than the inmates of the Gulag. Furthermore, there was never any famine in Russia until the communist revolution, so that “the serfs were slaves but they had full bellies” (217). While Soviet society sought to overturn the injustice of serfdom, the Gulag allowed the society to essentially maintain these unconscionable institutions but hide them away from the public.

In a short chapter, Solzhenitsyn describes how a new wave of prisoners came to the camp after the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II.

Solzhenitsyn details typical life in the Gulag. Most of life in these camps was “work, work, work” (220) such as hard, repetitive physical labor. The oldest form of work in the Gulag was logging. Solzhenitsyn compares the difficulty of work in the Gulag to the equivalent work in Tsarist Russia, illustrating how fewer rules existed and how there was harsher punishment for inmates. Food in the Gulag was unnourishing and in short supply. Anything good was stolen by those in charge. The weather was almost always cold, though inmates were barely clothed. Whatever clothes the inmates wore when they arrived was either taken away or worn down to rags. Inmates slept in the barracks after a long, punishing day of work. These barracks were sometimes barely more than a hole in the ground or a tent, lit by kerosene lamps. Inmates slept on bunks made from wooden shelves. People did not leave their few possessions behind in the barracks: They took their mugs and mess tins to their work duty, so that these items were not stolen. They slept in their wet clothes, which may freeze during the night, and used their sandals as pillows so that the sandals were not stolen. In the center of the barracks was a wood-filled oil drum used to heat the room, though the wet firewood burned only unreliably.

The conditions in the Gulag caused the “intellectual and spiritual horizons” (225) of the inmates to narrow. Inmates were reduced to animals, Solzhenitsyn believes, who were just waiting to die. Those closest to death were fed last and fought among themselves over whatever scraps of food were left. The inmates quickly came to identify the diseases afflicting them, such as scurvy or alimentary dystrophy. One of the only forms of escape was death. Solzhenitsyn describes how large majorities of inmates did not survive their imprisonment. With few doctors available, guards checked corpses to make sure that they are dead. These makeshift autopsies entailed stabbing the body with a bayonet or smashing its skull with a mallet. Bodies were buried naked to save the clothes, then dumped unceremoniously into mass graves to save time and effort.