The Gulag Archipelago

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1973

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-12

Part 2, Chapters 1-4

Part 3, Chapters 1-7

Part 3, Chapters 8-14

Part 3, Chapters 15-22

Part 4, Chapters 1-3

Part 5, Chapters 1-6

Part 5, Chapters 7-12

Part 6, Chapters 1-7

Part 7, Chapter 1-P.P.S.

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 3, Chapters 8-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “Women in Camp”

Solzhenitsyn explains how life in the Gulag was “harder for the women” (232). He recalls how women who arrived at the camp were paraded naked past the guards and more privileged prisoners, who selected the most attractive women and made them an offer: In exchange for sexual favors, the women’s lives would be made easier. Those women who refused for any reason found their lives made yet more miserable. For women, “attractiveness was a curse” (234) and the only protection against rape or unwanted attention was old age and unattractiveness. An attractive woman was constantly surrounded by men and threatened with violence. Solzhenitsyn believes that she had no hope of refusing them, but she had to carefully select when and to whom she relented. If she picked the right man, he could protect her from the other men, as well as the desperate teenage boys and the envious women. Many sexual diseases spread in the camps. Women were also forced into exhausting physical labor, their bodies worn out by the endless work. By official decree, any marriages were dissolved on arrival at the Gulag. Any woman who became pregnant was transferred out of the camp one month before she gave birth. She was taken to a hospital without knowing whether she would ever be reunited with her child once her sentence was finished.

Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “The Trusties”

“The Trusties” (238) were privileged prisoners in the Gulag. These individuals made friends of the guards and, in return, received the easiest work duties and the best food and clothing. The other inmates hated the Trusties.

Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “In Place of Politicals”

Inmates arrested for political crimes were referred to as “politicals” (240). Not all of them are politically minded people; many committed political crimes by accident, whether by some off-hand remark, a joke, or unwittingly disrespecting a bust of Stalin.

Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Loyalists”

Despite their imprisonment, some inmates remained fiercely loyal to the communist ideology of the Soviet Union. These so-called loyalists struggled with their falls from grace, but they never blamed the government. Their pain, Solzhenitsyn believes, was “the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma” (243). Solzhenitsyn describes how the wave of loyalist arrests in 1937 helped to eviscerate the inner workings of the Soviet government.

Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Knock, Knock, Knock…”

Solzhenitsyn discusses the mistrust and the suspicion regarding stool pigeons in the Gulag. Stool pigeons were inmates who were undercover in the cells, assigned by the guards to learn secrets from the other inmates. The guards often coerced prisoners into this position.

Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary: “Hand Over Your Second Skin Too!”

Solzhenitsyn recalls how inmates with 10-year sentences were not immune from further sentencing. Second camp terms forced some prisoners to stay even longer. This practice of handing out new sentences gained sudden popularity in 1938. Throughout World War II, the camp guards who wanted to avoid the frontline sought to prove the necessity of their continued prison station, and they uncovered all sorts of fake rebellion among the inmates; so long as the prison could be made to appear unruly, the guards’ jobs—and their distance from military combat—would be secure.

Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary: “Changing One’s Fate”

The desire to “change one’s fate” (254) was, writes Solzhenitsyn, innate and persistent for the prisoners. The only sliver of hope for many inmates was the idea of escape. This impulse was particularly true for the people beginning their sentences. According to Solzhenitsyn’s research, thousands of Gulag prisoners attempted escape. The guards relied on “invisible chains” (255) to keep the prisoners docile. The most important of these was the general submissiveness beaten into the inmates. Another was the starvation of the prisoners, who are too weak to attempt escape. The threat of another sentence, the remote location of the camps, and the likelihood of recapture made escape seem futile.

Part 3, Chapters 8-14 Analysis

Solzhenitsyn broadens his scope and details the lives of the other people in the camp, and the wider demographics show the full range of the Gulag’s ruthlessness. Each prisoner endured torture, but certain demographics suffered in specific and terrible ways. Women, for example, endured unique forms of violence which the men did not need to consider. Sexual violence in the Gulag was both institutional and individual: While individual inmates sexually assaulted the women, the institutional violence was more prevalent, and the guards and the favored inmates used the institutions of the Gulag to commit sexual violence. When women entered the Gulag, part of their processing was to be assessed by the male guards with an eye toward rape. Solzhenitsyn describes this process in a mundane fashion, using the same tone that he employs for describing the Gulag’s other bureaucratic violence. The sexual violence against women was ubiquitous and endemic to the Gulag, and women underwent this specific form of torture as an unwritten rule.

Solzhenitsyn doesn’t understand the people whose faith in communism never faltered. These so-called loyalists are absurd to Solzhenitsyn, who blames communism and Soviet ideology for the Gulag’s existence. He (and the other inmates) generally left the loyalists alone. These loyalists were fanatics, in his opinion, and trying to communicate with them seemed like a pointless endeavor when their logic was circular: “Here is their inevitable moral: I have been imprisoned for nothing and that means I am good, and that all these people around me are enemies and have been imprisoned for good cause” (245).

While the inmates faced the threat of extended sentences, many inmates ignored this threat; death was such a perpetual reality in the Gulag that the thought of living to the end of any sentence seemed far too optimistic. The prisoners’ indifference to extended sentences demonstrates the Gulag’s capacity to crush a person’s spirit.