The Gulag Archipelago A History Lesson

Glavnoye Upravieniye LAGerej (Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps).

For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that the State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.

In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described. Author's notes, The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The Gulag Archipelago is an expansive three volume series of writings that documents in graphic and often times unsettling detail what life for tens of millions of Soviet citizens was like under the totalitarian rule of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. In volume one, Solzhenitsyn describes the volatile social, political, and economic conditions under which the gulags first appeared while also documenting how the corrupt communist bureaucracy served as a mechanism to feed them. Solzhenitsyn puts considerable effort into elucidating for the reader the intricate network of prison labour camps that had spread across the Soviet Union from 1918 - 1950. He likened the network of prisons to a chain of islands just beyond the horizon - daring us to contemplate the unimaginably dark potential of a human soul operating with impunity beyond the glare of the public eye. Like the majority of Soviet history, The Gulag Archipelago exists on the outermost fringes of popular Western consideration; however, the book's historical importance cannot be overstated or ignored as it remains firmly within the realms of intellectual discourse - serving both as an exemplary lesson in literary composition and a brave reminder of the many abject failures of communism.

It is important to note for historical reasons, that prior to Solzhenitsyn's writings, the West understood very little regarding Soviet forced labour camps. For decades, the Communist Party successfully prevented voices critical of the State (like Solzhenitsyns) from reaching an international audience. Despite his first wish being to have The Gulag Archipelago published within the Soviet Union first, several factors led to the book eventually being published outside the USSR. Firstly, Solzhenitsyn was under constant surveillance from the State and some of his early work had already been confiscated by the KGB. Secondly, maybe not so surprisingly, despite repeated efforts Solzhenitsyn couldn't find anyone in the Soviet Union willing to - or brave enough - to publish The Gulag Archipelago. Thirdly, with the death of his typist Elizaveta Voronyanskaya (she was found hanged to death), it became obvious that if Solzhenitsyn wanted his work read - he would have no choice but to smuggle the final draft out of the Soviet Union. And he was able to successfully do so, sending a copy of the manuscript (on microfilm) to his lawyer, Dr. Fritz Heeb in Zurich and then finally to a publishing company in Paris. All royalties and sales profits were transferred to a fund supporting former prisoners of the gulags. Ultimately, it would earn Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, but it wasn't until 1973 that it was fully published in the West, and it wasn't until the end of the Cold War that it was first made public in the Soviet Union. The release of The Gulag Archipelago created considerable international debate and soon after its publication the Soviet Politburo considered Solzhenitsyn persona non grata, and on February 13, 1974 he was expelled to Germany. But by then it was already too late, the secret was finally out. The world was quickly learning of the Soviet sewage disposal system; the international community was aghast at how tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens had been crushed underneath the tyrannical jack boot of communism.

Originally, 'gulag' was an acronym given to the government agency which oversaw the system of forced labour camps and prisons that began in 1918. The term has since been used more generally as a common noun to describe any and all forced labor camps that existed in communist Soviet Union during the Cold War era. The first gulags appeared amidst the milieu of WWI. In February of 1917, the first Russian Revolution culminated in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the eventual fall of the Russian Empire. Several competing factions vied to fill the vacant seat of power in violent clashes, but by October of that same year, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks - having led a second revolution - gained autonomous political control over the Russian Motherland. Upon his ascendancy to power, Lenin immediately overhauled the government with a series of decrees that allowed him to institute the main tenets of the Marxist Communist Manifesto, resulting in the centralization of personal property, education, media, banks, agriculture, utilities, railway, and factories. Lenin also requisitioned the countries gold reserves; exiled, imprisoned or executed many of his previous enemies; and diminished the role of the Church by abolishing religious teachings in school. Solzhenitsyn points to these events as the primary causal factors that would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people due to famine, execution and inhumane mistreatment. On the fifth of December 1917, after merely weeks in power, Lenin issued The Decree of the Soviet of the People's Commissars Concerning the Courts No 1 in which he overhauled the legal system and refused to recognize pre-existing laws by creating organizations that acted independent from civil and criminal law courts. They were known as The Revtribunals, the NKVD troikas and the Chekas(1)(2). These State Organs were relentless in crushing dissent within the newly formed Communist Party and acted ruthlessly as judge, jury, and executioner.

And it is upon these historical facts that Solzhenitsyn deftly rebukes the widely held Western argument that attributes the failure of Soviet Communism to Joseph Stalin's perverted interpretation. At the time of it's publication, The Gulag Archipelago staggered the Soviet establishment to its knees by daring to rewrite the conventionally held interpretation of Soviet history. Instead of laying blame solely at the feet of Stalin as most historians did, Solzhenitsyn used primary source material, eyewitness accounts, and first hand experience to paint a more nuanced and accurate picture that helped shift the blame squarely onto the shoulders of Vladimir Lenin. Solzhenitsyn pointing out accurately that long before Stalin had taken power in 1924, Lenin had already established a centralized State; the tribunals had already been operating for several years; and in fact, had began under Lenin's control "even before there were either laws or codes." According to Solzhenitsyn, Stalin had merely took over the operations of a previously established, well-running machine.

After seizing control, Lenin wanted to punish anyone who opposed his reign and prior to the trials of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR's), Lenin had pushed for even wider interpretations of execution by shooting to include "propaganda and agitation...passive resistance to the government and mass rejection of the obligations of military service or tax payments."(3) All of Lenin's suggestions would eventually be accepted into the new Communist Code by May 20th and accepted into law by the All Russian Central Executive Committee on June 1, 1922 - seven days before the trial of the SR's. Solzhenitsyn's hypothesis seems to be accurate as historical record offers itself as irrefutable evidence that Lenin would establish the infrastructure, policies and laws from which Stalin would begin to grow his despotic dictatorship. To further substantiate Solzhenitsyn's rebuttal: to those who still hold onto the thought that real communism has never truly been attempted, there remains for their perusal documented historical evidence in the form of nearly one hundred million corpses, spread over the landscape of several dozen countries, definitively proving that communism, no matter when and where it has been attempted, has failed - just as miserably in the Soviet Union as it did in China under Mao, and in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

Terror is a method of persuasion. Vladimir Lenin(4)

In February of 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received eight years imprisonment under Article 58, paragraph 10 of the Soviet Criminal Code for 'spreading anti-Soviet propaganda' stemming from derogatory comments he made towards Stalin in some private letters to a friend. Solzhenitsyn would spend time in several institutions during his incarceration and would get to know the beast very well from the inside. Upon his release, it became imperative for Solzhenitsyn to show how the gulags weren't simply a prison system but that they served a broader political, social and economic purpose. He wanted to show how the gulags were not only used to contain the criminal element but were used as a multipurpose mechanism for widespread population control. And while debate continues between historians and scholars as to the primary intentions of the gulags, the facts remain that, (a) the majority of the northern industrial cities originated directly from concentration camps(5) and the industrialization of the U.S.S.R coincided exactly with the rise of the gulag system, (b) hundreds of thousands of people were exiled to, imprisoned in, or executed at gulags due to their ethnicity, class, religious beliefs, and political orientation, and (c) tens of millions of people died due the failures of communism during the height of the gulag era. In fact, by the beginning of the Second World War the gulag system grew to include at least 53 prisons and 423 concentration camps.(6) In addition to these numbers, there was an estimated 500 more 'prisoner of war' camps in which a further 4,000,000 Zeks had been imprisoned. (7)

"And so the waves rolled on -They arrested members of the nobility for their social origin. They arrested members of their families. Finally, unable to draw distinctions, they arrested members of the "individual nobility" - i.e., anybody who had simply graduated from a university. And once they were arrested, there was no way back. You can't undo what has been done! The Sentinel of the Revolution never makes a mistake!"(8)

Throughout The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn also writes of the systematic collection programs that took place under Stalin's regime. These searches emanating from the central State agencies, spread across Russia in concentric wave after wave of purges. They would rake communities clean of "profiteers or marauders", and would bring them before the insiduous Revtribunals, who would then read the law in it's widest possible interpretation. If they deemed you a threat to the security of the Party in any way, you could be administered a legislative penalty under a variety of acronyms (see below). "The only witnesses heard were for the prosecution. Defense witnesses were not allowed to testify."(9) Cases were settled in minutes with nothing more than coerced confessions that had been made under the duress of torture or without confessions or evidence at all. A line flowed from these show trials to the prisons like a sewer pipe. The gulags were filled with all types: students, intelligentsia, engineers, non-orthodox religious leaders, Kulaks (a privileged class of peasants), socialist revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, nobility, anarchists, wreckers, emigres, imperialists, Cossacks and Mensheviks - it mattered not who you were, eventually everyone would be caught up in the undertow and the waves crashed down upon the heads of everyone equally. No one would escape the Sentinels; there was no where to hide from the all "penetrating, eternally wakeful Organs(10)". It was an integrated, systematic method of social prophylaxis.(11) And if you were found guilty - as most were - you were deprived of the right to correspond; deprived of your titles, ranks, and decorations; your property confiscated; and you were imprisoned for up to twenty-five years, or exiled with no chance to appeal or executed by shooting. The NKVD troikas admit in their own documents to have executed nearly a quarter of a million people from July 1937 to November 1938(12). Solzhenitsyn writing that the NKVD was "subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan."(13)

The "great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide-sweeping [Article] 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation."Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, pg.60

The various ambiguous ways you could be convicted of a crime under Article 58:

ASA -Anti-Soviet Agitation

KRD -Counter-Revolutionary Activity

KRTD-Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity (And that

"T" made the life of a zek in camp much harder.)

PSh -Suspicion of Espionage (Espionage that went beyond

the bounds of suspicion was handed over to a tribunal.)

SVPSh-Contacts Leading (!) to Suspicion of Espionage

KRM -Counter-Revolutionary Thought

VAS -Dissemination of Anti-Soviet Sentiments

SOE -Socially Dangerous Element

SVE -Socially Harmful Element

PD -Criminal Activity (a favorite accusation against

former camp inmates if there was nothing else to be

used against them)

And then, finally, there was the very expansive category:

ChS -Member of a Family (of a person convicted under

one of the foregoing "letter" categories(14)

Solzhenitsyn relies on the statements of over 200 fellow inmates to describe life in the gulag and by the end of the first volume, the reader is left to conclude that being incarcerated in one was like living in a nightmare. The gulag was where the human spirit went to die. If there was a hell on earth, the gulags were certainly it. Solzhenitsyn tells us through first hand testimony of inhumane torture techniques, labourers being forced to endure extreme sub zero conditions without shoes or adequate clothing, lengthy solitary confinement sentences, lice-infested prisons, and blood-thirsty bed bugs. (so relentless was the onslaught of bed bugs in particular that the prisoners would eventually submit to the tiny predators, allowing them to feed at will). Haunting sounds of distant beatings and torture became a normal part of the daily routine while malnutrition, disease, infection, hardship and the acrid smell of rotting death filled the prison air. The gulag was where the world as you once knew it ceased to exist. It was easier to forget your previous life and keep your sanity than it was to hope for freedom and go insane. The gulag was where you learned to let go of all your earthly possessions for it was better to discard forever all memories and to embrace wholeheartedly the fear of the unknown. The gulag had one purpose and that was to crush the soul and the methods and efficiency with which it succeeded was beyond category.

In the forced labour camps the scene was equally atrocious. The Zeks spent long days digging in the mines, or building hydroelectric dams or constructing the railway lines without the benefit of advanced instrumentation or technology and without an adequate supply of food or water. History shows that it is largely upon the backs of the Zeks that the Soviet Union lifted itself out of the mud and into the industrial age, these men were true beasts of burden. They slept in roughly built log shacks with roofs made of sod and huddled together at night to stay warm. Many froze or were worked to death. By 1940, the forced labour camps had become leaders of industry in the Soviet Union. The Zeks were responsible for extracting nearly 50% of the country's nickel, 75% of its tin, 40% of its cobalt, 40% of its chrome/iron ore, 60% of its gold, and 25% of its timber.(15 ) Following Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the number of gulags began to subside substantially; however the gulag administrative institution wasn't closed until January 25, 1960, and forced labor camps continued to exist until 1987. While estimates vary between historians, Solzhenitsyn estimated that as many as fifty million prisoners passed through the gulag system from 1918 to 1956; and there was as many as twelve million people imprisoned at one time(16). There is further research that claims that up to seven million Kulaks died as a result of agricultural collectivization and famine in the years 1932-33. Between 1937 and 1939, an estimated seven million people were arrested merely due to their political beliefs, with at least one million of those sentenced to death. Beginning around the time of The Great Purge (1936), to around 1953, as many as twelve million people died from mistreatment and hardship. The estimated total deaths amounted to around twenty million, or thirteen million excluding peasants but this number does not account for those who died in prisoner of war camps (17) and the number is most likely much higher.

The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most prescient books written in the 20th century and within its pages resides a very important piece of advice for Western society; yet it remains relegated underneath mountains of prating pop culture (a convincing argument can be made to suggest that this is an act of deliberate intention). It is true that Solzhenitsyn offers both historiographical and case study evidence that definitively proves the main causal factors that led to the deaths of an estimated twenty million people in the Soviet Union, but in doing so, he also does something even more important. When his underlying causal factors are overlaid upon other historical examples of disastrous communist regimes, a pattern emerges. We begin to see that the techniques used by Lenin and Stalin are the same methods used by Mao, and Pol Pot. The techniques and details may differ slightly but the ideologies are the same. Broadly speaking, these flawed leaders incorporated a realpolitik based on a cult of personality through a deep understanding of the human condition. They understood something of which the general public remain largely ignorant - that all human beings innately exhibit the same characteristics and aspirations. More specifically, these atavists used biological accidents like race, ethnicity, and gender, along with the sociological accidents of class, religion, and political affiliation to impose a superficial veil of division by appealing to the emotions that created animosity between those with opposing ideological beliefs. All leaders throughout history, from Mussolini to Machiavelli divide people materially by their incorporeal belief systems with the explicit intent of preventing people from connecting by way of the one thing that unites them, their species. As any tyrannical leader will tell you - off the record of course - a united populace of well developed individuals is the perfect antidote to a tyrannical government.

In the West, these communist tactics are omnipotent, overt and obvious; we are relentlessly reminded of our differences despite them being far outnumbered by our substantial similarities. Social issues like gender inequality, immigration, white privilege, gun control, sexual misconduct, political correctness, and the global warming debate are just a few examples of what are known more generally as identity politics. Western governments employ these divisive tools against the masses just as the Marxists did. They manipulate public opinion by exploiting our susceptibility to fear, anger, hate, love, empathy and compassion - just the same as the Soviets and Chinese were manipulated one hundred years ago. It is simply dialectical - from every crisis there is a reaction, and from every reaction arises a solution. And this is easily done by understanding human nature on a psychological level. The homo sapien trusts the familiar and distrusts the unfamiliar; we embrace the comfortable while we discard the uncomfortable; we oppose what we don't understand and we approve of what we do understand. It is innately within us to fear the unknown because throughout our history the human being has played the dual role of the hunter and the hunted. We live and then we die and in between there is conflict and misery in pursuit of happiness. In between the living and the dead we struggle to find a perfect balance of order and chaos. Despite the distractions of a rapidly changing world, the human condition remains unchanged. We are fed an machine-driven, electronic illusion that is constantly changing yet our true aspirations and characteristics firmly remain of the human variety. The communist regimes of yesteryear could only dream of the propaganda methods being used to exploit the human mind today. Where the Communists only had newspapers and the radio, the Western propagandists of today have television and the smart phone.

As those fortunate few who understand history look back at the many failures that define Communism they can all agree that these mistakes need not be repeated. Yet we see a push by the left-wing establishment to extol the virtues of socialism and communism while also denigrating capitalism and democracy. We are constantly being told that the West is inherently racist and sexist yet I challenge the reader to find another country in the world that has done more for woman's rights and advanced the interests of minorities. What we are witnessing in real time is what Karl Marx called the 'class struggle' and we are nearing the end of his 'long march'. At every level we are being divided by irrational ideologies and illogical arguments. As a result we are becoming a nation of supercilious demagogues that lazily repeat talking points and narratives fed to us through the television. Several investigations have proven that Left wing social media conglomerates like Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are playing the part of communist censorship organization Glavlit by eliminating any undesirable printed materials. And when one hears Robert Conquest's critique of 20th century Soviet propaganda in his, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, it sounds as though he is criticizing the mainstream media of today! Conquest stating that Glavlit's whole purpose within the Soviet propaganda machine was "to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item".(18) Make no mistake, we exist in an eerily similar era to that of the oppressive Stalinist regime when we can't differentiate between evaluations of Soviet propaganda and our own. Again I cite Robert Conquest: the "truths repressed, falsehoods in every field were incessantly rubbed in print, at endless meetings, in school, in mass demonstrations, on the radio".(19)

I offer two examples of how communist Marxist tactics are being used today: the Obama Administration passed the Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 that enabled the government to disseminate propaganda to a domestic audience for the first time since World War II. Obama also instituted laws prohibiting whistle blowers from speaking out against corrupt corporations. Both of these pieces of legislation passed without protest from the liberal left largely because of Obama's effective use of cult of personality. We as a people, must remember that our freedom to speak transcends our irrelevant ideologies in much the same way our species is beyond the accidentia of race, ethnicity, gender, class or politics. We must remain vigilant in our pursuit of the Truth as we are being surrounded by irrationality that endures to obliterate it. The mainstream news conglomerates, led by post modern thought, propagate an illogical war against a fictitious myth. Blaming white male privilege for all the worlds ills by perpetuating a pathological theory of toxic masculinity and historians note how it parallels the Communist Party's systematic identification and isolation of the Kulaks prior to committing classicide. Furthermore, there is a movement to divide us even further with the introduction of 70 more gender pronouns and the passing of legislation demanding that we use them. It is frightening to see the ease with which the Left can destroy someone's career with mere allegations of something so ambiguous as 'sexual harassment' despite long standing presumption of innocence and burden of proof laws that should prevent such travesties of justice from happening. And to be clear, it is not on behalf of abdicating for more lenient sexual misconduct laws with which I make this point but with a genuine, heartfelt concern for our very Western values. We are 'innocent until proven guilty' and we can't allow the burden of proof to be swept up in a misguided torrent of public outrage and emotion. I deplore any form of oppression being committed by one human over another. But this issue, and several others that are incessantly tearing away at the fabric of our society are far more nuanced and require far deeper conversations than we are presently having. And, above all, we must understand that these divisions are created by age old techniques to foment hate and chaos that always result in less freedoms and ultimately, an even more oppressive government.

At a time when we desperately need less government we see the centralization or nationalization of banks, agriculture, communication, education, transportation, a graduated tax system, and asset forfeiture that are straight from the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto, and not based on the Constitution. Solzhenitsyn is warning us. This is how it happened in the Soviet Union. Exploiting our fears has created an over-bearing, bloated, Orwellian government that can now watch and record us through our TV's, laptops and smart phones. The Gulag Archipelago remains a poignant, omniscient literary offering that serves as an enormous red flag waving as we near the precipice of a great social schism and if we don't take history into consideration and learn from the past, our collective unwillingness to control our emotions will lead to the vilification and eventual destruction of not only an entire class of people but Western society as we know it.

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External links

1. The NKVD was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union and a precursor to the KGB. Later named the MVD of the USSR and are mostly known for their role in the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin in which they killed according to estimates between 600,000 and two million people, mostly by a single shot to the head.

2. Chekas were a Soviet secret police organization instituted to monitor the gulags but also to arrest, torture and execute those who they deemed to be politically opposed to the Communist Party. They also suppressed worker rebellions and confiscated food. The term Chekism is still used in Russia today and refers to a government run by a special political police force.

3. The Gulag Archipelago, pg. 352.

4. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, pg. 189.

5. "Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps". Arlindo-correia.org. Retrieved January 6, 2009.

6. Getty, Arch; Rittersporn, Gábor; Zemskov, Viktor (October 1993). "Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence" (PDF). American Historical Review. 98 (4): 1017–1049. doi:10.2307/2166597. JSTOR 2166597.

7. Nicolas Werth, The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 - November 1938), Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, [online], published on 20 May 2010, accessed 1 January 2014, URL : http://www.massviolence.org/The-NKVD-Mass-Secret-National-Operations-August-1937, ISSN 1961-9898

8. The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, pg. 40.

9. The Gulag Archipelago, pg. 351

10. The Organs were a network of Secret police.

11. a prophylaxis is a measure taken to maintain health and prevent the spread of disease while a social prophylaxis denotes the same dark connotations that Hitler envisioned for his final solution and exercising in ethnic cleansing.

12. Nicolas Werth, The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 - November 1938), Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, [online], published on 20 May 2010, accessed 1 January 2014, URL : http://www.massviolence.org/The-NKVD-Mass-Secret-National-Operations-August-1937, ISSN 1961-9898

13. The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn pg. 285.

14. Ibid, pg. 284.

15. Wikipedia page, The Gulags. See also Ivanova, Galina Mikhailovna (2000). Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. pp. 69–126.

16. The Gulag Archipelago, pg. 595. According to the researches of the Social Democrats Nicolaevsky and Dallin, there were from fifteen to twenty million prisoners in camps.

17. The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings 1930-1945, Teen Wheatcroft Pg.1321,1322.

18. Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101-111

19. Ibid