‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil

Published 50 years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Soviet Union’s barbaric system of forced labor camps is arguably the 20th century’s greatest work of nonfiction.

See By Gary Saul Morson. Mr. Morson, a professor of Slavic Languages at Northwestern University, is the author of “Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter” (Harvard University Press). Excerpts:

"Today the word “gulag” is often used figuratively, but in the Soviet Union the Gulag—an acronym designating the system of forced labor camps—was all too real. Millions of people lived and died in the Gulag’s many “islands,” the camps scattered over the vast country. The worst were located in the Kolyma region in northeastern Siberia, where prisoners labored at 50, 60, even 70 degrees below zero and were given insufficient calories to sustain life.

So different was this experience from anything Western intellectuals had imagined, and so thoroughly did it discredit fashionable Marxism, that reports by Gulag survivors were laughed at, especially in France where Marxist ideology was strongest. That all changed when Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s detailed history of the Gulag was smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” published 50 years ago, was much more than a detailed account compiled from the testimonies of hundreds of people; it was also arguably the 20th century’s greatest piece of nonfiction prose."

"In one memorable passage, Solzhenitsyn muses that if the intellectuals of Chekhov’s plays who wondered what things would be like in a few decades had learned “that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath . . . that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot . . . not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”"

"Lenin set up the system of terror and the Gulag while making clear that both were to be permanent features of the new regime."

"those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains stopped at a few corpses “because they had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.”"

"Those accepting Soviet ethics laughed at the very idea of “conscience.” “Right” was whatever aided the Communist Party. In this view, there were no higher values, no absolute good and evil, and the only thing that counted in any action was its result."

"in prison Solzhenitsyn gradually realized the fundamental falsity of ideological thinking: the idea that evil results from bad people, and it is only necessary to rid ourselves of them. Not at all. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”"