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The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 : An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume I) (1973)

Nobel Prize Winners

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Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
1918-
(Translated by Thomas P. Whitney)

    I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not
    having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined it all.
        -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author's epigraph to The Gulag Archipelago

    It seemed as if it was no longer I who was writing; rather, I was swept along, my hand was being
    moved by an outside force, and I was only the firing pin attached to a spring.
        -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies

It certainly helps that he looks like a figure out of the Old Testament, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's enduring image is likely to be that of the prophet of the Soviet Union's doom. No one, including Ronald Reagan, deserves more credit for making the West, and Russia itself, face the fact that Communism was evil, that it had to be defeated, and that it was entirely possible to defeat it. Where One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his most widely read work, is a devastating portrait in miniature of the effects of Soviet oppression on one man, the multi-volume Gulag Archipelago is the sprawling canvas upon which he depicts the entire vile system, sweeping across the decades since 1917 and touching upon every facet of society. It is, in essence, the Prosecutor's indictment, stating the case against the enormous criminal enterprise that was the U. S. S. R. It's always seemed to me that the only document you can really compare it to is Martin Luther's 95 Theses. It too represented a righteous and unanswerable rebuke to a seemingly invincible institution, served as a rallying point for reformers and outright opponents, and ultimately contributed to wholesale changes in that institution (Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church in one case, eventual demise in the case of the Soviet Union) which would have been nearly inconceivable in its absence.

The Gulag represents Solzhenitsyn's attempt to document nearly every phase of the Bolshevik's use of the police apparatus and prison camps for the suppression of dissent, or suspected dissent. Using a wide range of actual examples--many of them personal, others taken from fellow prisoners he might while he was detained--he takes the reader step-by-step through the process of arrest, interrogation, conviction (always conviction), transportation, and imprisonment. One is prepared for a tone of righteous indignation and bitter irony, but I was surprised to find here a kind of dark good humor. Perhaps this is done for effect, Mr. Solzhenitsyn suggesting that the claims of criminality upon which the authorities persecuted, and murdered, so many are worthy of only bemusement. After all, what can be more dangerous to absolute power than for people to greet it with contemptuous laughter? Obviously nothing, since Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished from the Soviet Union on February 13, 1974, just two months after portions of this work began appearing in print in the West, after the KGB had obtained a draft copy. In all likelihood, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's life was only spared because he was already a Nobel Laureate by then, having won the prize in 1970, though he was forbidden to travel outside the country at that time to accept it.

Besides offering a comprehensive Russian account of Soviet terror, Mr. Solzhenitsyn does something of extraordinary importance here, the importance of which most in the West did not fully comprehend until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if then : he drapes the crimes of Communism around the neck of not just Stalin but of Lenin too, and traces the roots of the terror to the very philosophy of Communism itself. It had been a convenient myth for party members in the Soviet Union and fellow travelers here in that the Russian Revolution had been a noble cause and an initial success that was gradually corrupted by the personal evil of just one man, Stalin. True believers clung to this idea both to justify their collaboration with the regime and to give themselves hope that the system could be reformed, to get it back on its original track. Mr. Solzhenitsyn began the process of yanking this prop out from under them, of demonstrating that the system was rotten to its evil core, that no past actions were justified and no just future was possible. In his excellent book, Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick makes a convincing case that Gorbachev failed to understand this critique and its power, and failed to anticipate that it would be the central feature of Glasnost, delegitimizing and destabilizing communism entire, whereas he expected only criticism of certain past leaders and practices, which he could use to his own advantage.

In later years Mr. Solzhenitsyn would move on to an equally powerful criticism of the moral vacuousness and extreme individualism of the West, earning him the loathing of Western intellectual elites. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he has become a harsh critic of the new Russia, for its failure to return to its roots in Orthodox Christianity, earning him the enmity of Russian bureaucrats. You would think that folks might have learned that he is a prophet whose jeremiads you ignore at your own risk.

(Reviewed:01-Aug-01)

Grade: (A+)

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The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 : An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume I) (1973)

Nobel Prize Winners

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