In 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was removed from his position as a decorated military officer in the Red Army and sentenced to eight years in a gulag, or a Soviet prison labor camp. He was charged with the crime of “anti-Soviet propaganda”—making negative comments about the country’s leader, Joseph Stalin, in a private letter to a friend. As an author, Solzhenitsyn dedicated his life to writing books that exposed the injustices of the Soviet legal system and the horrific realities of life in prison, where thousands—if not millions—of prisoners died from abuse and neglect in the 20th century.
The Gulag Archipelago is the longest and most ambitious of these books, and it acts as a history of the gulag system from the 1917 revolution to the death of Stalin in 1953, with a focus on the years that Stalin was in power. Alongside scenes from his own imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn includes anecdotes from other prisoners, excerpts from letters and courtroom transcripts, writings from Soviet officials that attempted to justify the camps, and more. According to these varied sources, life in the gulag was brutal and violent, physically and psychologically breaking down the prisoners it didn’t kill outright.
Inaccuracies and Exaggeration in The Gulag Archipelago
We now know that the numbers Solzhenitsyn provided for the scale of the camps were most likely inaccurate, though by how much is difficult to determine. While Solzhenitsyn suggests that around 12 to 15 million people were imprisoned between 1917 and 1953, the most conservative estimates place the number closer to 2 to 3 million. Regardless, an enormous number of lives were destroyed in gulags, and while Solzhenitsyn’s numbers are questionable and the subsequent decades of scholarship have complicated some of his arguments about the government’s goals for prisoners, his overall impressions of the camps—as sites full of theft, abuse, sexual violence, and random executions—have never been contradicted.
Ultimately, even Solzhenitsyn’s inaccuracies worked as a criticism of the Soviet government—he had no choice but to use unreliable sources because the government wouldn’t acknowledge what it was doing. As several scholars have pointed out, Solzhenitsyn was concerned less with perfect accuracy than with starting a conversation by challenging the government to refute his claims of large-scale imprisonment.
The book was written in secret, under constant threat of seizure by State Security—the counterintelligence and secret police organization responsible for operating the camps—and of Solzhenitsyn being returned to prison. While the book ultimately had to be published abroad in France, Solzhenitsyn intended it primarily for Russian readers. His hope was that public exposure of Soviet human rights abuses would encourage others to speak out and demand change from their government, despite the consequences.
Publication and Impact
Solzhenitsyn’s secrecy when writing the book was justified—the KGB seized his papers multiple times, and his assistant either killed herself or was murdered for attempting to protect his work. Almost as soon as the book was published, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported to Germany. He and his family subsequently fled to the United States and lived there for 20 years, unable to return home until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Despite these attempts by the government to silence Solzhenitsyn, the book had a huge impact both at home and internationally. The first volume of the book was circulated in Russia through underground samizdat publications, inspiring a few other gulag survivors to self-publish their own accounts, and the popularity of translations fostered international criticism of Soviet gulags. An official version of the book was finally released in Russia in the mid-1990s, where it’s now required reading for public school students.
The Gulag Archipelago moves through the history of the camps chronologically and geographically, relying heavily on personal accounts and Solzhenitsyn’s own memories. The full text is nearly 2,000 pages and was broken up into three volumes for publication. This guide is based on the abridged version produced in 1982 for educational use. While the overall narrative is the same, this version omits many of the extended personal anecdotes and details about the gulag system prior to Stalin’s rise to power in the late 1920s.
This guide organizes the information around Solzhenitsyn’s central argument that the gulag system was a tool of mass violence, exploitation, and state-sanctioned murder. Despite what the Soviet government claimed, it didn’t provide any benefit to society and it wasn’t rehabilitative for prisoners. It was a way for the government to consolidate power and keep the people in line. Solzhenitsyn makes this argument through the following points:
We’ll explore each of these points in detail while also considering the book’s historical context and comparing Solzhenitsyn’s account to the treatment of prisoners worldwide today.
Much of The Gulag Archipelago is dedicated to describing just how poorly Soviet prisoners were treated, to the extent that Solzhenitsyn repeatedly draws comparisons between the gulag system and the execution camps operated by the Nazis in World War II. He argues that, although the gulag system wasn’t a tool of genocide in the traditional sense—it wasn’t intended to wipe out a specific national or ethnic group—it still operated as a system of state-sanctioned murder, moving supposed criminals out of the public eye and exploiting them for labor as much as possible before killing them.
(Shortform note: While the Soviet government tried to frame the gulag as being a more humane reformation of Russia’s pre-revolution Tsarist prison system, in practice the two systems were more alike than different. Huge numbers of prisoners were arrested for criticizing the government, exiled to Siberia, and forced to labor as miners or loggers. In many cases, former Tsarist prison sites were actually taken over and reopened as gulags. The main difference between the two systems was scale—even if you accept the most conservative estimates, gulags imprisoned 10 times as many prisoners, operating thousands of camps simultaneously.)
On the rare occasions when the gulag system was discussed in public, it was framed as rehabilitative. Prisoners would enter as criminals or “parasites,” labor to provide a useful service to society, and exit as productive workers. However, as Solzhenitsyn points out, the prison system wasn’t designed to facilitate reintegration back into society. Terms were so long and the work so brutal that most prisoners exited with their health totally destroyed and having lost touch with anyone on the outside. In addition, release from prison wasn’t unconditional, as most prisoners were released into exile and ordered, on threat of re-imprisonment, never to return to the cities where they had previously lived and worked.
Rethinking the Goals of Prison
Most prison systems worldwide claim to be able to reform or rehabilitate prisoners, just as the Soviet government framed the gulag system. However, the modern-day prison abolition movement argues that prison systems actually operate as systems of revenge and social control. Prisons aren’t designed to help prisoners or the victims of their crimes, but to maintain “law and order,”—the government’s ability to control people. The three main arguments of the anti-prison movement are:
Most people who wind up in prison are driven there by poverty and lack of access to educational or professional resources and are not inherently dangerous.
Time in prison is physically and psychologically damaging and actually makes it harder for people to live peaceful and law-abiding lives after release.
Prison disproportionately affects the most marginalized members of society, who serve longer terms for less serious offenses.
Anti-prison activists propose alternative models for dealing with crime, most of which involve community-run service, mental health and educational organizations intervening in the lives of at-risk people, and ensuring that former criminals make some kind of restitution to their victims.
In this section, we’ll detail how gulags subjected prisoners to forced labor, physical abuse, long prison terms, and exile.
The vast majority of gulag prisoners spent their terms doing “general labor” as miners or loggers in remote parts of Siberia. The camps’ designers themselves acknowledged the brutal nature of this work and that many prisoners died on the job. According to Solzhenitsyn, gulag administrators believed that prisoners were only useful to the state in the first three months. Beyond that, labor and mistreatment would have taken too much of a toll, and the best thing was for them to die quickly.
(Shortform note: In the gulag, workers who died or were released would simply be replaced with new arrivals. Functionally, this system was equivalent to slavery: a system that also requires a steady supply of new people who are either so desperate or who have no other choice but to accept unlivable conditions.)
In addition to the inherent physical demands of mining and logging, prisoners worked 12- or 14-hour shifts, were poorly fed and clothed, and never had adequate shelter. They received no formal training in their work and had limited access to tools. Solzhenitsyn also points out that they were, naturally, unmotivated—a prisoner’s survival could depend on their ability to avoid working as much as possible, conserving their energy to avoid burning through the few calories they were given each day. As a result, the camps often operated at a loss, barely justifying the cost of housing and feeding (however poorly) the prisoners in the first place.
(Shortform note: Some camps exploited prisoners for their intellectual labor instead. Special Design Bureaus, or sharashkas, housed prisoners who had formerly been scientists or engineers and forced them to do technological research on behalf of the state. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t discuss sharashkas at length in The Gulag Archipelago, since they were the focus of his 1968 novel In the First Circle, but he stated several times throughout his life that he only survived the gulag because he spent around half his term in a sharashka.)
Physical and sexual abuse were part of everyday life in the camps. Guards regularly punished prisoners—for real or imagined infractions—by beating them, taking away their clothing or personal possessions, depriving them of sleep, or keeping them in solitary confinement. Solzhenitsyn notes that, in many prisons, the living quarters had no latrine. Prisoners would have to wait for the guards to accompany them outside to relieve themselves, often only once a day, and this privilege could be revoked as a punishment.
(Shortform note: Fictional depictions of torture often focus on beatings, but tactics designed to humiliate or put stress on prisoners gradually—taking away clothing, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation or sensory overload, and so on—can be just as devastating. Modern international law surrounding torture makes a point to define torture not simply as physical abuse, but as any “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”)
Sexual violence was widespread in the camps, especially for female prisoners or children (from the mid-1930s on, children over the age of 12 could be tried as adults, and Solzhenitsyn claims that thousands served terms in gulags throughout the ’40s-60s). Prisoners were harassed at random by their fellow prisoners and forced into sexual relationships with guards, either in exchange for better treatment or on threat of being assigned to worse labor conditions.
(Shortform note: Modern pop culture depictions of sexual violence in prison tend to emphasize the threat of rape from other prisoners and particularly sensationalize same-sex or cross-racial activity. In fact, most of the sex that occurs between prisoners is consensual, and it’s much more common for prisoners to be sexually abused by guards or other authority figures.)
Even when the prison administration wasn’t actively hurting the prisoners, it neglected them—prisoners were regularly denied medical treatment and forced to keep laboring until they were physically incapable of doing so. Those who survived illnesses often suffered, for the rest of their lives, from the lingering effects of malnutrition and permanent damage to their respiratory and gastrointestinal systems.
(Shortform note: While prisoners have access to healthcare in the United States, the quality of that care is limited, and it’s not uncommon for chronic health conditions to be poorly treated or for warning signs of a health crisis to go ignored to the extent that the prisoner is left with lasting damage. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, lack of resources and mishandling of social distancing procedures meant that thousands of prisoners got sick.)
It was common for prisoners in the gulag to serve 10- or 25-year terms, regardless of the severity of the offense. Children were generally given three to five years, and Solzhenitsyn’s own eight-year sentence was on the lower end of sentences for anti-Soviet activity. In addition, prisoners often had their sentences extended as a punishment by the camp guards. These extensions were made without a new conviction or investigation process. Rather than taking on additional months or years, prisoners would have their sentence reset, so that they would have to begin serving their 10 or 25 years again from that point forward—regardless of how much time they’d already served.
(Shortform note: Most legal systems scale the length of prison terms to the severity of the crime, and offer a number of opportunities for prisoners to reduce the length of their sentences based on good behavior. The length of Soviet prison terms was extreme by any standard, and the ability to extend sentences without the intervention of a judge is unheard of in most other nations.)
Release from prison meant an end to forced labor, but ex-prisoners were not given all the rights of free citizens. Most were ordered never to return to their former homes and forced to live instead in remote villages and cities on the outskirts of the USSR. Many of these areas were directly outside the prisons in which they’d previously been held. They had to regularly check in with local police but were now expected to find their own food and housing, sleeping in shacks and taking on underpaid menial labor to survive. Some even accepted work within their former prison, this time as contract laborers.
In short, exile was a continuation of prison, just with slightly more freedom of movement. Solzhenitsyn notes that ex-prisoners’ way of life was unstable, since they could be forced by police order or the whims of State Security to move to a different community. Some fled exile and moved back to other parts of the USSR, but they had to remain in hiding or else risk being returned to prison.
(Shortform note: Even in countries which fully restore the rights of citizenship to ex-prisoners—either upon release or after a probationary period—the stigma of having spent time in prison can make getting housing and work difficult. In the United States, felons are barred from certain professions, and ex-prisoners are regularly passed over in favor of less experienced candidates. Ex-prisoners often struggle with poverty and are significantly more likely than the average citizen to be homeless.)
Though the conditions Solzhenitsyn describes were obviously inhumane, they were rarely discussed in public—let alone protested—prior to the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel about the camps in 1962. Solzhenitsyn argues that this silence and the extent and brutality of the gulag system itself was made possible by the near-total control the Soviet government had over its citizens. The government kept people largely in the dark about how it operated, forced them to stick to state-approved narratives of history and pop culture, severely limited communication with the outside world, and criminalized any expressions of doubt or dissidence.
The extent of this control was such that citizens not only complied with the state out of fear for their own safety but were also indoctrinated into accepting propaganda as the absolute truth, no matter how obviously it contradicted the reality of their lives. For example, according to Solzhenitsyn, many prisoners in the gulags who knew they were innocent nonetheless went to their deaths without any resistance, having such faith in the system that they believed the state would eventually realize its mistake and exonerate them.
Soviet Indoctrination and 1984
George Orwell famously satirized this level of brainwashing in his novel 1984, which he based in part on the Soviet Union. In the fictional totalitarian nation of Oceania, holding opinions critical of the state is a criminal offense known as thoughtcrime, and citizens are expected to forget the past and even the present when it contradicts the Party line. The book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, actively represses his own memories of the period before the Party came to power, fearing the consequences—torture, imprisonment, or becoming an “unperson”—should he fail to accept propaganda as reality. Soviet citizens would similarly feign ignorance of the gulag system so that they could avoid being swept up in it.
In this section, we’ll discuss how the government indoctrinated its citizens through secrecy, propaganda, and xenophobia.
Though the existence of gulags wasn’t a secret, few people prior to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago knew just how extensive the camp system was. Solzhenitsyn writes that there were no public records of how many people were in the camps, for what crimes, for how long, or in what conditions prisoners were held. When the news or state-sponsored literature referenced the prisons, they portrayed them in exclusively positive terms, as places where enemies of the state were neutralized and put to work for the safety and benefit of ordinary citizens. Any attempts to question this official narrative would be construed as anti-Soviet activity, itself a crime.
Arrests and sentencing were conducted largely in secret. Many prisoners were seized off the street or had their home invaded in the middle of the night, weren’t told what they were accused of, and were physically attacked or robbed in the process. Security officials were under no obligation to inform a prisoner’s loved ones where or for what they were being held, and those arrested had no right to a lawyer. The text of the state Criminal Code wasn’t available for public reading and was denied to those undergoing interrogation when they asked for it.
(Shortform note: When someone isn’t aware of their legal rights, they’re vulnerable to mistreatment and exploitation. The Criminal Code Solzhenitsyn references actually had stipulations against torture or holding a prisoner indefinitely, but these rules were rarely enforced. Today, many nations have laws requiring that police inform suspects of their rights before taking them into custody—for example, in the United States, the Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona determined that police must tell people that they have a right to legal representation and to refuse to answer questions upon arrest.)
Solzhenitsyn argues that the secrecy with which criminal investigations were conducted worked to terrorize both prisoners and free citizens. So long as arrests weren’t public knowledge, people would simply disappear, and the facts of what they did or what had happened to them would come out only through rumors. Even if multiple people disappeared from a single community, it was difficult for their neighbors to understand the scale of arrests taking place.
(Shortform note: Modern international law forbids the enforced disappearances of prisoners with no acknowledgment of their arrest being made to the public or to their loved ones, but laws governing the prisoner’s right to personally communicate with the outside world—through visits, phone calls, letters, and so on—vary by country, and these rights are sometimes denied as a punishment.)
From the 1930s on, the Soviet Union had an extremely robust and powerful propaganda system, exerting near-total control over how the government was depicted in the news, radio and television, works of literary fiction, and in education. Historical events that threatened to embarrass the government were covered up, while successes were exaggerated.
(Shortform note: While Solzhenitsyn focuses on how propaganda was used to cover up political scandals, the strength of Soviet propaganda can also be seen in how economic developments were covered, such as the reporting on the Five-Year Plans, a series of government programs begun in the 1930s to overhaul the USSR’s struggling economy. While the first two Five-Year Plans were successful in modernizing the country’s agricultural and industrial systems, the propaganda machine glossed over delays and claimed inflated production levels.)
This propaganda machine operated through two primary mechanisms: historical revisionism and mislabeling.
The government continually revised official histories, erasing past events or figures in order to serve current political needs. Solzhenitsyn notes that many Soviet politicians and security officials were imprisoned or disgraced after decades of service, despite having been previously depicted as heroes. The purges of the 1930s, in which Stalin had dozens of his political rivals removed from power and scrubbed from the historical record, were the most famous example of this practice.
(Shortform note: Interestingly, historical revisionism could sometimes act to make society more open and progressive by ending the veneration of authoritarian figures. For example, in 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev delivered a “secret speech” in which he publicly condemned Stalin’s leadership and the “cult of personality” which had formed around him. This sudden change from universal worship of Stalin to open criticism was a shock to the country, but it opened the door for greater ideological freedom and reform—at least until Khrushchev himself was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.)
Another aspect of the propaganda system was the widespread use of euphemism or deliberate mislabeling to obscure the realities of mass deaths or human rights abuses. For example, when public news media reported on the widespread use of prison labor, it often called prisoners “volunteers” and downplayed the physically demanding nature of their work.
(Shortform note: Prison labor is widespread in the United States today, and while information about this practice is publicly available, many people remain ignorant of just how many industries rely on prison labor, how poorly prisoners are paid (often cents per day, if at all), and how dangerous their working conditions are. Anti-prison activists argue that prison labor isn’t just economic exploitation, but a direct outgrowth of American slavery—the 13th Amendment, which ostensibly outlawed slavery, includes the exception that forced labor may be used as “punishment for a crime.”)
Mislabeling could also be used to demonize prisoners, thus discouraging people from sympathizing with them. For example, it was common to refer to those arrested for counter-revolutionary or anti-Soviet activity—the crime for which Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned—as “fascists.” Former Red Army soldiers who wound up in the gulag were often depicted as Nazi collaborators, despite the fact that most of them had been arrested for crimes totally unrelated to their military service, and some were even former POWs who had been liberated from concentration camps.
(Shortform note: There were some genuine Nazi collaborators in the gulag. During the war, the Nazis captured and recruited a number of Russian POWs in order to organize them into a makeshift “Russian Liberation Army” led by former Red Army General Andrey Vlasov. After the war ended, those “Vlasov men” who failed to escape to Western Europe were either executed or imprisoned in the gulag. Controversially, Solzhenitsyn defended them by arguing that they were victims of Soviet exploitation who joined the Nazis to survive or to fight against communism, not because they agreed with Nazi ideology.)
Another way the government could indoctrinate its citizens was by setting up a kind of us-versus-them mentality, wherein the Soviet Union was the bastion of morality and strength and had to be defended unquestioningly against other, more corrupt nations. Much of the Soviet Union’s national identity, particularly during the Stalinist period Solzhenitsyn focuses on, was based on the supposed dichotomy of the West—consisting of the capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United States—and the East—consisting of the Soviet Union, China, and various other communist regimes. These two spheres would compete for international influence and economic success throughout the 20th century.
(Shortform note: This West-East dichotomy was equally important to the United States’ national identity during this period (1945-1991, sometimes called the Cold War era), but in the American imagination, the West was the bastion of morality and strength and the USSR was the corrupting threat. This framing was used to justify proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as a culture of paranoia and hostility toward any Americans suspected of being communists.)
Because this conflict was positioned as a matter of ideology, the Soviet government limited cultural exchange between the West and the East. They made it difficult to cross the border and forbade the trade of specific books, films, and music from outside the Soviet bloc. They also censored literature and art by Soviet citizens, arguing that material that depicted the government too critically could be co-opted by Western nations as a form of anti-Soviet propaganda. This xenophobia provided the basis for Solzhenitsyn’s persecution after the publication of his first novel—he was deemed a national security risk.
(Shortform note: Some cross-cultural exchange took place anyway, in secret. In the Soviet satellite state of Estonia, for example, citizens were able to access foreign TV signals and watch American shows like Knight Rider and Dallas, and in the ’40s-60s, smuggled Western jazz records gave birth to an underground “hipster” subculture among Russian teenagers. In the other direction, works of art by Soviet citizens that didn’t meet with state approval were sometimes snuck out and published in the West to great acclaim—this was the case for several of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, as well as works by Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Bulgakov.)
Having gone out of its way to make the outside world seem unfamiliar and threatening, the Soviet Union could then wield deportation as a punishment. Those deported would have no hope of communicating with their friends and family back home. Solzhenitsyn notes that when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he was too afraid to leave the country to claim it, believing that the Soviet government would not allow him back across the border.
(Shortform note: While the outside world wasn’t as hostile or terrifying as the USSR claimed, it wasn’t home, and many Soviet dissidents were unhappy living in the West. Solzhenitsyn himself was a recluse, and quickly became unpopular in America for his conservative, Russian nationalist politics and his tendency to give speeches condemning American consumer culture.)
According to Solzhenitsyn, another way the Soviet Union could control its citizens was via social alienation, or conditioning them not to care about or connect with each other, which worked to repress dissident movements. The legal and prison systems discouraged feelings of empathy while encouraging feelings of instability and fear. There was no logic to who got arrested or punished and who didn’t, so citizens in and outside the camps could only protect themselves by informing on, stealing from, and violently attacking one another. They became wary of offering aid to someone in need, and didn’t feel confident enough in other people to try to band together to stand up to their oppressors.
(Shortform note: The term “social alienation” is often associated with Karl Marx, a communist philosopher and cultural icon in the Soviet Union. Marx condemned capitalist societies for reducing people down to their labor, treating them as mere “cogs in a machine” whose feelings, relationships, and desires didn’t matter and should even be repressed when they threatened to interfere with profits. Though the USSR was a communist society that ostensibly valued its workers, it was also an authoritarian state, and it too benefited from repressing its citizens’ humanity in order to preserve the government’s absolute power over the people.)
This alienation worked differently in the free world versus in the gulag. Solzhenitsyn describes alienation in the free world as mainly being a lack of trust between people, while alienation in the gulag often involved violence.
Solzhenitsyn writes that State Security constantly recruited informers from among the general population. Officials persuaded citizens to turn against their friends and neighbors through appeals to their patriotism, offers of material rewards, or—in the method Solzhenitsyn claims was most common—threats. Because anti-Soviet activity and knowledge of such activity committed by another person were both crimes, security officers could seize people at random and threaten to imprison them if they didn't provide names.
Though not everyone became an informer, the popularity of this method further encouraged citizens to mistrust each other—anyone you met could be an informer. In addition, if someone you became close to was later arrested, your association would reflect badly on you. Therefore, it was best practice to trust no one and to assume that any person you met would sacrifice you to protect their own standing.
(Shortform note: The belief that there are informers in a community can be more dangerous and destabilizing than the informers themselves. For example, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century, the IRA (an anti-British paramilitary group) would make people suspected of being informers for the British disappear. Some of these people were legitimate spies, but some weren’t, and their murders destroyed families and deepened feelings of hostility and suspicion between Republican and Unionist neighborhoods—feelings which regularly erupted into violence.)
Soviet citizens were also under pressure to break off certain relationships in order to prove their loyalty to the state. Failure to renounce your association with someone who’d been imprisoned was considered anti-Soviet activity, no matter if they were a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a child. Those who gave up these relationships—either willingly or under duress—were still often fired, denied housing, and socially ostracized by their community. In the end, there was too much to lose from association with the wrong person for the vast majority of Soviet citizens to be motivated to seek out close relationships, or to consider forming coalitions that would have allowed them to stand up to State Security and other government forces.
(Shortform note: Despite this alienation, some dissident organizations did begin to form in the USSR after Stalin’s death in 1953. However, repression by the government was still severe enough that these groups either operated mostly in secret or were gradually broken up as their members were arrested, deported, institutionalized for alleged psychiatric illnesses, or outright assassinated.)
Solzhenitsyn describes relationships in prison as being inherently contradictory. He writes that the friendships and even romantic connections formed between prisoners were the only things that made the years survivable, but at the same time, the prisons were deliberately constructed to make it difficult or impossible for a prisoner to act out of anything but self-interest. For example, in the vast majority of gulags, there wasn’t enough food, clothing, or living space for every prisoner, and prisoners would have to compete with or steal from each other in order to survive.
(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s claim that relationships between prisoners could be life-saving is supported by accounts from prisoners all over the world. Despite living in abusive environments where they endured violence from staff and fellow prisoners alike, many formerly incarcerated people speak positively of the friends or loved ones they met in prison, calling them the most significant relationships of their lives and maintaining those relationships after release.)
Hierarchies in the gulag also contributed to the alienation. An entire class of prisoners managed to avoid general labor by emphasizing skills they’d acquired outside of prison, such as mathematics, military experience, or administrative work.
Rather than serving as miners or loggers, these “trusties” became cooks, record-keepers, medical assistants, foremen, and even lower-level guards. Their more privileged positions entitled them to less crowded housing and the first pick of food, which allowed them to take more than their fair share. Some were even given the authority to determine how well other prisoners were treated—whether they received a full ration, were written up for failing to meet work quotas, were punished for breaking minor prison rules, and so on.
According to Solzhenitsyn, a large portion if not the majority of the prisoners who survived the camps were trusties. Other prisoners were inevitably ground down by the brutality of their work and lack of access to the same kinds of resources.
(Shortform note: Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl makes a similar observation to Solzhenitsyn’s about trusties in Man’s Search for Meaning, his memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. According to Frankl, those prisoners who held onto their morals and refused to betray one another generally died in the camps, while those who cooperated with the administration or thought only of themselves—becoming kapos, stealing from other prisoners, arranging for someone else to take their place on a transport to the gas chambers, and so on—were more likely to survive. The camps were designed to make the prisoners’ lives an “unrelenting struggle” for survival and to favor those most willing to exploit others.)
While much of The Gulag Archipelago focuses on detailing the abuse prisoners suffered at the hands of low-level state representatives—the police, State Security officers, and camp guards—Solzhenitsyn also stresses that these representatives were themselves victims of indoctrination and social alienation. While he doesn’t excuse their actions, he argues that they were under incredible pressure from the state to participate in violence and that most acted out of fear of their leaders, the desire for safety, and the need to conform.
In this section, we’ll detail how the police and security officers were conditioned to feed the cycle of abuse.
While it was obvious that joining State Security would require you to act against your neighbors, many were attracted to the job because it paid well and had ample opportunities for advancement. Soviet propaganda depicted State Security as the defenders of the people and the righteous arm of the state, rooting out evil. Many recruits came straight from communist youth organizations, state-run universities, and the military, and so had already bought into this framing to some extent.
Once they joined, it was easy for the power they wielded to go to their heads. Representatives of State Security and the police, no matter how young or inexperienced, were treated with deference by all members of society. This was partly due to the effectiveness of propaganda, but also to fear—everyone knew that these officials could arrest anyone they liked and were under pressure to constantly make new arrests just so they could be seen working. Some used their power to settle personal grudges, such as by having romantic rivals arrested.
These recruits were quickly exposed to the kinds of abuses they were expected to participate in. They would observe their superior officers beating, torturing, robbing, and sexually assaulting prisoners and were encouraged, if not outright ordered, to participate. Compliance showed loyalty, while refusal or squeamishness was mocked or punished. Showing too much sympathy for a prisoner could get you arrested for anti-Soviet sentiment.
“Just Following Orders” as a Defense
In the full version of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn quotes from letters he received from a number of current and former security officers. Many were defensive about their participation in the abuse of prisoners and argued that they had no choice but to follow orders. The “just following orders” defense is a controversial one in human rights debates, due in large part to its association with the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46.
The trials concluded that the “superior orders” defense was illegitimate in cases where the order being given would violate international law and that the requirements of military obedience don’t relieve you of the responsibility to make the right “moral choice.” While most modern states comply with the trials’ conclusion, modern attempts to hold soldiers accountable for war crimes or other violations of international law still tend to divide responsibility based on the defendant’s position of power and level of direct participation—a grunt soldier will likely be prosecuted less harshly than the commander of their unit.
Solzhenitsyn gives some accounts of security officers who acted against orders to assist their victims—stopping a beating, warning a free civilian under suspicion to run, turning a blind eye to the theft of extra rations, and so on. However, these stories are far and few between, and Solzhenitsyn points out that the kind of official who would behave this way rarely rose within the ranks of State Security, lacking the cruelty and initiative that would impress their superiors and get them to the point of rewriting policy.
(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s point is very similar to the “no good cops” argument made by modern anti-police and anti-prison activists, who assert that it’s impossible for there to be good individuals within an inherently exploitative system. Even if an individual acting alone could make a difference, those who resist abusing their power and try to help victims are often openly reviled by their peers and become victims themselves. Examples include the number of police officers killed or threatened for exposing corruption within their precinct and the widespread hatred for and undermining of Internal Affairs and similar accountability organizations.)
Solzhenitsyn himself nearly became a security officer, and while he ultimately refused on moral grounds, he admits that he behaved nearly as badly as the average camp guard once he was an officer in the Red Army. He was encouraged to mistreat the men under his command, and even after his arrest, he failed to regard his fellow prisoners as equals. Only after years of imprisonment did he begin to regret his actions. He claims that he behaved so cruelly not because it was necessary or even because he enjoyed it, but because it was expected of him.
The Appeal of Abusing Others
Numerous psychological studies have concluded that giving people unchecked authority and encouraging them to feel solidarity with one group and superiority over or distance from another can lead otherwise law-abiding and moral people to commit horrific acts of violence. Two infamous examples include the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Third Wave, both of which were shut down early after the detrimental effects on their participants became obvious.
These experiments both found that it took only a few days for a group of seemingly normal students, having been given absolute authority over their peers, to begin enforcing authoritarian rules of conduct and treating anyone who resisted with cruelty and sadism. The heads of these experiments, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and high school history teacher Ron Jones, concluded that their subjects were so attracted to the feelings of power and group acceptance that they willingly sacrificed their morals.
Throughout the book, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that the worst aspect of imprisonment was not the brutal conditions or mistreatment, but its inherent hopelessness. Prisoners’ lives weren’t valued, and there were no avenues for early release or reconsideration of a case. The only thing prisoners could focus on was survival, and this, again, often required them to steal from and abuse others.
Attempts at protest usually failed, either because the camp guards didn’t care about the prisoners’ well-being or because the prisoners had no public forum in which to make their grievances known. For example, while hunger strikes attracted attention in prisons all over the world in the 20th century, they almost always failed in Soviet prisons because no one outside the prison knew if a prisoner was starving, and no one inside the prison cared. All a hunger strike would do was make the prisoner even weaker.
(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s point about the ineffectiveness of these hunger strikes is a common critique made of nonviolent protest: that it requires an audience who already cares, at least somewhat, about the lives of the protesters. Nonviolent protest tends to fail in instances where the protesters are totally dehumanized or the government can make their protest invisible to the general public. Even in cases of hunger strikes outside the Soviet Union, poorly publicized ones fizzled out where well-publicized ones succeeded in their goals.)
The only methods of resistance that did have any effect were work strikes or outright violent takeovers of the camp by prisoners. However, such protests eventually collapsed, either because the prisoners were too weak to continue resisting or because the military intervened to murder the strikers. In the end, the labor prisoners provided was not significant enough to the state to serve as an effective bargaining chip, and camp authorities would rather kill a few prisoners to keep the rest in line than concede anything to them.
(Shortform note: While Solzhenitsyn mainly discusses the Kengir Rebellion of 1954, similar uprisings occurred at the Vorkuta and Norilsk camps the previous year, shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin. Modern studies of these strikes argue that they were as successful as they were because the prisoners were well-organized and politically informed—they formed groups around shared nationality or military experience, circulated newspapers and pamphlets arguing for better treatment, and kept one another housed and fed during the months they operated independently.)
According to Solzhenitsyn, what would have made the biggest difference for prisoners in these cases was some form of transparency. If free citizens knew the extent of the abuses taking place in prison and the prisoners could count on their attempts at protest being recognized and publicized on the outside, they might have been able to work together to demand change. The Soviet government’s ability to control the flow of information was so significant because it kept the people ignorant of their most powerful tool of resistance—their numbers.
Repressing People in a Supposedly People-First System
As a political system, communism is supposed to advance the needs of the people, particularly the working class, by sharing everything—food, housing, goods, and so on—equally among them. Authoritarian communist states use this same rhetoric even as they crush attempts by “the people” to set up democratic structures or voice resistance.
The Soviet Union managed this cognitive dissonance by substituting “the Party” for “the people.” The Party supposedly represented the people’s best interests, even as in practice it was controlled by a few elites. Any decision the Party made was spun as representing the will of the people, while attempts by individuals to stand against it were attacks on the people. This narrowed the definition of who counted as “people” to only the most loyal and obedient citizens.
Solzhenitsyn ends The Gulag Archipelago with a call for other accounts of the camps to be published—not state-sanctioned narratives, but personal accounts that might supplement or complicate his own work by giving more accurate numbers or a more complete picture of conditions in various camps. Wrapping up his critique of the Soviet government as an oppressive and authoritarian institution, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t propose specific political changes (though he hints several times that he believes that the camp system ought to be abolished), but instead appeals to the reader to recognize the government’s corruption and to seek out alternative histories from ordinary citizens.
(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s approach to activism is an example of what is sometimes called “speaking truth to power,” a type of non-violent protest that tries to make uncomfortable facts public, in the face of censorship and the threat of violent retaliation, as a way to inform and inspire others.)
The Soviet government worked to make its power seem absolute and to discourage citizens from banding together. By exposing these tactics and the brutality with which prisoners were treated, Solzhenitsyn says he hoped to start a trend of public criticism of the government in literature, and that he believed that open communication between citizens would create the conditions for more concrete forms of resistance. The government remained in power for as long as it had by making it impossible for people to discuss the grim realities of their lives. If open discussion had suddenly become possible, the people might have recognized how abusive the government truly was and how utterly it had failed to fulfill the promises of the revolution—equality, prosperity, and an end to exploitation.
The Collapse of the Soviet System
Solzhenitsyn’s vision of the future of anti-Soviet resistance came to pass when the Soviet Union collapsed two decades later, in the early ’90s. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR instituted a number of democratic policies which decreased censorship, released political prisoners, required greater transparency from the government, and expanded freedom of speech for the average citizen.
The following years of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) were marked by protests, the formation of a number of human rights organizations, public recognition of past atrocities, and successful independence movements in the Soviet states of Eastern Europe. All of these actions had previously been met with violent repression, but this time they were largely permitted, and the Soviet Union itself was formally—and peacefully—dissolved in December of 1991. Though this had not been his goal, Gorbachev declared that the government had lost popular support and that it was time for something new.
The Gulag Archipelago, as a history and a critique, was highly specific to the Soviet Union and its citizens. Even so, the book is widely read today, and has been used as an educational tool for discussing issues such as censorship, political repression, and human rights abuses in prison. Proponents of the book argue that it doesn’t just illuminate the past, but can act as a warning about the future.
What parallels, if any, do you see between Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of the Soviet Union and your own country? If these two governments are more unalike than alike, what do you think are the key differences?
Do Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the gulag system resemble the prison system in your own country? Why or why not?
What do you think the goals of your country’s prison system are, compared to Solzhenitsyn’s claim that the gulag was a tool of control and exploitation?