Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

Hunger strikes proved ineffective as the government went about implementing coercive counteracting tactics (i.e., patience and deception on behalf of the prison administration, coercive feeding, directives telling the prisoners to go ahead and starve themselves to death-government assuming no responsibility therefore). As D.M. Sturley (1964) (16) observed, many of the peasantry class did resist Forced Collectivization. Rather than hand over their livestock to the state, peasants slaughtered and ate them and also refused to till the fields. Unfortunately, we are discussing a predominantly peasant culture faced with mass illiteracy and famine on an extensive scale. Peasants were ultimately forced into forced labor at the point of the machine-gun.

I concur wholeheartedly with Solzhenitsyn’s conviction that war crime criminals of the Stalinist era must be brought to justice through the Soviet criminal justice system. As he illustrates in The Gulag Archipelago, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals have been convicted on such charges in West Germany (p. 175). In the past quarter century, not one of Stalin’s accomplices has been brought to trial. These statistics, do not at all balance, with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous secret 1956 denunciation of Stalin. Unless the Soviet system recognizes and facilitates legal action with reference to these crimes against humanity, the process of extirpating the Stalinist ethos from the soil of “Holy Russia” will be drastically prolonged.

The right to life as a basic tenet of liberalism is desirable to all. Individual fulfillment is inextricably interwoven with the freedom of expression. The bell of the Gulag will continue tolling throughout the course of history.

Donald G. Boudreau

Montclair State College

Upper Montclair, New Jersey

Fall 1974

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Amalrik, Andrei. Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1970.

Camus, Albert. An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Pub., 1969.

Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion and Death. Translated from the French and with an introduction by Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Pub., 1961.

Gasset, Jose Ortega y. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1957.

Goldston, Robert. The Russian Revolution. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966.

Grazzini, Giovanni. Solzhenitsyn: a biography. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1974.

Hook, Sidney. Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1965.

Mayer, Milton. They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1969.

Medvedev, Roy A. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Publishers, 1970.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Parts I-II. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. Cancer Ward. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The First Circle. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Stories and Prose Poems. Translated by Michael Glenny. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.

Sturley, D.M. A Short History of Russia. New York: Harper & row Publishers, 1964.

Toynbee, Arnold J. Civilization on Trial. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

PERIODICALS

The New Republic — A Journal of Politics and the Arts

The New York Times

Time Magazine

Esquire Magazine

NOTES

1.     

2.     

3.     

4.      Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 287.

5.      Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 288-9.

6.      Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 290.

7.      Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 291.

8.      Cf. Medvedev, at 239.

9.      Cf. Medvedev, at 285-6.

10.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 364.

11.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 462.

12.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 469.

13.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 476.

14.   Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 172-3.

15.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 503-4.

16.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 545-6.

17.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 547.

18.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 562.

19.   Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 473.

20.   Sidney Hook, Marx and the Marxists, pp. 107-22.