Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

…Here is somewhere to settle forever, a place where a man could live in harmony with the elements and be inspired. But it cannot be. An evil prince, a squint-eyed villain, has claimed the lake for his own: there is his house, there is his bathing place. His evil brood goes fishing here, shoots ducks from his boat. First a wisp of blue smoke above the lake, then a moment later the shot.

Away beyond the woods, the people sweat and heave, whilst all the roads leading here are closed lest they intrude. Fish and game are bred for the villain’s pleasure. Here there are traces where someone lit a fire but it was put out and he was driven away.

Beloved, deserted lake.
My native land…

-Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn (1972)

Excerpted in part from “Lake Segden,” in Solzhenitsyn, Stories and Prose Poems, at 198-9.

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,

for not having divined all of it.

So begins The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of Soviet police terror and the sub-human prison camp network. It is less important for what it says then for what it leaves unsaid. This detailed account of living death in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956 takes on its true importance from the suggestion that the police system it describes continues to this day. The infamous network of slave labor camps remains in operation, even if the numbers imprisoned have been vastly reduced, since the amnesties granted during the Nikita Khrushchev regime.

One day, Mr. Solzhenitsyn clearly hoped, his account shall play a role in bringing the Soviet people to rise up and end the decades of oppression which they have so far accepted with such docility. That day is unlikely to come soon as Solzhenitsyn indicates, for the Soviet secret police is the central vital element-even more perhaps than the Communist party machine—in binding the Soviet system together.

The network of camps, prisons, communication facilities, transportation systems and spying organizations, Solzhenitsyn reports, “honeycombs” the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. It appears that no Soviet citizen is ever more than a short distance from some link of this pervasive apparatus of control that permeates all governmental, party and social organizations. The survival of this infrastructure makes it less significant that the actual prison camp population has fallen from an estimated twelve million during Stalin’s reign of terror to perhaps one million today.

Much of what Solzhenitsyn reports had long been known in the West. Yet, this was the first time that an authoritative voice of stature has spoken from Moscow itself to inform the Soviet people in detail of their tragedy and to call for punishment of its perpetrators. Solzhenitsyn’s courageous challenge to the overwhelming power of the police state is a political act without real precedent in the fifty-odd years since the Bolshevik Revolution.

Solzhenitsyn has shown us that his mission is not merely to accuse but rather, to search for remedies that would help the individual overcome the suppression and fear found in a totalitarian regime. My conceptual framework indicates that Stalin was not engaged in a real struggle with counter-revolutionaries. Logic dictates that Stalin acted inimically to his own revolutionary calling.

The main tendency of Stalinist mass repression during the period 1936-1938 was an assault on the Party, on old Bolshevik cadres, on proletarian revolutionaries, on the intelligentsia that were honorably serving the interests of the masses. This study centers upon the question of resistance, dissent, and protest in The Gulag Archipelago. The question reiterates through our minds as it had that of Solzhenitsyn’s — “But can there really be a whole nation of fools?”