Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

My orientation vehemently conjectures that economic and social progress would have been much greater if Stalin had not destroyed thousands upon thousands of scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, and writers. The solidarity between the people and the government would have been much stronger had there been no mass repression. The people would have shown the Central Committee more confidence if the beau monde in the Party, government, economic and military apparatus had not been destroyed in the mid-thirties. Stalin can no longer be placed alongside Marx, Engels, and Lenin. He must stand alone.

The question usually asked by outsiders, [W]hy did the Jews of Nazi Germany not offer more resistance?” becomes radically obscene in the face of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Treblinka. Granted, there was never an exodus of a major part of the Jews of the ghettos, but in 1942-1943 as the eastern ghettos were being destroyed, small groups of Jews escaped to the woods in a desperate bid for survival and vengeance.

Where is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of the Stalinist reign of terror? Where are the six hundred prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacking the Nazi guards, literally blowing up the death houses at Treblinka, and fleeing into the nearby Polish forests? Where are the suicide missions? How could the Russian people have gone to their incarceration, torture, and slaughter like lambs? Was fear of government retaliation so pervasive in the Soviet mind that it negated any and all forms of resisting, dissenting, and protesting? Why did the Jews, despite their relative few in number and the lateness of the hour, arm themselves in rebellion, while the Soviets of this period appear as pacifists in the face of a system which exemplified dialectical terrorism?

Nazi anti-Semitism condemned the Jews as an “alien element” in the body of the nation, thus making them a merciless target of any punishment the deranged minds of totalitarian nationalists were capable of inventing with the help of modern technology. Somewhat similarly, totalitarian Communism condemns the “class enemy” as an alien element within the society. And a madly totalitarian regime, such as Stalin’s, is capable of dealing with it accordingly.

What makes the critical analysis of these atrocious modern evils often so difficult is that they are connected with highly popular, ideologies and mass movements. The idea of nationalism is history’s “first world religion,” as the late Hans Kohn so aptly referred to it. And, to all evidence, the so-called Marxist class structure too is well underway to becoming another world religion. Small wonder it is that even the most articulate and intelligent critics of such successful movements are easily sidetracked. There is, of course, no lack of clear-sighted and courageous commentators on contemporary affairs who are placing these brutal phenomena of our century in proper critical and realistic perspective. Rather, what is lacking is the public ability and willingness to listen to them.

Critics of nationalism and class struggle, not surprisingly, have a particularly difficult time in getting their intellectual messages across in the vulgar confusion of modernity. Two of the worst holocausts of our time, the Hitlerism and the Stalinist — are causes in point to illustrate the ideological malaise which is worldwide.

This paper is write in the hopes that students of law and politics and public administration will seek to confront these “diseases” and “treat” them by educating the public as to their horrendous ramifications. It is unfair to ask more in light of the limitations of the human condition.

This venture is three-fold. First, we will be examining the historically isolated incidents of resistance as they became manifest in the Gulag Archipelago. The relative assessment will prove hopefully to be more precise by referring to historical works of the era such as Roy A. Medvedev’s Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1972) and The Russian Revolution (1966) by Robert Goldston, in addition to our primary source of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Second, we will be presenting a literary depiction of resistance in the Gulag camps through two of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s finest novels, Cancer Ward (1972) and The First Circle (1972). With Solzhenitsyn as a survivor of eight years in concentration camps and three years in exile for his offense (written derogatory remarks about Stalin), his account of literal occurrences is taken here to be nothing short of certitude.