Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn also takes issue with the internal political continuum of the Soviet Union and shows how and why resistance gained no firm foundation. Stalin was free to play them off against one another to his political advantage. Divided they would err under Stalin’s fantasy.

…those prisoners to the left of the socialists—the Trotskyites and the Communists—shunned the socialists, considering them exactly the same kind of KR’s (counterrevolutionaries) as the rest, and they closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring. The Trotskyites and the Communists, each considering their own direction more pure and lofty than all the rest, despised and even hated the socialists (and each other) who were imprisoned behind the bars of the same buildings and went outdoors to walk in the same prison courtyards.13

It is merely reasonable to understand the non-Western Soviet Union utilizing anti-western sentiments as a rationale for accelerating the industrialization of their nation. Granted, any lesser industrialized nation would have a reason to fear being conquered by a more industrialized nation. Yet, this position can be exploited beyond a reasonable standard of concern.

In Civilization on Trial, Arnold J. Toynbee (1947) the noted historian, demonstrates how and why this anti-western creed is unquestioningly accepted, generation after generation.

Marxism is, no doubt a Western creed, but it is a Western creed which puts the western civilization ‘on the spot’; and it was, therefore possible for a twentieth-century Russian whose father had been a nineteenth-century ‘Slavo-phil’ and his grandfather a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian to become a devoted Marxian without being required to make any reorientation of his inherited attitude toward the West. For the Russian Marxian, Russian Slavophil, and Russian Orthodox Christian alike, Russia is ‘Holy Russia’ and the Western world of the Borgia’s and Queen Victoria, Smiles’ Self-Help and Tammany Hall, is uniformly heretical, corrupt and decadent. A creed which allows the Russian people to preserve this traditional Russian condemnation of the West intact, while at the same time serving the Russian government as an instrument for industrializing Russia in order to save her from being conquered by an already industrialized West is one of those providentially convenient gifts of the gods that naturally fall into the laps of the chosen people.14

ERADICATING DISSENT

Another conscious move by the Stalinist system to eradicate any dissent was to place common thieves in the same cells with the other zek prisoners. Many of the common thieves worked for the prison administration in exchange for amnesty, special privileges, food, clothing and money. Solzhenitsyn observes the conditions conducive to striking out and explains why to a great extent their non-existence. It is also noteworthy that these common thieves not only sought damaging statements from the other zeks which would certainly come back to haunt them in time. They were also notorious for mugging zeks in their cells and stealing their food parcels, clothing and personal valuables. Resistance by the zeks against the thieves when it did occur was in a rage of self-defense, rather than a group effort at resisting.

To strike out boldly, a person has to feel that his rear is defended, that he has support on both his flanks, that there is solid earth beneath his feet. All of these conditions were absent for the Article 58’s. Having passed through the meat grinder of political interrogation, the human being was starved, he hadn’t slept, he had frozen in punishment cells, he had lain there a beaten man. But it wasn’t only his body. His soul was crushed too. Over and over he had been told and had had demonstrated to him that his views, and his conduct in life, and his relationships with people had all been wrong because they had brought him to ruin. And so you allow the thieves to take your overcoat and paw through your jacket and snatch your twenty rubles from where it was sewn in, and your bag has already been tossed up above and checked out, and everything your sentimental wife collected for your long trip after you were sentenced stays up there, and they’ve thrown the bag back down to you with, …your toothbrush. Although not everyone submitted just like that, 99 percent did in the thirties and forties. And how could that be? Men, officers, soldiers, front-line soldiers!15