Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

Roy Medvedev Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: Part Two We print here the first English translation of a discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, I1 by the distinguished Russian historian and intellectual dissident Roy Medvedev. Elsewhere in this issue, Peter Reddaway analyzes the exchanges of opinion going on among the Russian dissidents. We believe that the issues raised by people like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Medvedev-including their differences of outlookare among the most important political matters of our time. - EDS. tions, the way prisoners died and were killed, The second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s and the unceremonious way they were bur- Gulag Archipelago has now appeared. Where ied-all these things find their place in Sol- the first volume consisted in a detailed investi- zhenitsyn’s book. The author describes the gation of everything that preceded the arrival various types of hard labor and the starvation of millions of Soviet people in Stalin’s con- diet imposed on the zeks; he studies not only centration camps-the system of arrests, the the world of the camps but also the world various forms of confinement, interrogation immediately surrounding them, the world of with torture, judicial and extrajudicial perse- “campside”; and he surveys the peculiarities cution, prisoner transports and transit pris- of psychology and behavior found among the ons-the second volume gets down to the prisoners and their jail keepers (or “camp study of the primary and fundamental part of keepers,” in Solzhenitsyn’s terminology). the Gulag empire, the corrective or, as Sol- Like the first volume, which came out in zhenitsyn rightly calls them, the “destructive” December 1973, this volume deserves the labor camps. Here nothing escapes the au- highest estimation, especially because it is a thor’s attention: the origin and history of the conscientious investigation, artistically pre- camps, the economics of forced labor, the ad- sented and based on authentic fact. True, the ministrative structure, the categories of pris- second volume did not have the moral shock oners and everyday life of the inmates, the effect of the first, did not stun and shake the position of women and juveniles, the relations reader so. Perhaps because it was the second between ordinary zeks and the trusties,’ be- volume; or perhaps, for me, this impression tween criminals and politicals, the camp has to do with the fact that I have read dozens guards, the convoy guards, the “information” and dozens of memoirs by former camp in- service and the recruiting of stool pigeons, the mates (most of them, of course, never pub- system of punishments and “incentives,” the lished) and have recorded hundreds of ac- functioning of the hospitals and medical sta- counts and pieces of testimony about camp ‘Zek: In camp slang, abbreviation of the Russian word for life. It is also significant that, while the basic “prisoner,” zaklyuchenny . facts are reliable (and there are noticeably 155 fewer petty factual inaccuracies in the second Alas, we can have little hope that memorials volume of Gulag Archipelago than in the will be erected even where the largest concen- first), many of the author’s judgments and tration carnps stood, or that the camp barracks, opinions are too one-sided and categorical and compounds, towers, and mines will be restored his general observations are by no means al- in museum form, or that some sort of markings ways well-grounded. This is particularly true will be placed at the countless camp cem- of the way he obviously lays his colors on too eteries, where there are probably more Soviet thickly in depicting the world of “the free” in people buried than fell in the war against Nazi his chapter “ Our Muzzled Freedom. ” Germany. There is little hope that an eternal But, of course, none of the shortcomings of flame will bum here or that the names of those the second volume overshadow the artistic and who died and were killed will be chiseled in social significance of this book, which has no marble. It is quite possible that books will equal in all our literature on the camps. remain the only monuments to these people. Several years ago I heard of a certain occur- One such book, The Gulag Archipelago, will rence from a former “son of Gulag” who had easily outlive those who wish to suppress it gone to visit Vorkuta as a free citizen (many and will stand as an unforgettable tribute for such veterans of the camps feel the lurge to those to whom its author dedicated it, all those visit the places where their years had been who perished in the camps, “all those who did spent working behind barbed wire; Solzhen- not live to tell it.” itsyn too writes about this). It was an occur- rence common in those parts. A foundation pit Camp Myths for a new school in Vorkuta had been started.’ IN OUR COUNTRY, where there is no freedom No sooner had the thin topmost layer of soil of the press or freedom of information, where been removed than the teeth of the excavating most information circulates by certain secret machines revealed a huge deposit of human channels, a multitude of rumors inevitably bones. This was not of course the site of a arise and dozens of different myths have public primitive human settlement, and no archeolo- currency and are accepted by many as unques- gists came there. It was one of those giant tionable truths. Under the conditions existing mass graves that grew near the northern in the camps such legends, rumors, and camps-great pits, already dug in the autumn, myths-often far removed from reality-were into which thousands of corpses were thrown all the more likely to find fertile ground. Na- during the winter-prisoners who died or were talya Reshetovskaya has recently contended shot-to be covered over later on, with the that Solzhenitsyn’s book is essentially based arrival of the brief northern summer. Construc- on this camp f~lklore.~That is certainly not tion of the school was temporarily halted, not so. Of course Solzhenitsyn, through no fault of for the purpose, naturally, of setting up a mon- his own, had no chance to check documentary ument to the unknown convicts; the freshly evidence in order to verify much of the infor- bared bones of these zeks were carted off by night and buried somewhere outside the city 3Natalya Restetovskaya (born 1920): Solzhenitsyn’s first limits, and this new cemetery was not marked wife; they married in 1940, were separated by the war, in any noticeable way. At the original site of then by his imprisonment in 1945; she divorced him in the mass grave, school construction was re- 1950 while he was in the camps. After his release and rehabilitation (195657). they remarried in the late 1950s. sumed and completed. before he won fame with Ivan Denisovich. In the late 1960s they separated again, and he established a relation- *Vorkura: One of the largest labor camp complexes of the ship with his present wife, Natalya Svetlova. The author- Stalin era, mainly set up for mining the coal of the Pech- ities, to harass him further, long supported Reshetovskaya ora River basin in the arctic northeast of European Russia. in her refusal to agree to a divorce. They were finally The town of the same name, center of the region, was divorced by the time he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. built by prisoner labor in 1931-32 and is now a city of Reshetovskaya’s memoirs were published outside the So- nearly 100,OOO. The Vorkuta camps were apparently dis- viet Union (English edition, Sanya: My Life wirh mantled after major strikes by prisoners in 1953. Solzhenitsyn, New York, 1975). 156 ROY MEDVEDEV mation he obtained from fellow inmates and Now Solzhenitsyn himself writes that the first from subsequent correspondents and inform- juveniles came to Solovki only in mid-March ants. However, both his own camp experience 1929. How could the newly arrived inhabitants and his intuition as an investigator and an artist of the children’s colony, isolated from the enable him in most cases to distinguish sharply adult prisoners, find out everything that had enough between truth and invention in the ac- gone on at Solovki for years before? But if this counts he has recorded. If some legends do particular anecdote related by Solzhenitsyn crop up in the pages of Gulag Archipelago, seems dubious, no such doubts arise over his rare as they may be, this happens for the most own story of the many illegal and arbitrary part when the topic is the distant past or the actions committed at Solovki, a narrative that lives and “affairs” of those high up in the can be confirmed by other accounts and other “organs,” for example, Minister of State Se- witnesses. curity Abak~mov.~ I think that among such myths we must Where the Camps Came From include Solzhenitsyn’s story of the 14-year-old SOLZHENITSYN DATES the existence of concen- boy who on June 20, 1929, during Gorky’s tration camps for political opponents in our visit to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp country from 1918. This is not slander, QS asked to speak with Gorky in private and then some of his detractors contend. Solzhenitsyn spent an hour and a half telling the famous quotes Lenin’s telegram to Yevgeniya Bosh, writer about all the illegalities committed in president of the Penza Province Executive that camp.5 According to Solzhenitsyn’s ac- Committee, advising “lock up all the doubtful count, Gorky, after talking with the boy, left ones in a concentration camp outside the the room in tears.

Load more