The Gulag Archipelago

BOOKS | Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago was a vast, invisible network of internment sites that stretched from the Bering Strait to the Bosphorus, functioning as a secret state within a state. This system maintained a continuous flow of invisible slaves who were moved between islands via a sophisticated and long-developed transport network.

While mainstream Soviet society occupied itself with scientific research, arts, and tourism, the Black Maras rolled incessantly through the streets to replenish the camp populations. Entrance into this hidden realm was achieved solely through arrest, an unassimilable spiritual earthquake that shattered the universe of the individual and instantly shifted their present into the past.

Those who administered the system were trained in specialised schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while the guard force was conscripted through military centres. All fateful gates to this world were prepared in advance.

Institutionalised Arrest and Interrogation

The science of arrest was a critical segment of penology, supported by a substantial body of social theory and various classifications. Night arrests were the preferred methodology because they induced a state of terror in entire households and ensured that state security personnel maintained a significant superiority in numbers. Operatives utilised wide-ranging forms of deception, including fake invitations to sanatoria or staged chance encounters, to ensure victims had no opportunity to hide or destroy evidence.

Once detained, individuals were subjected to a formalised system of interrogation designed to exhaust, wear down, and render them helpless so that they would sign confessions at any cost. The legal framework established by Vashinsky maintained that absolute truth was unattainable by mortals, thus permitting sentences based on relative or approximate evidence faked by the interrogator without leaving his office.

Interrogators utilised simple methods to break the human will, including enforced sleeplessness, psychological humiliation, and the threat of harm to family members. Physical coercion involved starvation rations, beatings with rubber truncheons, and confinement in dark, unventilated boxes infested with bedbugs.

Logistics of Involuntary Transport

Prisoners were transported via sealed steel ships, primarily the Stalypin or Stalin cars, which were ordinary passenger carriages divided into compartments. These compartments were often packed with up to thirty-six individuals, meaning many hung suspended between other human beings with their legs unable to touch the floor.

Thirst was utilised as a regulatory tool, as prisoners were frequently fed salt herring or dried carp but denied water to limit the frequency of required toilet visits. For mass deportations, such as the removal of entire nations or the fifteen million peasants during the Great Break, red cattle cars were utilised.

These caravans were loaded at night under the glare of searchlights and the barking of police dogs to conceal the scale of the operation from the general public. Many trainloads arrived at their destinations in the northern taiga with carloads of corpses attached to the rear.

Demographic Impact and Social Strata

The history of the system is defined by successive waves of internment that pulsed through the murky pipes of the prison sewers.

The 1929 wave of deculacisation drove millions of industrious peasants into the tundra and the taiga, creating an ethnic catastrophe without precedent in Russian history. The wave of 1937 to 1938 targeted individuals of position and those with a party past, though party officials represented no more than ten per cent of those arrested.

Following World War II, a further wave swallowed whole nations, repatriated prisoners of war, and individuals who had seen European life. Under the all-encompassing Article 58 of the Criminal Code, any thought, action, or lack of action could be painted as counter-revolutionary activity.

The state also targeted religious believers of all denominations, leading to the internment of Orthodox monks, Baptists, and members of various sects who viewed camp numbers as the mark of Satan.

Conditions of Forced Labour and Economic Output

The archipelago was founded on the principle of forced labour, an idea advanced by Lenin in the first month after the October Revolution.

The Solovetsky Islands, formerly a monastery, served as the model camp where the supreme law was to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months. Prisoners were subjected to general labour including logging, mining, and the construction of massive public works like the White Sea Baltic Canal, which resulted in a quarter of a million deaths. Food was distributed through a differentiated ration pot, making prisoners drive each other to meet impossible work norms.

The camp social structure placed professional thieves at the top as socially friendly elements who were permitted to terrorise the political prisoners. Women faced additional hardships, including the loss of biological functions due to heavy work and the inevitable separation from children born within the system. Flags in some autonomous regions bore the image of Saint George, though they were ultimately crushed by the central authority.

The 1948 Reform and the Kengir Uprising

In 1948, the authorities created a network of special camps to isolate political prisoners from common criminals. This policy backfired as it removed the criminal buffer and united men of action, including former frontline officers and partisans, who began to anonymously execute informers.

This new spirit of resistance culminated in the Kengir Uprising of 1954, where 8,000 prisoners seized control and established an independent republic for forty days. The rebels organised religious services, weddings, and utilised a radio transmitter to broadcast their demands to the surrounding troops. The uprising was eventually crushed by T-34 tanks that fired live ammunition and drove over people, resulting in hundreds of casualties. Despite the massacre, the event proved that the human spirit could not be extinguished and marked the beginning of the system’s eventual reorganisation.

Moral Transformation and Legacy

Internment in the archipelago forced a profound re-examination of the individual soul, leading some to corruption and others to spiritual ascent. Corruption manifested as the adoption of a philosophy to survive at any price, often at the cost of one's conscience or another's life.

Conversely, many prisoners found that the absence of external distractions allowed for a deepening of the soul and the discovery of genuine friendship. The legacy of the system infected the entire country with poisons of secrecy, mistrust, and the permanent lie as a form of existence. Even after the death of the Asiatic dictator and the subsequent liberalisation under Khrushchev, the archipelago remained an integral part of the political regime.

The state continued to destroy documents and suppress information regarding atrocities such as the 1962 Novocherkassk rebellion, where a peaceful protest was met with machine gun fire and tanks. The perceived necessity of the system ensures that while rulers change, the apparatus of the archipelago persists.