Solzhenitsyn painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal, and practical origins of the Gulag system at Lenin's feet, not Stalin's. Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago." That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland the colonizers, by civilization the Nazis, by race and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Solzhenitsyn's examination details the trivial and commonplace events of an average prisoner's life, as well as specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprisings.Īt Chapter 4, Solzhenitsyn writes: "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. In that setting, he explored the treatment of prisoners and their general living conditions, slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system, camp rebellions and strikes, such as the Kengir uprising the practice of continued internal exile following the completion of the original prison sentence, and the ultimate but not guaranteed release of the prisoner, if one survived. He started with arrest, show trial, and initial internment, continuing with the transport to the Gulag. This was a slang term for an inmate, derived from the widely used abbreviation z/ k for zakliuchennyi ("prisoner"). Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a zek through the Gulag. Khrushchev gave the speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denouncing Joseph Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the widespread surveillance of all classes of people that pervaded the Stalin era. The narrative ends in 1956 at the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech (" On the Personality Cult and its Consequences"). The book describes and discusses the waves of purges and the assembling of show trials by Stalin through the 1930s in the context of the development of the greater Gulag system Solzhenitsyn closely examines its purposive legal and bureaucratic development. Solzhenitsyn begins with Vladimir Lenin's original decrees that were made shortly after the October Revolution they established the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor. At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labor camps that operated in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia.Īs structured in most printed editions, the text comprises seven sections divided into three volumes: parts 1 to 2, parts 3 to 4, and parts 5 to 7. It appeared that year in the literary journal Novy Mir a third of the work was published in three issues. It was not widely published there until 1989. Contemporaries have questioned the authenticity and reliability of Solzhenitsyn's account, describing it as sensationalized.įollowing its publication, the book was initially circulated in the Soviet Union by samizdat underground publication. Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner. It explores a vision of life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system. It was first published in 1973 by the Parisian publisher YMCA-Press, and it was translated into English and French the following year. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation ( Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, romanized: Arkhipelag GULAG) Note 1 is a three-volume series written between 19 by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident.
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