Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 3 Book

I also read the official abridged version for Parts 1 and 2


Themes
• Scale of repression in Imperial times barely registers when set against the post-Revolutionary periods.
• Lenin is culpable
• Khrushchev and the post Stalin era after 1956 is still unforgivably penal. Has enough changed?

Synopsis

The Gulag forced labour camps have become a stain on the history of post Revolution Russia. Solzenitsyn's body of work, and The Gulag Archipelago in particular, are hugely important in shaping world opinion. The camps themselves are discussed in great depth by Solzhenitsyn; many of the accounts are anecdotal and dissenting voices claimed that they were apocryphal. What gives Solzhenitsyn's extensive, wide ranging sweep, such authenticity, is the variety of prisoner that populated the camps. Thieves (the Bitches' War), politicals , returning soldiers, captured Germans, Kulaks (prosperous peasants) were all human material used in the Russian drive to industrialise, and to eradicate opposition.

Sections V- VII focus much greater attention on the Russian history either side of Stalin's presidency. The decade following Stalin's death in 1956 was the time during which time the book came together and early distribution of Solzhenityn's work commenced during Khrushchev's programme of de-stalinisation. Numerous references are also made to the period (Imperial) prior to the Revolution of 1917.
The latter stages of WW2, and beyond, from the time of Germany's retreat from the heart of Russia, is chronicled by Solzhenitsyn as a betrayal by the Western Powers as, in the necessary determination to eradicate Nazism, an opportunity arose for Stalin to pursue his agenda, and to get support (Solzhenitsyn says he called up Churchill) in remodelling and extending a Soviet Union that might otherwise have struggled to enforce the Moscow centric national building of the 1920s and 1930s.
The treatment of enlisted Russian soldiers is well known to have been disgraceful.
As Solzhenitsyn puts it:
"The biographies of all three escapers were identical- and like those of millions at that time: first the front, then German prisoner-of-war camps, escape, recapture, liberation when the war ended, and by way of thanks for it all- imprisonment by their own side". (202)

Highlights

Solzhenitsyn writes with a sarcasm and wit which is most welcome, given the pages of brutality. Prisoners were assigned a number (Solzhenitsyn was (Shch 232) and had their fingerprints taken. The prisoner "played the piano" (58)
Stalin is mocked throughout and variously called:
The Great Helmsman
The Great Father
Father of the Peoples
Generalissimo
Visionary Architect
Great Coryphaeus (leader of the chorus, from Ancient Greek)
The Cannibal
The Thinker
Almighty One
"His sovereign brother Hitler's experiment in the extirpation of Jews and Gypsies.. Father Stalin had given thought to the problem earlier " (386)
" Neatness and uniformity! That is the advantage of exiling whole nations at once! No special cases! No exceptions, no individual protests!"
Stalin was the fourth pillar of the Vanguard Doctrine!" (of Lenin)

> Imperial references
• Katorga. - literally a galley in a boat with rowers shackled.(summary taken from a footnote). Sahkalin Island, written by Anton Chekhov in 1893, is referenced by Solzhenitsyn. Conditions in the Siberian gulags forty years later, are of a totally different (ghastly) magnitude. Solzhenitsyn almost goes full Mothy Python "Four Yorkshiremen" as he gives examples to imply that under Tsar Nicholas II the prisoners "were lucky"
• Peasant Emancipation. "of all her wars, the Crimea was Russia's luckiest, it brought the emancipation of the peasants and Alexander's reforms"(80)
• Stolypin "Terror"(1906/7) "the Russian state even then was considered the most oppressive in Europe". No! Things weren't the same. Not at all the same" (91)
> The Khrushchev de-stalinisation is regarded skeptically
"a decree of 1961 made murder in the camps punishable by shooting. This Khrushchevian decree was all the Stalinist special camps had lacked" (244 footnote)

"Stalin's death had changed nothing" (280)

Solzhenitsyn says he fell for the Khrushchev line that it would never happen again. Then he received letters from Zeks (political prisoners) saying nothing has changed since Ivan denisovich's time. "Any Zek who reads your book will feel bitterness and disgust because everything is as it was"
With some anger Solzhenitsyn says Rulers change "they should have let their space program go to hell! Let Sukarno's navy and Kwame Nkrumah's guard regiments look after themselves . Rulers change the Archipelago remains" (494)

Novocherkassk in June 2 1962- hushed up as a whole camp was attacked by the prison authorities


Historical & Literary context

• My copy (ISBN 9780002622554) is the original UK edition of 1978. (Volume 3 V-Vii) It includes
o A Preface to the English translation by Solzhenitsyn. November 1977, Vermont
o Translation by Harry Willets
o Translator's note (intriguingly left blank!)
o Index, footnotes throughout, glossary and end notes)
The original Volume 3 runs to 526 pages. This is condensed to 138 pages in the abridged version.
One immediate impression of where the original version is not only superior, but in my opinion essential, is in the footnotes. My abridged version has none; my original, while not challenging David Foster Wallace, has extensive footnotes and these are often the very best and most interesting bits.
One example: In (3), chapter 3 Chains, Chains Is a twenty three page chapter.
In the abridged version Chains, Chains has only three pages.
A whole chunk of narrative about the infamous Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish army officers is removed. This is absolutely key to discussion about Beria, Stalin, the Nazi pact and it is history which, in the Gorbachev years, resulted in an apology to Poland in 1990.
Solzhenitsyn is withering about the Soviet "experts" who had shortly before signed the mendacious findings of the Katyn commission (to the effect that it was not we who had murdered the Polish officers). Solzhenitsyn goes on to quote Shakespeare of Dr Kolesnikov, a medical expert in the Katyn investigation team who finds himself subsequently working in the camps "Othello's occupation's gone"

The Gulag Archipelago is understandably summarised as a Concentration/ Work Camp story with hideous and exhausting graphic detail. While this is true, Solzhenitsyn is also a clever, subtle historian, and he has extensive knowledge of great figures from European literature; quoting them extensively.

Postscript

I started reading The Gulag Archipelago on January 1st 2021. Days before, on December 26, 2020, George Blake, the former British spy and Soviet Union double agent died at the age of 98. In an interview with Reuters in Moscow in 1991, Blake said he had believed communism was "an ideal which, if it could have been achieved, would have been well worth it. I thought it could be, and I did what I could to help it, to build such a society. It has not proved possible. But I think it is a noble idea and I think humanity will return to it."
If Blake read The Gulag Archipelago it has to be assumed that he thought the deprivations of the labour camps in the period covered by Solzhenitsyn were justifiable as part of the accelerated industrialisation needed to enable the Soviet Union to catch up, economically, with the West.
Blake was awarded a medal by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in 2007
As I ended my read, on January 22, 2021 opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested on his return to Russia and held at Matrosskaya Tishina prison.
In 2013 the Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova wrote a public letter which drew international attention to conditions in her prison which were declared close to those of "slave labour".
The most common type of prison in Russia is the "corrective colony" combining penal detention with compulsory work. The system of labour colonies originated in 1929 alongside the Gulag labour camps, and after 1953 the corrective penal colonies in the Soviet Union developed as a post-Stalin replacement of the Gulag labour-camp system
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
On July 24, 2019 President Vladimir Putin visited the House of Russia Abroad , led by Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalia, President of the Solzhenitsyn Charity Foundation.
Solzhenitsyn (died August 2008) said about Putin
"Reverse efforts to save the country's lost statehood began to be taken under Putin. The foreign policy, bearing in mind our situation and possibilities, is quite reasonable and more foresighted (interview with the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper dated April 28, 2006).
Putin said about Solzhenitsyn:
"I remember well all my contacts with Alexander Isayevich, his wisdom, foresight and a wide gasp of history. His heart, soul and thought were filled with pain for the Fatherland and unfailing love for it. These feelings were a driving force of his creative endeavour. He clearly distinguished authentic, real, people's Russia and the totalitarian system that plunged millions of people into sufferings and hard trials. But even in exile, Alexander Isayevich never let anyone speak disparagingly and spitefully about his Motherland, rebuffing any manifestations of Russophobia." (speech at the opening ceremony of Alexander Solzhenitsyn monument in Moscow on December 11, 2018).

Recommend

A great book about a period in history that is endlessly fascinating and still relevant to contemporary world affairs. Highly recommended.