SYNOPISI OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (CONFIDENTIAL)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100750001-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 5, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 15, 1974
• Content Type: REPORT

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W VnT)Y REVIEW Or: BOOS
ORK REVIEW OF BOOS
Between Earth and Hell
Arkhipelag GULag 1918-1956
Parts I and II
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.'
YMCA Press, Paris, 606 pp.
George F. Kennan
The nineteenth-century traveler and
writer, George Kennan (1848-1924),
whose namesake and relative I happen
to be, on arriving at the 400th page of
his well-known study of Siberia and
the Exile System (first published in
1888), tells of sitting "on one cold raw
autumnal day, in a dirty post-station
on the great Siberian road," watching
the passage of a miserable party of
guarded convicts, who were making
their laborious way, on foot and in
leg-fetters, over the 1,040-mile stretch
from Tomsk to Irkutsk. As they
moved through the village they sang,
by permission of the convoy, the
so-called "begging-song"-the miloserd-
naya-in the hope of eliciting mercy,
in the form of small donations of
food, from the villagers. When they
had passed, Kennan was overcome, he
wrote, by "a strange sense of dejec-
tion, as if the day had suddenly grown
colder, darker, and more dreary, and
the cares and sorrows of life more
burdensome and oppressive." This was
one of the rare points at which he
allowed a touch of subjective feeling to
burst the crust of cool restraint that
covers his otherwise factual and very
Victorian book.
It is with a similar feeling that the
Western reader, and particularly one
who has himself had some experience
of Russia, lays down the 600-page
volume containing the first two parts
of the multi-part study which Alex-
ander Solzhenitsyn has addressed to
the judicial, penal, and forced-labor
systems created and operated, over the
decades, by the Tsar's successors. True,
the Western reader experiences this
moment of disheartenment not, like
Kennan, in the midst of a harrowing
journey that has carried him thousands
of miles from anything resembling
European civilization, but rather in the
comfort of his own living room, him-
self devoid of either hardship or dan-
ger. He is aware, on the other hand,
that what Solzhenitsyn is here describ-
ing is a phenomenon not only much
worse (Kennan would have found this
hard to believe) in degree of inhuman-
ity but also greater in scale, by a
factor of several hundred times, than
sented itself to Kennan's view.
he initial reaction to Mr. Solzhenit-
syn's account is less indignation against
the authors of these horrors and
injustices, though of course there is
tha, too, than discouragement, great
sad ess, and no small measure of
pu lement over the fact that such
thi gs could have taken place in our
ow time in a country sharing the
Ch istian tradition, a country that has
bee ri the source of some of the
gre test literature, and the greatest
mo al teaching, of the modern age, a
co ntry with which we were in effect
all' d during the recent war, and with
wh ch we fancied ourselves to have in
co man at least certain standards of
dec ncy and humanity that would set
us off against our common enemy.
e shrinks from the task of at-
te ting to describe this-the most
hea y and relentless book of our time.
It i like no other. Part reminiscence,
par history, part sociological study,
par folklore, it is a leisurely and
ex ustive examination of that vast
'lot er Russia"-the Russia of involun-
ta confinement and servitude-which,
gro ing from small beginnings in the
ear 1920s, rose to monstrous dimen-
sio s in the 1930s and 1940s, develop-
ing ultimately into an empire-within-
an- mpire, indeed into something more
tha an empire: into a specific culture,
Co plete with language, customs,
leg nds, mythology, hierarchies of
au hority, overt and otherwise--
eve thing, in fact, except hope. It is
the culture of a territory Populated by
peo le of the most disparate origins,
tast s, acid natures, united only by
the common obligation, one way or
an her, to live in it, and by the fact
tha while they have not yet been
compelled-or permitted-to enter the
next world, they have been obliged-
mo t of them, at any rate-to leave
be ind them every hope of happiness
or elf-realization in this one.
olzhenitsyn likes to think of Allis
to 'tory as an archipelago. He uses this
ter to designate the entire police
em ire of prisons and forced-labor
ca ps with which he is concerned. To
me it seems more like some species of
At antis, situated not between Heaven
an Earth, but somewhere on the
bo ders between Earth and Hell,
k- n tn the outside world only
NE
21 March 1974
mrougn remote and implausible rumor
and knowing of the outside wort
almost nothing at all. But let us accept
Solzhenitsyn's image of the Arch#-
pelago as the algebraic designation.
This initial volume, written-it woul
seem-between 1958 and 1967, deals
only with the preliminary phases o
the life of a victim in the Archipelagol:
the experience ' of arrest; the first days;
various forms of pressure and tortur
shared with others; the penal boxe
the death cells; then, transportation i
all its forms: in Black Marias, in bo
cars, in barges and ocean-going vessels
the noncriminal prisoners (I hesitate t(
call them political) being everywhere
delivered up to the savage tyranny of
the criminals. But it also treats of the
preliminaries in time: the origins of th~
system itself; the original Cheka; th~
development of Solovetski Island as
place of confinement; the early trial:
of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and thi
engineers and technicians; then the ful
flowering of the system, in the 1930s
Each subject is treated in depth, with i}
wealth of illustration and detail, most
of it drawn from identified individual
experience.
The book has its faults. Considerin
the circumstances under which it mus
have been written, the only occasion
for surprise is that it does not have
more of them. The historical parts are
heavy. That some inaccuracies should
occur, and some statements be open to
challenge, was inevitable in a work o
this size and nature. The treatment o
the great public purge trials of the
1930s is particularly inadequate. Here
as in the First Circle, Solzhenitsyn
incomparable in his treatment of th
ordinary victims of the system, show
himself curiously helpless when it
comes lo picturing the senior figures o
the regime: they emerge as caricatures
not as real human beings.2 For
1 An English translation will be pu -
lished later this year by Harper
Row.
2 Particularly inadequate is the treat-
ment, in this connection, of Bukharin.
sibility of seeing the recent work c
Bukharin by Stephen F. Cohen (Bu
harin and the Bolshevik Revolutio
reviewed in The New York Review
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no doubt, the book will seem too long,
too detailed-too much of everything.
Solzhenitsyn has seen no reason to
spare the reader, any more than experi-
ence has spared him, the full burden of
what he has learned and now has to
say. Not only that, but the language in
which it is written-intensely compact,
often twisted and involved, laced with
camp slang, abbreviations, initials, and
words built of initials-is such as to
place the heaviest of demands even on
readers of the original Russian text,3
not to mention translators. Not many,
1 fear, will have the fortitude to read it
all, from beginning to end.
The book is already being attacked
in Russia, and will no doubt be
attacked elsewhere, for what may be
interpreted as a defense of the Vlasov-
ites, i.e., the Russian force, under
General A. A. Vlasov, that allowed
itself to be armed and used by the
Germans (although in the end it fought
briefly against them too), eventually
surrendered to the American command
in Bavaria, and was finally delivered up
by the latter to the Soviet authorities
for such retribution as they might
see fit to inflict. It is the impression of
this reviewer that what Solzhenitsyn
was concerned to do here was not to
justify or condemn the behavior of
Vlasov and his men but to reveal the
cruel and hopeless dilemmas by which
they were confronted, and the ex-
tremes of despair to which they had
been reduced, by the senseless orders
they received from the Soviet high
command, by their disgust with the
Stalinist regime, by the cruel circum-
stances of their experience as war
prisoners in Germany, and, finally, by
the knowledge that they would, if
returned to Russia, be punished as
criminals for the mere fact of having
been taken prisoner, even if they had
not in any way collaborated with the
Germans.
The reviewer
can find in these
passages of the book no hint of
anything resembling sympathy for the
Nazis-only pity for the Russians in-
volved, a reproach to the Western allies
for the heartlessness and thoughtless-:
ness of their handling of this problem,
and a determination to raise the ques-
tion: what had to be wrong with a
political regime in order that "several
hundred thousand young men in the
ages of twenty to thirty should take
up arms against their fatherland in
alliance with its most bitter enemy?"
It
as a series of "revelations." There is
not much of what is told here that was
not, generally speaking, already known
or strongly suspected-usually assumed,
in fact-by those who had followed
closely the available record of Soviet
realities as it has developed in recent
years. Solzhenitsyn's book will have to
take its place on the shelf alongside
many other fine works of Soviet
origin, of which those of Nadezhda
Mandelstam and Roy Medvedev are
only two of the finest and most
recent, not to mention a number of
Western studies, devoted to the same
subject.
But the book, aside from the talent
with which it is written, gives con-
firmation to a great deal that was,
heretofore, only strongly suspected or
poorly documented. Even if only a
fraction of what is told here were
accurate, the force of the .condemna-
tion would not be diminished; whereas
actually, in the opinion of this re-
viewer, the inaccuracies or exaggera-
tions are of negligible dimensions and
significance.4 The work thus achieves,
in its massiveness, its fierce frankness,
and its compelling detail, an authority
no amount of counterpropaganda will
ever be able to- shake. And it emerges
before world opinion not only as an
act of immense courage and stoutness
of heart on the part of its author, and
not only as a political event of major
importance in the development of
Soviet power, but as the greatest and
most powerful single indictment of a
political regime ever to be leveled in
modern times.
There are certain salient facts about
this great system of punishment to
which attention has indeed been called,
in almost -every instance, by earlier
writers, but which emerge with particu-
lar force and authority from Solzhen-
itsyn's work, and which deserve em-
phasis to the foreign reader.
The Archipelago was, in" the first
place, not the work of any single man.
Of course, Stalin had an outstanding
responsibility. Not for nothing was he
the most powerful figure in the regime
in the years when the system reached
its. greatest development. It was he
existed before his autocratic power was
established; and it continued, as Sol-
zhenitsyn repeatedly points out, to
burn, albeit at much reduced intensity,
after his death.
Khrushchev, who was interested only
,an the excesses committed against
-Party members, tended to blame exclu-
sively Stalin, under whose power those
excesses for the most part occurred.
Solzhenitsyn, interested not in Party
members per se but in human beings,
finds himself obliged to widen the
spectrum and to consider as well the
non-Party masses. In such an examina-
tion the figure of Stalin, while by no
means absolved of responsibility, neces-
sarily takes a less prominent place.
What flows most impressively from
Solzhenitsyn's work is that one had to
do here, in this Archipelago, with
something greater and more terrible
than any single individual could have
created and maintained: with some
sort of monstrous human misunder-
standing-a Frankenstein creature that
grew over the heads of its creators and
of those who were ostensibly its
commanders, gained an inner mo-
mentum of its own, and ended by
carrying relentlessly along in its tenta-
cles. all those connected with it:
prisoners, guards, investigators, tor-
turers, and executioners alike. One
may charitably believe that the men of
Lenin's time created it almost acci-
dentally, not fully aware of what they
were doing, believing they needed
something of this sort as an instrument
of the Party, but failing to understand
what it could some day become.
Stalin, who knew full well what they
had_ done, pressed it into service,
without compunction, as an instrument
of his own fears and diseased suspi-
cions. His successors have retained it in
a subdued form, sometimes stronger,
sometimes weaker, presumably feeling
that they needed it for the security of
Books February 7, 1974), and cannot
be blamed for not knowing all that
was in it; but his treatment of Buk-
harin would have benefited from an
acquaintance with it.
3This review is based on the original
Russian text; the reviewer has not seer:
a translation.
who, presumably knowing well what 4
he was doing, removed most of the In so far as the challenges to Solzhen-
itsyn's integrity and veracity raised by
rods from the infernal human reactor, Viktevich and others are concerned, it
during the years of the Thirties, and can only be said that anyone who
permitted it to burn with an intensity would take seriously such statements
wn before or since. But he did by people who are effectively at the
not kn
o
would App e vtBC i aOlhRsioase ' p olUaJ~e,,,iJ,;l -% ~c ce 7-did 9-&n1d1 94 Omercy of the olice GOW0750001as3not really read
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because it was hard to know how to
get rid of it. To abolish it entirely
would have meant to invite increased
attention to it and to spotlight the
awkward question of, the Party's re-
sponsibility for its creation in the first
place, and for the tolerating of it over
the decades.
The second point that flows with
great force from Solzhenitsyn's book is
the fact that this phenomenon, con-
trary to an impression widespread
elsewhere, by no means represented
just, or even mainly, the oppression of
political opponents by a group of men
holding dictatorial power. Only a tiny
percentage of those who were made
victims of the system can be said to
have been in any sense political oppo-
nents of the regime. People were
arrested and consigned to this terrible
half-world not as individuals-not, as a
rule, for anything they themselves had
individually done-but as members of
categories. "Prophylactic" considera-
tions-i.e., the reflection that certain
categories of people might be theoret-
ically more capable than others of
making trouble for the regime in
future-no doubt had something to do
with the identification of the cate-
gories from which arrests were to be
made. But other considerations were
predominant.
This great reactor had to have fuel.
Without fuel it could not exist. Its
appetite had to be appeased. The only
fuel it could accept was human beings
-their lives, their happiness. But there
were not remotely enough of the
guilty ones to satisfy this hunger. One
had, therefore, to reach primarily for
the innocent. This was not difficult.
"Give us the body," was the watch-
word of the system. "We will produee
the case against it."5 This situation is
best described by Krylov's fable of the
wolf who first offered a series of
pretexts for attacking and eating the
lamb, all of which the lamb was easily
able to refute; whereupon the wolf lost
patience and said: "Your guilt lies in
-the fact that I greatly desire to
eat"-and at once consumed him.
Finally, this entire phenomenon was
something much more complex than
just a situation of bad guys vs. good
guys. The corruption of understanding
on which it rested was not confined to
the regime itself and its servants. There
was a widespread tendency among the
innocent victims (Madame Mandelstam
also comments
omments
their
r ca egory, was an exceptional
one, and that while they themselves
were innocent, most of their fellow-
sufferers were guilty of something.
What you had, in reality, was a vast
and sordid theatrical performance, in
which thousands played the roles of
the righteous dispensers of justice,
while millions of others played, with
sickening realism, those of the crim-
inals, brought sternly to justice and
now suffering deserved retribution for
their crimes.
There was of course very little
reality in either pretense. But of the
two sets of actors, it was the latter-
the victims-who took the whole pro-
cedure most seriously and tended to
believe, if not in their own guilt, then
in that of many of their companions in
misery. The investigators and jailers, on
the other hand, presumably knew only
too well-could not help but know-
what the score was. But even if these
latter knew that the whole thing was a
show, many of them (and many of the
victims as well) were obviously brought
to believe that it was a necessary show,
that it served a useful purpose, that
the interests of the Party were in some
way promoted by it.
It was such reflections that led
Solzhenitsyn to recall to memory with
relentless honesty (and these are some
of the most impressive passages in the
book) the abuses of his earlier author-
ity as a military officer (they were
very minor ones) of which he felt
himself guilty, and to ask how he
would have behaved if, as might easily
have happened, he had, at a certain
point in his career as a student, elected
to go to the secret police academy
rather than to the university. Would
not he, too, have succumbed to the
pervasive moral and intellectual atmos-
phere by which he would have been
surrounded in this great bureaucratic
police -machine? Would he ever have
questioned it? Was there not, in fact,
in the very air of this system of power
a corruption that penetrated much of
Soviet society as a whole, successful
and influential society in particular,
and made possible this monstrous dis-
tortion of human life?
Solzhenitsyn searched for the roots
of this corruption, and found them in
the ideology. I would suggest-and I
doubt that he would disagree-that one
could go a step further and say that
the trouble lay not so much in the years. "Why, for nothing at all," was
the answer. "You're
lying
" charged
t
l
,
ac
ua
upon it) to believe that content of Lite ideology (all the officer, angrily. "For noth~ng at all
own case, or that of their ideologies, after all, are imperfect and they only give ten "
ears.1
A... g -eyed ro el ase_;~aneiner92 : CIA oDP7e 01194A AA~1 nnis nn 3
inadequate, but not all a this sinister)
as in the absolute value ttached to it.
The insistence, built into Bolshevist
philosophy from the start, that there
was no inhibition, no scr
of decency, of delicacy,
-but literally none-that
permitted to take preced
interests of the Party as i
was this savage and recki
standing of tens of milli
and rendered them all,
ple-whether
f compassion,
ity of others
nce over the
terpreted by
trol of it: it
, the under-
slaves alike, vulnerable to the stupen-
dous degradation that Solzhenitsyn
It is impossible to belie
book can have anything
major effect on the Soviet
would be true even if no
total work were to appe
two parts to which thi
addressed (and there are
of Western publishers). Th~s merciless
indictment, coming as the
the large body -of existing I
the same subject, is too de
be ignored. The Soviet lead
just by ignoring it themse
tempting to smother it wit
consign it to oblivion ol-
remain without consequenc
large for the craw of
propaganda machine. It
there, with increasing disco
it has done its work.
And what is this work,
itsyn perceives it? It is,
conscience; to compel t
regime to come to terms, at
with its own history; to co
face that history frankly; to
Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago f
is-a shame on the name of
the name of Socialism; to ask
could have happened; to ide
basic flaws in the system
mitted it to happen; and th
about both to eradicate th
e that this
egime. This
ore of the
review is
the hands
climax to
terature on
rastating to
ers cannot,
ves or at-
falsehood,
ause it to
s. It is too
he Soviet
will stick
fort, until
Solzhen-
urely, to
Russian
e Soviet
long last,
pel it to
recognize
r what it
ussia and
how this
ntify the
that per-
?n to set
)se flaws
sSolzhenitsyn tells of one occasion
upon which a prisoner, in p ocess of
being transported from one place of
confinement to another, was asked by
a curious convoy officer for what
offense he had been given the unusu-
ally heavy sentence of twe' my-five
masters and
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and to- liquidate the unhappy remnants
of earlier great abuses that are still
present in the Soviet judicial and penal .
systems.
This will not be easy. It will shake
the whole structure of Soviet power as
heretofore known. It will require the
abandonment of the absurd claim to
omniscience and infallibility that the
Party has heretofore always main-
tained. It will require, for the first
time in fifty years, a critical examina-
tion of Lenin's political philosophy, as
well as that of his successors. It will
require a confession, on the part of the
present leaders, that they, too, have
made mistakes. '
Does this imply the overthrow or
collapse of the regime? Not, one would
suppose, if this act of self-searching
can be carried out with anything
approaching the courage and integrity
Solzhenitsyn has brought to the sub-
ject. There is, after all, no plausible
possible. alternative to this regime,
today; and not even Solzhenitsyn has
suggested that any effort should be
made to create one. What is demanded
here is, rather, an alteration in the
nature of the Russian-Communist polit-
ical system-a relative humanizing that
would bring it into better accord with
the needs of a great advanced society
in the modern world. It is the ghost of
Dubbek that will hover, together with
this book, over the towers of the
Kremlin, so long as its lesso,is are not
heeded.
But this process of humanization, as
Solzhenitsyn has shown, is not just a
matter of tinkering with present prac-
tices. It is a matter of introspection
and self-understanding-a process which
Khrushchev attempted, in his crude
way, to put into motion within a
limited area but which his successors,
evidently thinking that life would be
easier that way, attempted to stop. If
the process can now be successfully
resumed, one can see hope both for
the Russian people and for their
leaders. But if the leaders attempt to
avoid or impede it, they will merely
dig themselves in deeper. The Russia
that will then ensue will be one where
it will be, to use Solzhenitsyn'a own
words, "uncomfortable and terrible to
live"-terrible and uncomfortable for
everyone, and not alone for those, the
non-Party masses, who have no share
in the ruling of the country.
and grumbling about the lines at the
filling station? What does this book
mean for us?
The problem Solzhenitsyn poses is
essentially Russia's problem. No out-
side force can solve it. No useful
purpose would be served if any at-
tempted to do so.
Yet there are ways in which people
in the West can support, by their
reaction, the purposes this book was
written to promote.
They can, first of all, exert them-
selves to keep the course of events in
Russia under the scrutiny of world
attention. There is no greater discour-
agement that could be brought to the
forces working for a more humane
Russian society than the impression
that their efforts are forgotten, or
viewed with indifference, elsewhere.
Secondly, the West can see to it that
the limited portion of Russian cultural
activity-literature, scholarship, journal-
ism-which exists in the Western world,
beyond the control of Soviet censors,
receives encouragement and support,
and is not permitted to die from
neglect and lack of understanding. Ever
since the first appearance of Alexander
Herzen's Kolokol in London, in 1857,
the voice of the Russian-in-exile has
been an important, sometimes almost a
vital, factor in the struggle for greater
liberality in the treatment of Russian
cultural activity, and for political
liberalization generally, at home. In
recent decades, the United States has
replaced Germany and England as the
leading host, in the quantitative, if not
the qualitative, sense, for this sort of
Russian cultural life. But there is every
reason to fear that if something does
not happen soon to increase the sup-
port devoted to it, its present vigor
will not be of long duration. And this
Russian cultural activity is the atmos-
phere the exiles breathe.
To the extent it is permitted to
decline-to the extent Russian-language
publishing facilities and journals and
the facilities for training and advanced
research in Russian studies are allowed
to go out of existence-the voices of
those who, like Solzhenitsyn, are now
compelled to live abroad will be stifled
for lack of stimulus and of mediums of
expression, and the influence exerted
in Russia itself will be to that extent
reduced.
But the most valuable contribution
Westerners can make by way of re-
action to Solzhenitsyn's book is to
recognize its direct relevance to them-
selves, their problems and their be-
havior. If they take it in a spirit of
detached and smug superiority, pitying
the poor Russians for the deficiencies
of their system of government and
congratulating themselves on the
beauties of Western civilization, they
will have missed the most important
point Solzhenitsyn has to make. The
supreme value of the work lies in its
exemplary quality-its quality as an
example of ruthless and fearless
honesty in the exploration of the
weaknesses in one's own personal be-
havior and in one's own society. If
some of this honesty does not rub off
on the Western reader (and when has
he ever been more in need of it?), then
the book may have helped people in
Russia, but it will not have helped
people here; and to the extent the
West has remained deaf to its message,
its effect in Russia, too, will have been
weakened. Solzhenitsyn has scattered
widely, and with generous hand, the
summons to conscience that the work
represents. The seeds should be
allowed to sprout wherever, and how-
ever, they are needed. 0
And what of us-of us Westerners,
enjoying rights we scarcely value,
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