The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 2

Already, this book is creepier than the first one. Volume 1, you sense Solzhenitsyn’s outrage and mocking humor. Volume 2 starts out describing the very first Gulag, which was at the site of a former monastery at the Solovetsky Islands. It is only a former monastery in the sense that Lenin determined it was a good isolated area, easy to guard, with nowhere to escape to. So he appropriated it for the newly forming prison system.

What made me slow down my reading and forced me to process what Solzhenistyn is saying are the photos. He explains quite carefully that those slated for slaughter were marched to location and shot in the back of the head, before having their body pushed down the stairs to make room for the next victim. Then he shows you a picture of a quite ordinary archway and says “this is where these people were murdered.” And it creates a sharp contrast between the idyllic beauty of this monastery on the White Sea up by Finland, and the lived horror of those who survived their tenure here.

At the very beginning of the book, there is included a map of the gulag system. And it really drives home just how far reaching this horror story is. Russia is an enormous country, composed of 6,601,665 square miles, making it the largest country in the world. And while it is bordered on almost all sides by water, most of the country is land locked, so I wasn’t quite sure how an archipelago was managed, given the dictionary definition of the word, “A group of islands.” But here you learn that Solzhenitsyn does not literally mean an archipelago. He means that the entire gulag system formed their own islands in the “sea” of the Russian land mass—and there were more gulags than cities.

And he ruthlessly points out that while Germany gets a lot of righteous hate for Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald, Russia’s contribution to concentration camps has been largely ignored by the 20th century. Everyone thinks Hitler was wholly unique and original with his monstrous creations. He was not. Everything he did had been done before—in mother Russia. By Lenin and Stalin. By the socialist party who could not handle a dissenting opinion. Lenin and Stalin after him quickly realized that the gulag system would have to be scaled up to a massive undertaking, if they were to silence all the dissent they were experiencing. And so the cancer spread…

So, first off, a quick correction. In my post for Volume I, I said that general labor was the work around camp. I grossly misunderstood what Solzhenitsyn meant by the term, as was made abundantly clear to me in Volume 2. General labor means the Labor of the Camp, i.e. whatever the camp “specialized” in. So, if it was a logging camp, they’d burn you up cutting down trees.  In a mining camp, they’d send you out to dig up copper, or gold, or whatever natural resource was in the area and useful to the Soviet cause.

This clarification is important for understanding the true horrors of today’s blog. Starting with an introduction to Naftaly Frenkel. Frenkel was also an inmate, as were most people in the camps, including the guards. But what made Frenkel such a standout was the ideas of corrective labor that he gave to Stalin, starting with classifying the prisoners into groups A, B, C, and D.

“Everyone not engaged in providing essential services for the camp (B), not verified as being ill (C), and not undergoing correction in a punishment cell (D) must drag his workload (A) every day of his sentence.”

Which meant ideally, you were classified as B: Providing essential services for the camp. Getting classified as C: Being very ill, was difficult, and the doctors even had limitations on the number of patients they could deem too ill to work. And being in a punishment cell (D) was in many ways worse than the actual labor. Isolation, in an unheated cell, they would take away any warm weather gear, and only feed you every three days. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn reports that if you weren’t sick when you went in, you were likely to exit with a lifelong debilitating illness.  Pretty sure that because you “earned” the illness in the punishment cell, there was no sick time for you. So, we see being classified as A, made you general labor.

Enter quotas. We’ll stick with logging camps for all examples. If you did not fill your quota of trees cut down, you did not get to return to camp for the night. Since work quota’s were applied to squads of men, not individuals, entire squads of men would be left out of camp. Sometimes in the middle of winter. Where they would freeze to death. Labor was cheap. But the quota remained. Enter Tukhta: the reports of inflated figures.

So, say a camp was coming up 10,000 logs short of quota. A clever zek (prisoner) foreman, could fudge the report. When the “error” was discovered, the foreman could then report that the logs were there…still on the mountain. But because the snow was so deep when they were cut, we couldn’t get the logs off the mountain. And NOW, because the snow is melted and the logs are buried in mud, the logs will be half rotted, really only useful for firewood. And so, they were written off. But…and here’s the really fun part of Tukhta. Since initially those logs were reported as being delivered, the “delivery” was reported all the way down the line. The camp that was to receive them, reported receipt of 10,000 logs. Which were now “sitting in the water” having been floated down the river. And if they don’t send that surplus out to the sea, they’ll have to literally bomb the river to break up the frozen mass in the spring!

And so, we have 10,000 logs that never existed, simultaneously rotting on the mountain AND being sent to sea as surplus. Because of inflated figures, aka Tukhta. Socialism is a legacy of incompetence, lies, and failures. How do we know this is true of socialism in general and not just particular to the Soviet Union? Mao’s Great Famine reported much the same. Lying is the only way to actually meet the ridiculous demands made by the socialist overlords of a corrupt system of failure.

That’s very much what it feels like now. Each successive chapter I’ve read has been an introduction to the different people. Starting with “The Fascists.” Seriously, there is a whole chapter called “They’ve brought The Fascists!” Which is what they ended up calling the 58’s aka political prisoners. The problem is, the 58’s were never fascists. Ok, maybe not never. It’s not like I can personally know the believed ideologies of millions of dead. But by calling them fascist’s, it made it ok to do the things that were done to them. Early on in the book, we learn that inmates were not allowed to call each other or anyone “Comrade.” That was an honorific reserved for non-inmates to use amongst each other. The inmates had to address all freemen as “Citizen.” Which means the inmates were not even citizens of the Soviet Union. They were inmates, prisoners, with no status or standing. Which, as we learned while reading Ordinary Men, makes it easy to dehumanize them to the point that murder becomes simple. And calling them fascists also erases the very real problem of imprisoning people whose only guilt lay in having an original thought. Much like today…call someone fascist for disagreeing with you and you’ve solved two problems:

1.   You silence dissent because everyone knows fascists are evil, and the person you’re accusing can’t disprove a negative.

2.   You dehumanize them so that it makes it ok to attack them.

So just the accusation of fascism silences the room. And much like the attacks by cancel culture, most people apologize for whatever they said that caused the accusation to be leveled. Even if what they said was NOT fascist. And a few very bold fight back. Much like the allegation of racism, the charge of fascism is starting to lose all meaning. It’s been used to much, the meaning changed so often, that people don’t even care anymore. Which is a shame, because like genuine racism, genuine fascism is awful and should be countered where it actually exists. But labeling everything you dislike fascists is a childs guide to argument. It bears no merit, and makes it easy to ignore.

The next cast of characters were the women in camp. And much like in Mao’s China, they were victims of repeated rape. They had no option. Sex with the men in camp could guarantee them everything from a warm place to sleep at night, to extra rations ensuring they didn’t starve to death. If they got pregnant, they could be put in the mother’s camp for a period of time. And if they rejected these options, then they would be put on general work crews, just like the men. And there was no adjustment for required minimum. What the men were required to produce, the women were required to produce. In some camps, they would take the women’s production totals and add them to the men’s production totals, so that the men’s numbers looked good, while the women were made to stay out and continue working. Because socialism is all about equality.

The final cast I will discuss today are the trustees. So, anyone engaged in the running of the camp and is also an inmate of the camp is a trustee. Trustee’s tended to manage to live through their sentence, and so becoming a trustee was an important survival technique. Solzhenitsyn held several trustee positions while in camp, and also did his share of the labor of the camp. Ultimately, one did not survive without climbing over the bodies of other zeks. This was not Darwinian…it was more gladiatorial. Not in the fight to the death sense, but in the sense of if you were unwilling to do what you had to do to survive, someone else would at your expense. And this is what they want to do here. More and more of the useful idiots are posting about the usefulness of camps and reeducation (aka indoctrination). It never once occurs to them that they could just as easily end up in those camps. THEY should read The Gulag Archipelago. It is simply not possible that they rounded up and killed 66 million people without killing some of the ideologically pure, true believers.

Sorry it’s been light on posting this week, I’ve had a bunch of side quests this week that kept me from reading at my usual fast pace. But, here we are, with the next round of inmates described.

Solzhenitsyn goes out of his way to highlight the absurdities of who exactly is imprisoned under Article 58. While 58s were, in total, classified as “political’s,” the section determined exactly what kind of political. Section 10 was a universally accessible section. ANYONE could be classified as a 58-10. 10 meant you were in for Counter-Revolutionary Agitation. Any thought spoken out loud that could in any way be construed as critical of the regime could land you in the Gulags under article 58-10. Sort of the extreme logical conclusion to cancel culture. The other catch-all section that people could be imprisoned under was section 12. Which meant failure to make a denunciation. So if your husband as arrested for 58-10, and you did not immediately denounce all association with him, up to and including divorce, you yourself could be arrested for 58-12, failing to denounce him. Again…the logical extension of cancel culture. Have you ever tried defending someone the media elites are trying to cancel? The mob will turn on you just as quickly.

A fair amount of those imprisoned were Loyalist. These were people who were died in the wool Communists. They genuinely believed that THEY were the sole innocent in prison, and if only Comrade Stalin would hear their story, they would be immediately released. Well…not so much. Those were the ones Soviets would call Useful Idiots. And in my opinion, the only ones who truly belonged in the Gulags. Play stupid games (communism/socialism) win stupid prizes (a trip to the Gulag).

It was interesting to me that after describing the Loyalists, Solzhenitsyn spends several chapters describing certain fates that could befall one in the camps. Starting with recruitment. Yep…the camp administrators, not the trusties, but the actual free men running the camps, would recruit from among the inmates other inmates to inform on the inmates. Solzhenitsyn said he was unable to locate any of these snitches who were willing to talk to him. Apparently, this was the bar too low to crawl under with any grace, so that those that did inform were unwilling to reveal their betrayals of other inmates. Stealing food is about survival. Informing on inmates which could earn them even more time inside…that was Betrayal. So what he did report on was the camps attempt at recruiting Solzhenitsyn. And it was a trap. The administrator started by asking Solzhenitsyn if he still supported Socialism. A no would earn Solzhenitsyn more jail time. A yes meant he was friendly and could be recruited to snitch. Solzhenitsyn found himself walking a very fine line. He said yes he was friendly. But when asked to snitch, he said no he would not do that. The administrator found an acceptable compromise. He asked if Solzhenitsyn would be willing to report on any overheard escape plans among the thieves. Solzhenitsyn was no friend of the thieves, and agreed. But only because he knew that the thieves would never let him get close enough to overhear any such plans. And fortunately, not to long after his recruitment, Solzhenitsyn was transported to a different camp.

And then we have a very dark chapter, describing what happens to those who are NOT friendly to Socialism after their time in the camps. Before being released, they would be rearrested. And transported even further north for repeat interrogation. Not all of them. Some would simply have their terms extended where they were, and find their original 10 year sentence extended to 25. But others…tents planted in the permafrost of the Siberian Tundra. Each tent was given a single garbage can heater with a single pail of coal for heat per day. As inmates froze to death, the bodies were simply stacked outside. They were unable to be buried because the ground would not yield to shovels. And those that did not freeze to death might simply be marched out to the Tundra and shot. One of the few survivors of this experience in the frozen waste said that many of the inmates would have preferred a gas chamber, over the slow freezing to death under less than starvation rations: 7 ounces of bread and 1 bowl of gruel per day.

There was one heroic chapter called Changing One’s Fate! Wherein Solzhenitsyn describes several escape attempts by inmates, some of which were successful, for a time, but almost inevitably ended when the escapee would feel a longing for family and would make contact with someone back home. On the plus side, almost none of the family betrayed the escapee.  They were caught because their family was being watched.

And now we get to the Socially Friendly, aka the Thieves. Anyone not imprisoned under Article 58, was likely in the Thieves Guild. Ok, Solzhenitsyn does not call it that. He simply calls them thieves. But so much of what is reported here made me wonder if there was a direct historical line from the thieves in the Gulag’s, and the modern day Russian Mafia. And I’m almost positive there is. So much so I BOUGHT ANOTHER BOOK! (shocking I know). But this is not about that. The thieves did run the camps. Because they were not 58s, they had leniency. And Solzhenitsyn identifies three key elements that raised the thieves standing above that of other inmates.

1.       The Voroshilov Amnesty of March 25, 1953. This released a wave of murderers, bandits, and thieves, who had all been serving sentences.

2.       Article 139 of the Criminal Code of 1926. This limited self defense. You had to literally wait until you had been stabbed before you could fight back against an attacker. Yes, that is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.

3.       The state, in its Criminal Code, forbids citizens to have firearms or other weapons, but does not itself undertake to defend the citizens! (Doesn’t THAT sound alarmingly familiar).

So the thieves, having determined that the laws did not apply to them, only to law abiding citizens, broke the law with continued impunity. And since they were not 58s, in the camps, they were essentially immune to camp life. They took what they wanted from other inmates, including the other inmates daily work load. They took food, bread, bedding…and yes, it seems this is where the mafia got it’s start in Russia. But more on that later. For now, this is where I’m at with volume 2. I’m off to read the rest of it. 225 pages left and only one day before I have to record and edit the review. Wish me luck!

I finished out the cast of characters yesterday with Solzhenitsyn’s description of what the Gulags did to children. Yep…children. The camps turned otherwise ordinary children into hardened criminals. With the blessing of the Gulag. The Gulag swallowed everyone. Artists were not immune and were destroyed wholesale, as they were not allowed to create any art that was critical of the regime. Sound familiar?

Solzhenitsyn included chapters on the camp dogs…not the guard dogs, and he did not mean to malign actual dogs, that was his euphemism for the camp guards. After all, they were as tied to the camps as the inmates and trustees. And the campers…those freemen and women who lived camp adjacent and made their living off of camps. What…you thought only the Nazi’s engaged in such atrocity?

But finally, we move out of the cast of characters and into the effect the camps have on people. The Ascent was an oddly positive chapter in this book. I think ascending is how one comes to terms with ones own complicity in the system. Wait a minute…how can one be complicit in ones own incarceration? Well….some did escape. And that is one way to not be complicit. A better way to not be complicit is to speak out. Loudly. Often. Make your voice heard. This was not necessarily an obvious option in Soviet Union, where in the voting booth, you only had one option. We’re not much better off here with our paltry TWO selections. Wait…we do have more than two. Never forget that voting for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.

Anyway, quietly going along to get along is not an option in the face of evil. If this is the path you choose to take, you have no one to blame but yourself when you end up in the Gulag. And recognizing your complicity in this is the path out of darkness. This is how you ascend.

The alternative is corruption. That soul corruption which causes you to turn in to a stool pigeon, willing to turn on your fellow inmates. That soul corruption betrays your very core, and Solzhenitsyn was unable to locate very many former inmates who were willing to admit to this level of soul corruption.

The next to last chapter was called “Our Muzzled Freedom,” wherein Solzhenitsyn identifies “those traits of free life which were determined by the closeness of the Archipelago or which were in the same style.” Solzhenitsyn identifies 10 traits that were experienced in varying degrees by virtually everyone living in the socialist state of the Soviet Union.

Constant Fear, servitude, secrecy and mistrust, universal ignorance, squealing, betrayal as a form of existence, corruption, the lie as a form of existence, cruelty, and slave psychology. Let’s break this down a little bit, see if I can give examples of each to demonstrate just how far down the Archipelago we are already living. Now, I explore these a little more in tomorrow’s video review, which will be live at 9:15am PST.

But the last chapter struck me. In it, he identifies at least two people whose stories were outstanding for various reasons. But I’m going to focus the rest of this post on one: Anna Petrovna Skripnikova. Anna was the daughter of an ordinary worker of Maikop, born in 1896. Now, the socialists would have you believe that Anna had no options in life other than to be a wife and work herself to death on a farm somewhere under the Tsarist regime. This is not what happened. Anna was very smart, reading Dobrolyubov and Dostoyevsky as early as third grade. In 1917 (before the Bolshevik revolution), she entered the Chaplygin’s Advanced School for Women, eventually earning a degree in in philosophy and psychology, eventually becoming a very popular teacher in Maikop at the Institute of People’s Education for Adults. When the Red Army eventually rolled through her village, decrying the Bolshevik’s and expecting full support for Lenin’s revolutionaries, calling down vile denouncements on the intelligentsia, of which Anna was one. As were many of the people in the audience. Reportedly, Anna responded. She went up on stage and replied:

“We have heard out your ignorant speech. You summoned us here, but it was not announced that it was to bury the great culture of Russia! We came here expecting to see a culture-bearer and found a gravedigger. You would have done better simple to curse us out than to say what you did today! And so are we supposed to understand that you speak in the a name of Soviet power? Well, if the Soviet government is going to have such bandits as you as its representatives, it will fall apart.”

Now THAT is the kind of courage that is sadly lacking in America. And yes, she was imprisoned for it. And she refused to back down. She was imprisoned multiple times, each time fighting back, and refusing to renounce the use of her own reason. She was a hero. And I have a feeling that even if I spoke Russian, I would be very hard pressed to find any additional information on her outside of the brief biography given her by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But I’m still going to try.

Review was originally posted on YouTube on August 16, 2021, but is now on Rumble and PodBean.