GULAG

An appreciation of one of the most important books of our time:

Today the word “gulag” is often used figuratively, but in the Soviet Union the Gulag—an acronym designating the system of forced labor camps—was all too real. Millions of people lived and died in the Gulag’s many “islands,” the camps scattered over the vast country. The worst were located in the Kolyma region in northeastern Siberia, where prisoners labored at 50, 60, even 70 degrees below zero and were given insufficient calories to sustain life. ....

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, published 50 years ago, was much more than a detailed account compiled from the testimonies of hundreds of people; it was also arguably the 20^th century’s greatest piece of nonfiction prose.

Dedicated to “all those who did not live” to tell their story, The Gulag Archipelago demonstrates a nadir of humanity with nearly unfathomable cruelty. ....

Those who had admitted some of the horrors often blamed them entirely on Stalin, as if Lenin would not have done such things, but, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates, Lenin set up the system of terror and the Gulag while making clear that both were to be permanent features of the new regime. To those Westerners who imagine that this bizarre system of punishment could not happen in their country, Solzhenitsyn cautions: “Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” ....

How was such evil possible? Shakespeare and Schiller clearly did not grasp evil, Solzhenitsyn instructs, because their villains “recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black,” but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains stopped at a few corpses “because they had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what...gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination...the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good...in his own and others’ eyes.” ....

Those accepting Soviet ethics laughed at the very idea of “conscience.” “Right” was whatever aided the Communist Party. In this view, there were no higher values, no absolute good and evil, and the only thing that counted in any action was its result. On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn decided; what matters most is not the result but one’s soul. ....

...[I]n prison Solzhenitsyn gradually realized the fundamental falsity of ideological thinking: the idea that evil results from bad people, and it is only necessary to rid ourselves of them. Not at all. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” Having grasped this truth, Solzhenitsyn arrived at another—“the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).” ....

Gary Saul Morson, "‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil," The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2023.