Summary: The Gulag Archipelago

The GIST

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a three-volume work of nonfiction about the Soviet Union's system of forced labor camps, known as the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident who had been a prisoner in that system himself, wrote it in secret between 1958 and 1968. He built it from reports, interviews, statements, diaries and legal documents, and from what he had lived through. It was first published in Russian in Paris at the very end of 1973, and English and French translations followed the next year.

Few books have landed with such force. The American diplomat George F. Kennan called it "the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times." The novelist Doris Lessing said it "brought down an empire." Six weeks after it came off the presses in Paris, its author had been forced into exile. Inside the Soviet Union it circulated in underground copies and was not widely published until 1989. Since 2009 Russian schools have issued it as required reading. It is at once a history, a former prisoner's own account, a gathering of many testimonies and an argument about how ideology gives evildoing its justification.

The Big Ideas

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

The subtitle tells you what kind of book this is. Solzhenitsyn assembled his highly detailed picture from many kinds of sources: reports, legal documents, diaries, interviews and statements, and his own experience as a prisoner. The result is, as the subtitle says, a literary investigation.

In most editions the text runs to seven parts spread over three volumes, with parts one and two in the first, three and four in the second, and five through seven in the third.

The book moves along two tracks at once. One is a chronological history of the camp system and the laws and bureaucracy that produced it. The other follows the path a typical prisoner would travel through that system from beginning to end. The reader sees the machine being built and then what it was like to be fed into it.

From Lenin's Decrees to the Secret Speech

On the historical track, Solzhenitsyn covers the forced labor camps as they operated from 1918 to 1956. He begins not with Stalin but with Vladimir Lenin. Soon after the October Revolution, Lenin's first decrees created the legal and practical basis for the camps, places where both political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sent to do forced labor.

From there the book follows the growth of the system. It describes the successive waves of purges and the staging of show trials under Stalin through the 1930s, always in the context of the growing camp system. Solzhenitsyn pays close attention to the deliberate legal and bureaucratic development of the Gulag.

The narrative ends in 1956 with Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech, delivered at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. In it Khrushchev denounced Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power and the surveillance that had reached into every class of society during his rule.

The Journey of a Zek

Running alongside the history is the human story. A zek was slang for an inmate, taken from the abbreviation z/k for the Russian word for prisoner. Solzhenitsyn traces the typical course of a zek through the Gulag step by step.

It begins with arrest, followed by a show trial and the first period of confinement. Then comes transport to the camps. Once there, he examines how prisoners were treated and the conditions in which they lived, the slave labor gangs, and the technical workings of the camp system. He records moments when prisoners fought back, including camp rebellions and strikes such as the Kengir uprising. He describes the practice of internal exile, by which a person who had served out the original sentence could still be kept in exile. And he arrives finally at release, which came in the end for those who survived but was never guaranteed.

Part of what makes the account so affecting is its range. Solzhenitsyn sets down the small, ordinary events of an average prisoner's life as carefully as he records the notable episodes, the revolts and uprisings in the system's history. The reader comes to know the Gulag both as a routine and as a catastrophe.

Ideology and the Making of Evildoers

The book's thesis concerns what makes cruelty on this scale possible. In the fourth chapter Solzhenitsyn turns to Shakespeare. Macbeth's attempts to justify himself were weak, he observes, and his conscience consumed him. Even Iago looks like a lamb by comparison. Shakespeare's villains stopped at a dozen bodies, and Solzhenitsyn gives the reason in a short sentence: "Because they had no ideology."

He goes on: "Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination." Ideology, in his account, is the social theory that lets a person see his own acts as good rather than bad, and lets others see them that way too. He draws the parallel across history. The agents of the Inquisition steeled themselves by invoking Christianity. Conquerors pointed to the glory of their homeland, colonizers to civilization, the Nazis to race, and the Jacobins to equality, brotherhood and the happiness of generations to come.

The point is not that systems act on their own. The passage closes with a reminder that people did this: "Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago." What ideology supplied was the justification and the determination to keep going.

A Systemic Fault, Not One Man's Aberration

This leads to the book's central historical claim. Solzhenitsyn takes great pains to show that the Gulag began with Lenin, in its theory, its law and its practice, and not with Stalin. Stalin, in his telling, enlarged a concentration camp system that already existed.

The distinction mattered. Khrushchev, the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's supporters in the West treated the camps as a deviation that belonged to Stalin. Solzhenitsyn said many Western intellectuals saw the camp system as a Stalinist aberration. He and others in the opposition tended to see the Gulag instead as a fault built into Soviet political culture, the inevitable result of the Bolshevik project itself.

He added a warning. A good deal of what he described was no longer being done, he claimed, yet the framework underneath was still standing, and a later leadership could bring it back and enlarge it.

A Manuscript in Hiding, and a Book That Shook an Empire

The story of how the book was written is dramatic in its own right. Possessing the manuscript could mean a long prison term for anti-Soviet activity, and Solzhenitsyn was under constant KGB surveillance. So he never worked on the manuscript in complete form. He kept separate sections with trusted friends around Moscow and its suburbs, and sometimes wrote in their homes under cover of a social visit. After the KGB seized his materials in Moscow, he turned his drafts into finished typescript during 1965 to 1967, partly while in hiding. For much of this time he lived at the dacha of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose fame offered some protection from searches.

The master copy was entrusted to Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian minister of education whom Solzhenitsyn had befriended in the Lubyanka prison in 1945. Susi's daughter Heli kept it hidden from the KGB in Estonia until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. A microfilm was smuggled to Solzhenitsyn's legal representative in Zürich, and a later paper copy was signed at the foot of each page by Heinrich Böll to guard against charges of falsification.

Solzhenitsyn wanted the book published first in Russia and knew it could not be. Then, in 1973, the KGB interrogated one of his trusted typists, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and seized one of only three copies still on Soviet soil. Within days of her release she was found hanged. After learning of her death he allowed publication in Paris, where YMCA-Press brought the book out a few days after Christmas. The royalties and sales income went to a fund for former camp prisoners.

The impact was immediate. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that until then the Communists and their allies had convinced their followers that attacks on the regime were mostly bourgeois propaganda. Roy Medvedev, a Soviet dissident and historian who called the book extremely contradictory, also wrote that few would rise from reading it the same as when they began. The historian Orlando Figes said that many of the Gulag inmates he interviewed identified with it so strongly that they could no longer separate their own experiences from what they had read.

Scholars have also raised serious cautions. Stephen G. Wheatcroft calls it a fine literary masterpiece and a sharp political indictment, but notes that it never claimed to put the camps in a quantitative perspective and that its estimate was too high, with archival research bearing out the lower figures. J. Arch Getty and Gabor Rittersporn criticized its methods, Rittersporn pointing to its reliance on vague reminiscence and hearsay, and others have classed it as oral history. Solzhenitsyn's first wife told a newspaper in 1974 that it was the folklore of the camps; her own books were published by a Soviet state-run press.

Putting It to Work

• Be wary of ideas that excuse harm. The book's sharpest lesson is that ideology gives evildoing its justification, making a person's acts seem good in his own eyes and in others'.
• Look at systems, not just rulers. Solzhenitsyn's insistence that the camps began before Stalin is a reminder to ask what laws and institutions make abuse possible, instead of blaming a single ruler.
• Do not assume a dismantled system is gone. He warned that the structure outlasted the practices and could be revived.
• Honor testimony. The book exists because Solzhenitsyn gathered what he and others had witnessed, and because friends hid its pages at great risk.
• Read it for what it is. Treat it as a literary and political work, as Wheatcroft describes it. For numbers, he points to research in the state archives.

Who Should Read It

This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Soviet Union, the Soviet camp system or the way ideology can justify cruelty. It will reward readers of history and political thought, and those drawn to great works of witness. The full three volumes are a serious commitment, and abridged editions exist, such as the one Solzhenitsyn's widow prepared for Russian high-school students or the fiftieth-anniversary abridgment with a foreword by Jordan Peterson, who has called it the most important book of the twentieth century.

This has been a summary of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.