PDF Summary:The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago is a work of historical nonfiction that describes life in Soviet prison labor camps, popularly known as gulags, in the USSR from the late 1910s to the mid-50s. Prisoners like author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were arrested on minor or even fabricated charges, tortured and robbed by security officials, and held in camps for decades, where many were worked to death.

Though the book was banned and Solzhenitsyn persecuted by his own government for publishing it, it exposed human rights abuses by the Soviet Union to the world, counteracting decades of propaganda. In the modern day, it acts as a warning of how governments can use violence, paranoia, and repression to control and exploit their citizens. This guide will consider the book’s historical context, the tools used by authoritarian governments, and how Solzhenitsyn’s account compares to the treatment of prisoners worldwide today.

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Solzhenitsyn argues that the secrecy with which criminal investigations were conducted worked to terrorize both prisoners and free citizens. So long as arrests weren’t public knowledge, people would simply disappear, and the facts of what they did or what had happened to them would come out only through rumors. Even if multiple people disappeared from a single community, it was difficult for their neighbors to understand the scale of arrests taking place.

(Shortform note: Modern international law forbids the enforced disappearances of prisoners with no acknowledgment of their arrest being made to the public or to their loved ones, but laws governing the prisoner’s right to personally communicate with the outside world—through visits, phone calls, letters, and so on—vary by country, and these rights are sometimes denied as a punishment.)

A Powerful Propaganda Machine

From the 1930s on, the Soviet Union had an extremely robust and powerful propaganda system, exerting near-total control over how the government was depicted in the news, radio and television, works of literary fiction, and in education. Historical events that threatened to embarrass the government were covered up, while successes were exaggerated.

(Shortform note: While Solzhenitsyn focuses on how propaganda was used to cover up political scandals, the strength of Soviet propaganda can also be seen in how economic developments were covered, such as the reporting on the Five-Year Plans, a series of government programs begun in the 1930s to overhaul the USSR’s struggling economy. While the first two Five-Year Plans were successful in modernizing the country’s agricultural and industrial systems, the propaganda machine glossed over delays and claimed inflated production levels.)

This propaganda machine operated through two primary mechanisms: historical revisionism and mislabeling.

Historical Revisionism

The government continually revised official histories, erasing past events or figures in order to serve current political needs. Solzhenitsyn notes that many Soviet politicians and security officials were imprisoned or disgraced after decades of service, despite having been previously depicted as heroes. The purges of the 1930s, in which Stalin had dozens of his political rivals removed from power and scrubbed from the historical record, were the most famous example of this practice.

(Shortform note: Interestingly, historical revisionism could sometimes act to make society more open and progressive by ending the veneration of authoritarian figures. For example, in 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev delivered a “secret speech” in which he publicly condemned Stalin’s leadership and the “cult of personality” which had formed around him. This sudden change from universal worship of Stalin to open criticism was a shock to the country, but it opened the door for greater ideological freedom and reform—at least until Khrushchev himself was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.)

Mislabeling

Another aspect of the propaganda system was the widespread use of euphemism or deliberate mislabeling to obscure the realities of mass deaths or human rights abuses. For example, when public news media reported on the widespread use of prison labor, it often called prisoners “volunteers” and downplayed the physically demanding nature of their work.

(Shortform note: Prison labor is widespread in the United States today, and while information about this practice is publicly available, many people remain ignorant of just how many industries rely on prison labor, how poorly prisoners are paid (often cents per day, if at all), and how dangerous their working conditions are. Anti-prison activists argue that prison labor isn’t just economic exploitation, but a direct outgrowth of American slavery—the 13th Amendment, which ostensibly outlawed slavery, includes the exception that forced labor may be used as “punishment for a crime.”)

Mislabeling could also be used to demonize prisoners, thus discouraging people from sympathizing with them. For example, it was common to refer to those arrested for counter-revolutionary or anti-Soviet activity—the crime for which Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned—as “fascists.” Former Red Army soldiers who wound up in the gulag were often depicted as Nazi collaborators, despite the fact that most of them had been arrested for crimes totally unrelated to their military service, and some were even former POWs who had been liberated from concentration camps.

(Shortform note: There were some genuine Nazi collaborators in the gulag. During the war, the Nazis captured and recruited a number of Russian POWs in order to organize them into a makeshift “Russian Liberation Army” led by former Red Army General Andrey Vlasov. After the war ended, those “Vlasov men” who failed to escape to Western Europe were either executed or imprisoned in the gulag. Controversially, Solzhenitsyn defended them by arguing that they were victims of Soviet exploitation who joined the Nazis to survive or to fight against communism, not because they agreed with Nazi ideology.)

Xenophobia

Another way the government could indoctrinate its citizens was by setting up a kind of us-versus-them mentality, wherein the Soviet Union was the bastion of morality and strength and had to be defended unquestioningly against other, more corrupt nations. Much of the Soviet Union’s national identity, particularly during the Stalinist period Solzhenitsyn focuses on, was based on the supposed dichotomy of the West—consisting of the capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United States—and the East—consisting of the Soviet Union, China, and various other communist regimes. These two spheres would compete for international influence and economic success throughout the 20th century.

(Shortform note: This West-East dichotomy was equally important to the United States’ national identity during this period (1945-1991, sometimes called the Cold War era), but in the American imagination, the West was the bastion of morality and strength and the USSR was the corrupting threat. This framing was used to justify proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as a culture of paranoia and hostility toward any Americans suspected of being communists.)

Because this conflict was positioned as a matter of ideology, the Soviet government limited cultural exchange between the West and the East. They made it difficult to cross the border and forbade the trade of specific books, films, and music from outside the Soviet bloc. They also censored literature and art by Soviet citizens, arguing that material that depicted the government too critically could be co-opted by Western nations as a form of anti-Soviet propaganda. This xenophobia provided the basis for Solzhenitsyn’s persecution after the publication of his first novel—he was deemed a national security risk.

(Shortform note: Some cross-cultural exchange took place anyway, in secret. In the Soviet satellite state of Estonia, for example, citizens were able to access foreign TV signals and watch American shows like Knight Rider and Dallas, and in the ’40s-60s, smuggled Western jazz records gave birth to an underground “hipster” subculture among Russian teenagers. In the other direction, works of art by Soviet citizens that didn’t meet with state approval were sometimes snuck out and published in the West to great acclaim—this was the case for several of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, as well as works by Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Bulgakov.)

Having gone out of its way to make the outside world seem unfamiliar and threatening, the Soviet Union could then wield deportation as a punishment. Those deported would have no hope of communicating with their friends and family back home. Solzhenitsyn notes that when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he was too afraid to leave the country to claim it, believing that the Soviet government would not allow him back across the border.

(Shortform note: While the outside world wasn’t as hostile or terrifying as the USSR claimed, it wasn’t home, and many Soviet dissidents were unhappy living in the West. Solzhenitsyn himself was a recluse, and quickly became unpopular in America for his conservative, Russian nationalist politics and his tendency to give speeches condemning American consumer culture.)

Social Alienation

According to Solzhenitsyn, another way the Soviet Union could control its citizens was via social alienation, or conditioning them not to care about or connect with each other, which worked to repress dissident movements. The legal and prison systems discouraged feelings of empathy while encouraging feelings of instability and fear. There was no logic to who got arrested or punished and who didn’t, so citizens in and outside the camps could only protect themselves by informing on, stealing from, and violently attacking one another. They became wary of offering aid to someone in need, and didn’t feel confident enough in other people to try to band together to stand up to their oppressors.

(Shortform note: The term “social alienation” is often associated with Karl Marx, a communist philosopher and cultural icon in the Soviet Union. Marx condemned capitalist societies for reducing people down to their labor, treating them as mere “cogs in a machine” whose feelings, relationships, and desires didn’t matter and should even be repressed when they threatened to interfere with profits. Though the USSR was a communist society that ostensibly valued its workers, it was also an authoritarian state, and it too benefited from repressing its citizens’ humanity in order to preserve the government’s absolute power over the people.)

This alienation worked differently in the free world versus in the gulag. Solzhenitsyn describes alienation in the free world as mainly being a lack of trust between people, while alienation in the gulag often involved violence.

Alienation in the Free World

Solzhenitsyn writes that State Security constantly recruited informers from among the general population. Officials persuaded citizens to turn against their friends and neighbors through appeals to their patriotism, offers of material rewards, or—in the method Solzhenitsyn claims was most common—threats. Because anti-Soviet activity and knowledge of such activity committed by another person were both crimes, security officers could seize people at random and threaten to imprison them if they didn't provide names.

Though not everyone became an informer, the popularity of this method further encouraged citizens to mistrust each other—anyone you met could be an informer. In addition, if someone you became close to was later arrested, your association would reflect badly on you. Therefore, it was best practice to trust no one and to assume that any person you met would sacrifice you to protect their own standing.

(Shortform note: The belief that there are informers in a community can be more dangerous and destabilizing than the informers themselves. For example, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century, the IRA (an anti-British paramilitary group) would make people suspected of being informers for the British disappear. Some of these people were legitimate spies, but some weren’t, and their murders destroyed families and deepened feelings of hostility and suspicion between Republican and Unionist neighborhoods—feelings which regularly erupted into violence.)

Soviet citizens were also under pressure to break off certain relationships in order to prove their loyalty to the state. Failure to renounce your association with someone who’d been imprisoned was considered anti-Soviet activity, no matter if they were a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a child. Those who gave up these relationships—either willingly or under duress—were still often fired, denied housing, and socially ostracized by their community. In the end, there was too much to lose from association with the wrong person for the vast majority of Soviet citizens to be motivated to seek out close relationships, or to consider forming coalitions that would have allowed them to stand up to State Security and other government forces.

(Shortform note: Despite this alienation, some dissident organizations did begin to form in the USSR after Stalin’s death in 1953. However, repression by the government was still severe enough that these groups either operated mostly in secret or were gradually broken up as their members were arrested, deported, institutionalized for alleged psychiatric illnesses, or outright assassinated.)

Alienation in the Gulag

Solzhenitsyn describes relationships in prison as being inherently contradictory. He writes that the friendships and even romantic connections formed between prisoners were the only things that made the years survivable, but at the same time, the prisons were deliberately constructed to make it difficult or impossible for a prisoner to act out of anything but self-interest. For example, in the vast majority of gulags, there wasn’t enough food, clothing, or living space for every prisoner, and prisoners would have to compete with or steal from each other in order to survive.

(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s claim that relationships between prisoners could be life-saving is supported by accounts from prisoners all over the world. Despite living in abusive environments where they endured violence from staff and fellow prisoners alike, many formerly incarcerated people speak positively of the friends or loved ones they met in prison, calling them the most significant relationships of their lives and maintaining those relationships after release.)

Hierarchies in the gulag also contributed to the alienation. An entire class of prisoners managed to avoid general labor by emphasizing skills they’d acquired outside of prison, such as mathematics, military experience, or administrative work.

Rather than serving as miners or loggers, these “trusties” became cooks, record-keepers, medical assistants, foremen, and even lower-level guards. Their more privileged positions entitled them to less crowded housing and the first pick of food, which allowed them to take more than their fair share. Some were even given the authority to determine how well other prisoners were treated—whether they received a full ration, were written up for failing to meet work quotas, were punished for breaking minor prison rules, and so on.

According to Solzhenitsyn, a large portion if not the majority of the prisoners who survived the camps were trusties. Other prisoners were inevitably ground down by the brutality of their work and lack of access to the same kinds of resources.

(Shortform note: Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl makes a similar observation to Solzhenitsyn’s about trusties in Man’s Search for Meaning, his memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. According to Frankl, those prisoners who held onto their morals and refused to betray one another generally died in the camps, while those who cooperated with the administration or thought only of themselves—becoming kapos, stealing from other prisoners, arranging for someone else to take their place on a transport to the gas chambers, and so on—were more likely to survive. The camps were designed to make the prisoners’ lives an “unrelenting struggle” for survival and to favor those most willing to exploit others.)

How Power Corrupts

While much of The Gulag Archipelago focuses on detailing the abuse prisoners suffered at the hands of low-level state representatives—the police, State Security officers, and camp guards—Solzhenitsyn also stresses that these representatives were themselves victims of indoctrination and social alienation. While he doesn’t excuse their actions, he argues that they were under incredible pressure from the state to participate in violence and that most acted out of fear of their leaders, the desire for safety, and the need to conform.

In this section, we’ll detail how the police and security officers were conditioned to feed the cycle of abuse.

Desensitizing Recruits

While it was obvious that joining State Security would require you to act against your neighbors, many were attracted to the job because it paid well and had ample opportunities for advancement. Soviet propaganda depicted State Security as the defenders of the people and the righteous arm of the state, rooting out evil. Many recruits came straight from communist youth organizations, state-run universities, and the military, and so had already bought into this framing to some extent.

Once they joined, it was easy for the power they wielded to go to their heads. Representatives of State Security and the police, no matter how young or inexperienced, were treated with deference by all members of society. This was partly due to the effectiveness of propaganda, but also to fear—everyone knew that these officials could arrest anyone they liked and were under pressure to constantly make new arrests just so they could be seen working. Some used their power to settle personal grudges, such as by having romantic rivals arrested.

These recruits were quickly exposed to the kinds of abuses they were expected to participate in. They would observe their superior officers beating, torturing, robbing, and sexually assaulting prisoners and were encouraged, if not outright ordered, to participate. Compliance showed loyalty, while refusal or squeamishness was mocked or punished. Showing too much sympathy for a prisoner could get you arrested for anti-Soviet sentiment.

“Just Following Orders” as a Defense

In the full version of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn quotes from letters he received from a number of current and former security officers. Many were defensive about their participation in the abuse of prisoners and argued that they had no choice but to follow orders. The “just following orders” defense is a controversial one in human rights debates, due in large part to its association with the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946.

The trials concluded that the “superior orders” defense was illegitimate in cases where the order being given would violate international law and that the requirements of military obedience don’t relieve you of the responsibility to make the right “moral choice.” While most modern states comply with the trials’ conclusion, modern attempts to hold soldiers accountable for war crimes or other violations of international law still tend to divide responsibility based on the defendant’s position of power and level of direct participation—a grunt soldier will likely be prosecuted less harshly than the commander of their unit.

Solzhenitsyn gives some accounts of security officers who acted against orders to assist their victims—stopping a beating, warning a free civilian under suspicion to run, turning a blind eye to the theft of extra rations, and so on. However, these stories are far and few between, and Solzhenitsyn points out that the kind of official who would behave this way rarely rose within the ranks of State Security, lacking the cruelty and initiative that would impress their superiors and get them to the point of rewriting policy.

(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s point is very similar to the “no good cops” argument made by modern anti-police and anti-prison activists, who assert that it’s impossible for there to be good individuals within an inherently exploitative system. Even if an individual acting alone could make a difference, those who resist abusing their power and try to help victims are often openly reviled by their peers and become victims themselves. Examples include the number of police officers killed or threatened for exposing corruption within their precinct and the widespread hatred for and undermining of Internal Affairs and similar accountability organizations.)

Solzhenitsyn’s Reflections

Solzhenitsyn himself nearly became a security officer, and while he ultimately refused on moral grounds, he admits that he behaved nearly as badly as the average camp guard once he was an officer in the Red Army. He was encouraged to mistreat the men under his command, and even after his arrest, he failed to regard his fellow prisoners as equals. Only after years of imprisonment did he begin to regret his actions. He claims that he behaved so cruelly not because it was necessary or even because he enjoyed it, but because it was expected of him.

The Appeal of Abusing Others

Numerous psychological studies have concluded that giving people unchecked authority and encouraging them to feel solidarity with one group and superiority over or distance from another can lead otherwise law-abiding and moral people to commit horrific acts of violence. Two infamous examples include the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Third Wave, both of which were shut down early after the detrimental effects on their participants became obvious.

These experiments both found that it took only a few days for a group of seemingly normal students, having been given absolute authority over their peers, to begin enforcing authoritarian rules of conduct and treating anyone who resisted with cruelty and sadism. The heads of these experiments, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and high school history teacher Ron Jones, concluded that their subjects were so attracted to the feelings of power and group acceptance that they willingly sacrificed their morals.

The Futility of Resistance

Throughout the book, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that the worst aspect of imprisonment was not the brutal conditions or mistreatment, but its inherent hopelessness. Prisoners’ lives weren’t valued, and there were no avenues for early release or reconsideration of a case. The only thing prisoners could focus on was survival, and this, again, often required them to steal from and abuse others.

Attempts at protest usually failed, either because the camp guards didn’t care about the prisoners’ well-being or because the prisoners had no public forum in which to make their grievances known. For example, while hunger strikes attracted attention in prisons all over the world in the 20th century, they almost always failed in Soviet prisons because no one outside the prison knew if a prisoner was starving, and no one inside the prison cared. All a hunger strike would do was make the prisoner even weaker.

(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s point about the ineffectiveness of these hunger strikes is a common critique made of nonviolent protest: that it requires an audience who already cares, at least somewhat, about the lives of the protesters. Nonviolent protest tends to fail in instances where the protesters are totally dehumanized or the government can make their protest invisible to the general public. Even in cases of hunger strikes outside the Soviet Union, poorly publicized ones fizzled out where well-publicized ones succeeded in their goals.)

The only methods of resistance that did have any effect were work strikes or outright violent takeovers of the camp by prisoners. However, such protests eventually collapsed, either because the prisoners were too weak to continue resisting or because the military intervened to murder the strikers. In the end, the labor prisoners provided was not significant enough to the state to serve as an effective bargaining chip, and camp authorities would rather kill a few prisoners to keep the rest in line than concede anything to them.

(Shortform note: While Solzhenitsyn mainly discusses the Kengir Rebellion of 1954, similar uprisings occurred at the Vorkuta and Norilsk camps the previous year, shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin. Modern studies of these strikes argue that they were as successful as they were because the prisoners were well-organized and politically informed—they formed groups around shared nationality or military experience, circulated newspapers and pamphlets arguing for better treatment, and kept one another housed and fed during the months they operated independently.)

According to Solzhenitsyn, what would have made the biggest difference for prisoners in these cases was some form of transparency. If free citizens knew the extent of the abuses taking place in prison and the prisoners could count on their attempts at protest being recognized and publicized on the outside, they might have been able to work together to demand change. The Soviet government’s ability to control the flow of information was so significant because it kept the people ignorant of their most powerful tool of resistance—their numbers.

Repressing People in a Supposedly People-First System

As a political system, communism is supposed to advance the needs of the people, particularly the working class, by sharing everything—food, housing, goods, and so on—equally among them. Authoritarian communist states use this same rhetoric even as they crush attempts by “the people” to set up democratic structures or voice resistance.

The Soviet Union managed this cognitive dissonance by substituting “the Party” for “the people.” The Party supposedly represented the people’s best interests, even as in practice it was controlled by a few elites. Any decision the Party made was spun as representing the will of the people, while attempts by individuals to stand against it were attacks on the people. This narrowed the definition of who counted as “people” to only the most loyal and obedient citizens.

Transparency and the Future of the Gulag System

Solzhenitsyn ends The Gulag Archipelago with a call for other accounts of the camps to be published—not state-sanctioned narratives, but personal accounts that might supplement or complicate his own work by giving more accurate numbers or a more complete picture of conditions in various camps. Wrapping up his critique of the Soviet government as an oppressive and authoritarian institution, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t propose specific political changes (though he hints several times that he believes that the camp system ought to be abolished), but instead appeals to the reader to recognize the government’s corruption and to seek out alternative histories from ordinary citizens.

(Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn’s approach to activism is an example of what is sometimes called “speaking truth to power,” a type of non-violent protest that tries to make uncomfortable facts public, in the face of censorship and the threat of violent retaliation, as a way to inform and inspire others.)

The Soviet government worked to make its power seem absolute and to discourage citizens from banding together. By exposing these tactics and the brutality with which prisoners were treated, Solzhenitsyn says he hoped to start a trend of public criticism of the government in literature, and that he believed that open communication between citizens would create the conditions for more concrete forms of resistance. The government remained in power for as long as it had by making it impossible for people to discuss the grim realities of their lives. If open discussion had suddenly become possible, the people might have recognized how abusive the government truly was and how utterly it had failed to fulfill the promises of the revolution—equality, prosperity, and an end to exploitation.

The Collapse of the Soviet System

Solzhenitsyn’s vision of the future of anti-Soviet resistance came to pass when the Soviet Union collapsed two decades later, in the early ’90s. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR instituted a number of democratic policies which decreased censorship, released political prisoners, required greater transparency from the government, and expanded freedom of speech for the average citizen.

The following years of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) were marked by protests, the formation of a number of human rights organizations, public recognition of past atrocities, and successful independence movements in the Soviet states of Eastern Europe. All of these actions had previously been met with violent repression, but this time they were largely permitted, and the Soviet Union itself was formally—and peacefully—dissolved in December of 1991. Though this had not been his goal, Gorbachev declared that the government had lost popular support and that it was time for something new.