For decades the Soviet Union threw innocent citizens into gulags in accord with the systematic terror and paranoia that characterized the totalitarian state.
The Gulag Archipelago
Those
interested in the full extent of the Soviet Union's oppression of its
people would do well to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago.
This masterfully written work plunges readers into a world of fear,
coercion, and unimaginable despair; the images described within this
chilling book reveal not only the levels of depravity to which humans
can sink, but the pervasive fear that was instilled in the citizens of
the Soviet Union under the Bolsheviks. With the panoptic nature of the
Soviet government and the ever watchful eyes of its horrid secret
police network, the NKVD, no one was safe from the far-reaching
tendrils of the gulag.
A World of Utter Despair
Solzhenitsyn’s
strength in this work lies in his ability to create vivid and
convincing images of places few would care to remember. He wastes no
time in describing the brutal tortures devised to punish the gulag’s
unfortunate victims: beatings, acid baths, and sleep deprivation are
among the many ways in which the guards ensure maximum suffering. As he
had served eight years in the gulag himself, his passion to remind the
world of the unspeakable nature of the “archipelago”
is stated throughout the book, often with bitter sarcasm.
A Forgotten Crime
The
very notion that the hundreds of gulags scattered across the Soviet
Union have been forgotten is a theme that is particularly shocking
throughout the work. The fact that millions of perfectly innocent men
and women were so brutally terrorized by the Soviet government is still
extremely hard to grasp for one accustomed to the freedoms of a
democratic society. Why were these people accused of crimes they did
not commit? Certainly the guards and those in governmental positions
knew very well that most, if not all of the millions in the gulags,
were innocent, yet they only increased arrests as the years went on,
shipping citizens off like cattle even as the Germans were at the gates
of Moscow.
What Could Justify Stalin's Crimes?
Although
Stalin felt that terror was necessary to bring about his socialist
revolution (which seemed like a distant, unachievable goal throughout
his tenure), it is still very puzzling why he felt the need to
literally break the backs of innocents to achieve his goals. Although
fear certainly aided the Bolsheviks in their formative years, there
seemed to be little incentive to wage war on the nation’s own people
for decades. Besides innocent farmers and peasants, the “islands” of
the archipelago killed millions of the Soviet Union’s writers,
scientists, teachers, and soldiers, and it is hard to see how this
could have accomplished anything but the perpetuation of useless terror.
Resigned to their Fate
Another interesting theme is the ease
in which the Bolshevik officials and their NKVD henchmen enslave and
kill so many of their own people. Throughout the book, images of people
calmly going into the Black Maria cars of the NKVD - knowing they will
never see their family and friends again - are not uncommon.
Solzhenitsyn provides a rather thorough explanation of this phenomenon,
largely arguing that the entire government’s complicity with the gulag
system created a sense of utter hopelessness in its victims: “They
could not imagine that singly – or God forbid, collectively – they
might rise up for their liberty since they saw arrayed against them the
state (their own state), the NKVD, the police, the guards, and
the police dogs.”[1]
Few Options
He
continues to describe their desperate condition by claiming, “Even if
you were fortunate enough to escape unscathed, how could you live
afterward on a false passport, with a false name…when suspicious eyes
followed passers-by from behind every gateway.”[2]
The situation he describes seems like something from fiction, but one
need only count the bodies of those who died in the meaningless labor
camps and jails to know that it was all too real.
[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago
1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 2002), 255.
[2] Ibid.,255.
[3] Ibid., 215.