2017 Personality 13: Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag

So, I want to tell you about a book today. The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago." (to the camera crew) You ready? (to the students) The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago," and it's by a Russian author... a Soviet author named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was in the Gulag Archipelago concentration camp system for a very long time. He had a very hard life. He was on the Russian front when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II.

Now, Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact, and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union anyway. And from what I've been able to understand, the Soviets had prepared an invasion force for Europe at that point but were not concerned with having to defend their territory. So, they were caught completely unawares by Hitler's move. The conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful, and Solzhenitsyn was a soldier on the Russian front.

He wrote some letters to one of his friends, which were intercepted, complaining about the lack of preparation and using bitter dark humor to describe the situation. The consequence of that was that he was thrown into a work camp. The Soviet system relied on work camps, and so those were large labor camps of people who were essentially enslaved, many of whom were worked to death — often froze to death — working in conditions that were so dreadful that they're virtually unimaginable.

Solzhenitsyn spent a very large number of years in these camps, sometimes in a more privileged camp because he was an educated man, and sometimes in worse camps. He also developed cancer later and wrote a book about that called "Cancer Ward," which is a brilliant book. So, he had a very hard life. There's just no way around that. To be on the front, and then to be in a concentration camp, and then to have cancer, that's... that's pretty rough.

Now, he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago." He wrote a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" first, that was published in the early 1960s, when there was a brief thaw. Stalin was pretty much out of the picture by the end of the 1950s. There’s some indication that he was murdered by Khrushchev, and Khrushchev became the premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin.

And there’s some indication, perhaps, that Stalin was either murdered by Khrushchev and a set of his cronies or, when he was very ill just before he died, he was not helped — at least by… wasn’t provided with any medical attention because of the intervention of Khrushchev and his cronies. Now, there's some indication as well, at that point, that Stalin, who was absolute— absolutely barbaric in every possible way you could imagine, was planning to start a third World War.

And he was certainly capable of doing such things because he had already imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people. Now... just after Stalin died, there was a bit of a thaw in the Soviet Union regarding internal repression. In the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn published a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which was a story about one day in the life — his life, really — inside one of these so-called "gulag archipelago" camps.

Now, he called it the "gulag archipelago" because an "archipelago" is a chain of islands, and so Solzhenitsyn likened the work-camp system in the Soviet Union, which is made of isolated camps distributed across the entire state... He likened that to a series of islands, and hence the metaphor. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was one of the first publications released in the Soviet Union that dared make public what had happened inside these camps, at least initially.

Now, that thaw didn't last very long, but that book had a tremendous effect. It's a short book; it's worth reading. After that, he spent— he wrote a number of other books, which were also— He's a great literary figure; in the same category, I would say, as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which is, like, really saying something, you know. Those two are perhaps the greatest literary figures who ever lived, with the possible exception of Shakespeare.

He wrote this book called "The Gulag Archipelago," which is published in three volumes, each of which is about 700 pages long. The first one details the origin of the oppressive Soviet system, at least in part under Lenin, and then its full-fledged implementation under Stalin and the deaths of... Well, Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at something approximating sixty million, between 1919 and 1959.

Now, that doesn't count the death toll in the Second World War, by the way. Now, people have disputed those figures, but they're certainly in the tens of millions, and the low-end bounds are probably twenty million, and the high-end bounds are near what Solzhenitsyn estimated. He also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China cost a hundred million lives, and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures, again, are subject to dispute, but somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people.

And one of the things that's really surprising to me, and that I think is absolutely reprehensible — absolutely reprehensible — is the fact that this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West. Any of these... it's because your education— your historical education. Establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor.

One of the things that's quite interesting about the gulag camps, and this is something that's very relevant to understanding modern Russia, is that so, ordinary criminals were put into the camps, and so were political prisoners. But the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let's say, as well as thieves who were engaged in theft as an occupation, were regarded by the Soviets as "socially friendly" elements.

And the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime was because of the oppressive nature of the previous Czarist/Capitalist system. And that the only reason that these criminals existed was because they had been oppressed — they were oppressed victims of that system. And so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps.

And these were very, very seriously bad people, and so, you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners who were regarded as socially hostile elements, sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts, but more often merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity, or the fact that they were related by birth to, say, people who had been successful under the previous systems.

So, who had any association with nobility or any association with were known as the Kulaks, who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union. Because they were regarded as "privileged." You may have heard that word more recently. They were regarded as "privileged" and therefore as enemies of the state. And it didn't matter if it was your father, or your grandfather, or your great-grandfather who happened to be "privileged," but the mere fact that you were a member of that group was sufficient reason to put you into a camp.