RESISTANCE IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (1918-1956)

By Donald G. Boudreau, PhD, MPA

How miserable is a society that knows no better means of defense than an executioner.

— Karl Marx

As quoted by Albert Camus in Camus’,

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, at 240.

INTRODUCTION

Back in the balmy summer of 1974, I spent many hot and humid nights working as a waiter in a steakhouse restaurant, out on the highway known as US Rt. 22, in northern New Jersey. In arriving home thereafter, late in the evening to a nearby suburb, feeling wired and needing to unwind before sleeping, I began bedtime reading a significant number of works authored by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn had been receiving substantial media attention then, regarding his published release a year earlier in 1973 of the first volume of his highly acclaimed The Gulag Archipelago, depicting life and death in the Soviet prison labor camp system during the years 1918-1956.

Given his, Solzhenitsyn’s firsthand perspective of the harsh life therein the Gulag camps, and reading his lightly fictionalized accounts contained in his many novels and stories and poems authored, I thought it would be useful in exploring the question as to how resistance manifested itself in its many ways among the inmates in the Gulag camps. I set about to doing so through reading the works of Solzhenitsyn and some other observers including noted historians of that particular era, whose writings depicted or otherwise memorialized authoritative experiences, acts of dissenting, protesting, and resisting that had occurred in the Gulag during those years.

In the fall of 1974, while preparing my senior college thesis for the advanced Scope and Methods in Political Science course at Montclair State College (now University) in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, on this very same subject, the senior requirement for a Political Science Major culminated in the student presenting an hour long oral presentation of the same written thesis of some serious length manuscript, before and in front of the entire classroom audience, comprised of the course’s professor and one’s fellow students.

My dear friend and fellow classmate, Janet Serra, just days before my scheduled senior presentation before the class, kindly presented me with an early surprise birthday present. It was a first edition, hardcover of the just released volume one of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. She was also, admittedly, sparing me in the process she had rightly said, the shamelessly classless embarrassment of having to read excerpts of the same, from my much worn and rabbit eared, paperback edition, during my hour long class presentation that she knew I was to be delivering soon before the entire class.

Thereafter, my professor, the now since retired Dr. George T. Menake, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Montclair State University, kindly recommended to me in the months thereafter upon returning the graded paper with comments, that he thought I might seriously wish to consider “publishing the paper someday”, which of course, at the time, I did not do so, that is until this day, as this is largely that same very paper verbatim with some incidental, minor cosmetic changes, which you now have before you.

Although granted, publishing this paper now represents somewhat of a thirty-eight year delay in following up on his, Professor Menake’s most thoughtful, prescient suggestion. But while some of the writing here may strike some as a bit dated, given the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union and other related reforms, the topic here presented nonetheless remains valid in our present day, given the worthwhile value in learning more regarding the many ways, creative and otherwise, in which victims historically have gone about resisting tyrannical and totalitarian regimes, worldwide. It is also noteworthy from the standpoint that many observers believe that Russia, the now former Soviet Union, has yet to come to grips with addressing and accepting the truths, the history of Stalin as a leader, and the Stalinist era and that of the Gulag camps, in all of their unvarnished cruelty and horror. See for example, in this regard Fred Hiatt, “Russians Seek Rosier Past, Even Revising Stalin Image,” [“Russians are romanticizing their prerevolutionary era and have even begun to question whether Joseph Stalin and his gulag were as monstrous as perestroika-era revelations suggested.”], The Washington Post, October 30, 1994, p. A31, col. 1, bold added. As David Satter (2011) powerfully observes in It Was A Long Time Ago, and It Never Really Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) the elemental failing of Russia’s leaders and people is their refusal in facing the moral depravity of its Soviet past, including its most savage manifestation: Joseph Stalin’s terror.

My appreciation for the accomplishments of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a gifted writer (he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature), and as an exhaustively detailed historian of life in Stalinist Russia, has only increased over the several intervening decades. Towards the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn lived in a comfortable compound in nearby Moscow, and was very supportive of organizations providing for the welfare of survivors from the Gulag camps. In supporting their works, Solzhenitsyn was known to make appearances at the Moscow-based offices of such in order to autograph copies of his books; the proceeds of which went to benefiting the victims and their families of those who had, somehow too, survived life in the various Gulag camps, as Solzhenitsyn himself knew well having himself experienced such firsthand.

Fortunately, and thanks to a reputable fine book dealer based in Connecticut who frequented such events in Moscow, I am today the proud owner of the prized possessions of not one, but two rather, beautifully signed copies of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which I have every intention of bequeathing as invaluable family heirlooms to be treasured and passed on, in turn, by my two beloved children, Katarina and Joseph.

Moreover and finally, given their aforementioned personal contributions made in the fall semester of 1974 to furthering the work of this paper, it is only fitting that I dedicate it here to them both: in ever loving memory of my late beloved dear friend, Janet Serra, for her much valued warm friendship and countless kindnesses. And for his steadfast encouraging support to the much respected scholar, Dr. George T. Menake, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science and Law, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, may he have a healthy, long, happy and fruitful retirement. “Thank you” both sincerely Janet and George, this one’s for you two!

Dr. Donald G. Boudreau

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Summer 2012

LAKE SEGDEN

…Here is somewhere to settle forever, a place where a man could live in harmony with the elements and be inspired. But it cannot be. An evil prince, a squint-eyed villain, has claimed the lake for his own: there is his house, there is his bathing place. His evil brood goes fishing here, shoots ducks from his boat. First a wisp of blue smoke above the lake, then a moment later the shot.

Away beyond the woods, the people sweat and heave, whilst all the roads leading here are closed lest they intrude. Fish and game are bred for the villain’s pleasure. Here there are traces where someone lit a fire but it was put out and he was driven away.

Beloved, deserted lake.

My native land…

— Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn (1972)

Excerpted in part from “Lake Segden,” in Solzhenitsyn, Stories and Prose Poems, at 198-9.

I dedicate this

to all those who did not live

to tell it.

And may they please forgive me

for not having seen it all,

for not having divined all of it.

So begins The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of Soviet police terror and the sub-human prison camp network. It is less important for what it says then for what it leaves unsaid. This detailed account of living death in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956 takes on its true importance from the suggestion that the police system it describes continues to this day. The infamous network of slave labor camps remains in operation, even if the numbers imprisoned have been vastly reduced, since the amnesties granted during the Nikita Khrushchev regime.

One day, Mr. Solzhenitsyn clearly hoped, his account shall play a role in bringing the Soviet people to rise up and end the decades of oppression which they have so far accepted with such docility. That day is unlikely to come soon as Solzhenitsyn indicates, for the Soviet secret police is the central vital element-even more perhaps than the Communist party machine—in binding the Soviet system together.

The network of camps, prisons, communication facilities, transportation systems and spying organizations, Solzhenitsyn reports, “honeycombs” the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. It appears that no Soviet citizen is ever more than a short distance from some link of this pervasive apparatus of control that permeates all governmental, party and social organizations. The survival of this infrastructure makes it less significant that the actual prison camp population has fallen from an estimated twelve million during Stalin’s reign of terror to perhaps one million today.

Much of what Solzhenitsyn reports had long been known in the West. Yet, this was the first time that an authoritative voice of stature has spoken from Moscow itself to inform the Soviet people in detail of their tragedy and to call for punishment of its perpetrators. Solzhenitsyn’s courageous challenge to the overwhelming power of the police state is a political act without real precedent in the fifty-odd years since the Bolshevik Revolution.

Solzhenitsyn has shown us that his mission is not merely to accuse but rather, to search for remedies that would help the individual overcome the suppression and fear found in a totalitarian regime. My conceptual framework indicates that Stalin was not engaged in a real struggle with counter-revolutionaries. Logic dictates that Stalin acted inimically to his own revolutionary calling.

The main tendency of Stalinist mass repression during the period 1936-1938 was an assault on the Party, on old Bolshevik cadres, on proletarian revolutionaries, on the intelligentsia that were honorably serving the interests of the masses. This study centers upon the question of resistance, dissent, and protest in The Gulag Archipelago. The question reiterates through our minds as it had that of Solzhenitsyn’s — “But can there really be a whole nation of fools?”

My orientation vehemently conjectures that economic and social progress would have been much greater if Stalin had not destroyed thousands upon thousands of scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, and writers. The solidarity between the people and the government would have been much stronger had there been no mass repression. The people would have shown the Central Committee more confidence if the beau monde in the Party, government, economic and military apparatus had not been destroyed in the mid-thirties. Stalin can no longer be placed alongside Marx, Engels, and Lenin. He must stand alone.

The question usually asked by outsiders, [W]hy did the Jews of Nazi Germany not offer more resistance?” becomes radically obscene in the face of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Treblinka. Granted, there was never an exodus of a major part of the Jews of the ghettos, but in 1942-1943 as the eastern ghettos were being destroyed, small groups of Jews escaped to the woods in a desperate bid for survival and vengeance.

Where is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of the Stalinist reign of terror? Where are the six hundred prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacking the Nazi guards, literally blowing up the death houses at Treblinka, and fleeing into the nearby Polish forests? Where are the suicide missions? How could the Russian people have gone to their incarceration, torture, and slaughter like lambs? Was fear of government retaliation so pervasive in the Soviet mind that it negated any and all forms of resisting, dissenting, and protesting? Why did the Jews, despite their relative few in number and the lateness of the hour, arm themselves in rebellion, while the Soviets of this period appear as pacifists in the face of a system which exemplified dialectical terrorism?

Nazi anti-Semitism condemned the Jews as an “alien element” in the body of the nation, thus making them a merciless target of any punishment the deranged minds of totalitarian nationalists were capable of inventing with the help of modern technology. Somewhat similarly, totalitarian Communism condemns the “class enemy” as an alien element within the society. And a madly totalitarian regime, such as Stalin’s, is capable of dealing with it accordingly.

What makes the critical analysis of these atrocious modern evils often so difficult is that they are connected with highly popular, ideologies and mass movements. The idea of nationalism is history’s “first world religion,” as the late Hans Kohn so aptly referred to it. And, to all evidence, the so-called Marxist class structure too is well underway to becoming another world religion. Small wonder it is that even the most articulate and intelligent critics of such successful movements are easily sidetracked. There is, of course, no lack of clear-sighted and courageous commentators on contemporary affairs who are placing these brutal phenomena of our century in proper critical and realistic perspective. Rather, what is lacking is the public ability and willingness to listen to them.

Critics of nationalism and class struggle, not surprisingly, have a particularly difficult time in getting their intellectual messages across in the vulgar confusion of modernity. Two of the worst holocausts of our time, the Hitlerism and the Stalinist — are causes in point to illustrate the ideological malaise which is worldwide.

This paper is write in the hopes that students of law and politics and public administration will seek to confront these “diseases” and “treat” them by educating the public as to their horrendous ramifications. It is unfair to ask more in light of the limitations of the human condition.

This venture is three-fold. First, we will be examining the historically isolated incidents of resistance as they became manifest in the Gulag Archipelago. The relative assessment will prove hopefully to be more precise by referring to historical works of the era such as Roy A. Medvedev’s Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1972) and The Russian Revolution (1966) by Robert Goldston, in addition to our primary source of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Second, we will be presenting a literary depiction of resistance in the Gulag camps through two of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s finest novels, Cancer Ward (1972) and The First Circle (1972). With Solzhenitsyn as a survivor of eight years in concentration camps and three years in exile for his offense (written derogatory remarks about Stalin), his account of literal occurrences is taken here to be nothing short of certitude.

Third and finally, in a state of hopeful culmination, the hypothesis will bear fruit. That being, if there exist no governmental implementation and public support of a criminal justice system acting in the interests of all the people (i.e., the rule of law) then dissent shall be suffocated. Without the existence of established and accessible channels representing the interests and grievances of the population at large, through which all injured parties may seek recourse without threat of governmental terroristic tactics, innocent persons shall suffer undue harm.

Included in the above stated processes of “a criminal justice system,” one would submit the sometimes forgotten tenet of a person’s innocence prior to being proven guilty under law. Equal application of the laws would also be conducive to a system “acting in the interests of all the people.” In fact, the writ of habeas corpus, statutes of limitations, and the prohibitions regarding double jeopardy and the implementation of ex-post facto legislation are all applicable to the concept of “a criminal justice system” as outlined above. If a system, be it through the dictates of its orientation or the madness of the presiding dictator, places a greater emphasis on the objectives of the state thus proceeding to negate the preserving of humanitarian means — then dissent which could serve to ameliorate social conflict will not be made manifest. In accordance with the thought as espoused by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one cannot separate means from ends any longer.

The Russians claimed they wanted to set up a paradise on earth — their subconscious chose hell. They have murdered their scientists, their poets, the soul of their people. The criminal is spreading in every country. In totalitarian countries it is those in power who are criminal.

— Eugene Ionesco (1974)

An excerpt from “No,”

Esquire, December 1974:254.

A quarter of a century ago, with the great hopes of mankind, the United Nations was born. Alas, in the immoral world it, too, became immoral. It is not a United Nations but a United Governments, in which those freely elected and those imposed by force and those which seized power by arms are all on a par. Through the mercenary bias of the majority, the UN jealously worries about the freedom of some peoples and pays no attention to the freedom of others. By an officious vote it rejected the review of PRIVATE COMPLAINTS — the groans, shouts and pleadings of individual, common PLAIN PEOPLE — insects too small for such a great organization. The UN never tried to make BINDING on governments, a CONDITION of their membership, the Declaration of Human Rights, the outstanding document of its twenty-five years and- thus the UN betrayed the common people to the will of governments they had not chosen.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1972)

Nobel Lecture: 25-26.

Translated from the Russian by F.D. Reeve

The Gulag Archipelago (1973) is in scope and density worthy of its subject, which is nothing less than the most massive and systematic repression of a people by its leaders that the world has ever known. The Bolsheviks inherited prison camps from the Romanov monarchy they overthrew, but what had been a purely punitive institution under the tsars became an economic one as well under the commissars. Slave labor attained its apotheosis under Joseph Stalin and his last police chief, Lavrenti Beria. One must preclude discussing particular instances of resistance by first recognizing the relationship between industrial construction and the proliferation of forced labor camps.

Their growth was simultaneous. By the latter nineteen-thirties, the Gulag was responsible for much of the country’s lumbering and extraction of gold, copper, and coal. Gulag camps built important canals, strategic roads, and many industrial enterprises in remote regions. This pervasive use of forced labor, however, had dangerous consequences:

In the first place, the harsh regime established in 1936 used up labor quickly, with a consequent need for replacement. Secondly, because Stalin did not find a rational solution for the problem of building in remote regions, he constantly increased the number of projects assigned to Gulag.[1]

State plans even encompassed the mortality rate of the forced laborers. Conclusively, it appears that a vicious circle was created insofar as the system of forced labor became a cause as well as an effect of mass repression.

Resistance by the peasant population to assaulting forced labor was not as obscure as it might appear. D.M. Sturley (1964) observes in A Short History of Russia that protest was employed, futile as it was in stifling Stalin:

Results of the Forced Collectivization did permit the introduction of more efficient methods, the cultivation of new crops, and increased production, but the immediate effects were appalling. The peasants resisted and had to be driven into the collective by the use of machine-guns or by the threat of deportation and forced labour. Rather than hand over their stock to the State they slaughtered and ate it and refused to till the fields. In 1929, there were thirty-four million houses in the U.S.S.R.; in 1933 there were only sixteen and one-half million; thirty million cattle (about 45 percent of the total) had been killed off. Once again in 1932-1933 the country was faced with one of the worst famines it had ever known. The kulaks disappeared, about five million of them, mostly in the forced labour camps and the slow death which they meant.[2]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973) tells of how Stalinist rule in the 1920’s quashed any and all forms of dissent vis-à-vis the establishment of permanently operating “troikas” whose purpose it was to bypass the courts. These so called OSO tribunes were composed of panels of three. They were also known as the Troikas of the GPU:

Up to 1924, the authority of the Troika was limited to sentences of three years, maximum. From 1924 on, they moved up to five years of camp; from 1937 on, the OSO could turn out “ten ruble bills”; after 1948, they could rivet a “quarter” — twenty-five years — on you. And there are people — Chavdarov, for example — who know that during the war years the OSO even sentenced prisoners to execution by shooting. Nothing unusual about this.[3]

These troikas utilized three deterrents which served to quash dissent throughout the Gulag archipelago. Their primary and principal distinguishing feature was closed doors.[4] They were first of all closed courts –for their own convenience. Secondly, in order to avoid any lack of ambiguity they established and utilized a system of predetermined verdicts.[5]

Thirdly, dialectics entered the troika operational scheme. All the articles of the code had become permeated with instructions, directions, and interpretations. And, if the actions of the accused are not covered by the Code, he can still be convicted:

• By analogy (What opportunities!)

• Simply because of origins (7-35: belonging to a socially dangerous milieu)

• For contacts with dangerous persons (here’s scope for you!) Who is ‘dangerous’ and what ‘contacts’ consist of only the judge can say.[6]

Directives were issued by Stalin and Beria at their annual convenience. As Solzhenitsyn unveils this system, one comes to realize that it is not the judge that judges. The judge merely receives a substantial salary for his physical appearance, the directives did the judging.

The directive of 1937: ten years; twenty years; execution by shooting. The directive of 1934: twenty years at hard labor; hanging. The directive of 1945: ten years for everyone, plus five years of disenfranchisement (manpower for three Five-Year Plans). The directive of 1949: everybody gets twenty-five.[7]

Roy A. Medvedev (1972) accurately summarizes the events surrounding the Great Purges which preceded the implementation of the above stated Stalinist directives.

In 1936-39, on the most cautious estimates, four to five million people were subjected to repression for political reasons. At least four to five hundred of them—above all the high officials—were summarily shot; the rest were given long terms of confinement. In 1937-38 there were days when up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone. These were not streams, these were rivers of blood of honest Soviet people. The simple truth must be stated: not one of tyrants and despots of the past persecuted and destroyed so many of his compatriots.[8]

One can undoubtedly ask the question as to why no resistance occurred among the judges and other persons assigned to carrying out the directives of Joseph Stalin. Were they not cognizant of the consequences of their actions? Medvedev’s reasoning is accurate as we will be witnessing when examining Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s two novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle, as appertaining to the question at hand.

Most of the judges and procurators must have known what they were doing when they sanctioned the arrest of innocent people and sentenced them to be shot or imprisoned. These officers of the law knew that they were creating lawlessness, but they chose to be its creators rather than its victims! What turned many NKVD officials into sadists? What forced them to break the laws of humanity? Many of them were once good Communists or Komsonol members who joined the NKVD on orders, not at all by inclination. Many influences were at work on them. In the first place there was the fear of becoming prisoners themselves, which overrode all other feelings. Secondly, a terrible selection went on within the NKVD, sifting out some officials, leaving the worst. Many-and this must not be overlooked-were corrupted by the unlimited power of the prisoners that Stalin gave to the NKVD. NKVD personnel were specially trained to be capable of carrying out any order, even the most criminal. The special brigade of torturers, for example, usually included students from the NKVD schools, young people eighteen to twenty years old. They were taken to torture chambers as medical students are to dissection laboratories, and thus were turned to sadists.[9]

In accordance with the dehumanizing world created here, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is quick to draw the essential distinction between the Tsarist Code and the Stalinist Code.

And especially new and important was the fact that we did not draw the distinction between methods and means the old Tsarist Code had drawn. Such distinctions had no influence either on the classification of the charges or on the penalties imposed! For us, intent and action were identical! A resolution has been passed-we would try them for that.[10]

SELF-IMMOLATION

In 1923, in Vyatka Prison, the (a) Socialist Revolutionary and his comrades barricaded themselves in a cell, poured gasoline over all the mattresses and incinerated themselves.[11] How many were there? Who were they? What were they protesting against? Such an act would have provoked uproar prior to the Revolution. Yet, this time around no one knew of the occurrence-not neither in Moscow— nor in history. And. As Solzhenitsyn observes, “and yet the human flesh cracked in the flames in exactly the same way.”

HUNGER STRIKES

One of the most renowned weapons utilized by the incarcerated Social Democrats and Social revolutionaries was the hunger strike. The new prison heads, operating in secrecy and silence, had acquired several powerful methods for combatting hunger strikes. Firstly, patience was adopted on behalf of the prison administration. Secondly, deception was practiced on a large scale thanks to the total secrecy of the operations. When every step is reported vis-à-vis the media, one is not going to do much deceiving. Thirdly, forced artificial feeding was adapted without question, from experience derived from none other than, experience with wild animals in captivity. By 1937, artificial feeding was evidently already in wide use. For example, in the group hunger strike of socialists that occurred in the Yaroslavl Central Prison, artificial feeding was administered to all those participating on the fifteenth day.[12]

These three approaches to dealing with hunger strikes gave rise to a new view. That the hunger strike is to be viewed as a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and accordingly, must be punished with a new prison term. Thus in mid-1937, a new directive was handed down which stipulated that “from now on the prison administration will not in any respect be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes!” A literal translation went as follows: if you seek to kill yourself, go right ahead. For it was the socialists, after all, whom Stalin viewed as the most dangerous enemies of his socialism. For the most part, the concessions obtained through the hunger strikes were infinitesimal when balanced against the extensive loss of life.

Solzhenitsyn also takes issue with the internal political continuum of the Soviet Union and shows how and why resistance gained no firm foundation. Stalin was free to play them off against one another to his political advantage. Divided they would err under Stalin’s fantasy.

…those prisoners to the left of the socialists—the Trotskyites and the Communists—shunned the socialists, considering them exactly the same kind of KR’s (counterrevolutionaries) as the rest, and they closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring. The Trotskyites and the Communists, each considering their own direction more pure and lofty than all the rest, despised and even hated the socialists (and each other) who were imprisoned behind the bars of the same buildings and went outdoors to walk in the same prison courtyards.[13]

It is merely reasonable to understand the non-Western Soviet Union utilizing anti-western sentiments as a rationale for accelerating the industrialization of their nation. Granted, any lesser industrialized nation would have a reason to fear being conquered by a more industrialized nation. Yet, this position can be exploited beyond a reasonable standard of concern.

In Civilization on Trial, Arnold J. Toynbee (1947) the noted historian, demonstrates how and why this anti-western creed is unquestioningly accepted, generation after generation.

Marxism is, no doubt a Western creed, but it is a Western creed which puts the western civilization ‘on the spot’; and it was, therefore possible for a twentieth-century Russian whose father had been a nineteenth-century ‘Slavophil’ and his grandfather a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian to become a devoted Marxian without being required to make any reorientation of his inherited attitude toward the West. For the Russian Marxian, Russian Slavophil, and Russian Orthodox Christian alike, Russia is ‘Holy Russia’ and the Western world of the Borgia’s and Queen Victoria, Smiles’ Self-Help and Tammany Hall, is uniformly heretical, corrupt and decadent. A creed which allows the Russian people to preserve this traditional Russian condemnation of the West intact, while at the same time serving the Russian government as an instrument for industrializing Russia in order to save her from being conquered by an already industrialized West is one of those providentially convenient gifts of the gods that naturally fall into the laps of the chosen people.[14]

ERADICATING DISSENT

Another conscious move by the Stalinist system to eradicate any dissent was to place common thieves in the same cells with the other zek prisoners. Many of the common thieves worked for the prison administration in exchange for amnesty, special privileges, food, clothing and money. Solzhenitsyn observes the conditions conducive to striking out and explains why to a great extent their non-existence. It is also noteworthy that these common thieves not only sought damaging statements from the other zeks which would certainly come back to haunt them in time. They were also notorious for mugging zeks in their cells and stealing their food parcels, clothing and personal valuables. Resistance by the zeks against the thieves when it did occur was in a rage of self-defense, rather than a group effort at resisting.

To strike out boldly, a person has to feel that his rear is defended, that he has support on both his flanks, that there is solid earth beneath his feet. All of these conditions were absent for the Article 58’s. Having passed through the meat grinder of political interrogation, the human being was starved, he hadn’t slept, he had frozen in punishment cells, he had lain there a beaten man. But it wasn’t only his body. His soul was crushed too. Over and over he had been told and had had demonstrated to him that his views, and his conduct in life, and his relationships with people had all been wrong because they had brought him to ruin. And so you allow the thieves to take your overcoat and paw through your jacket and snatch your twenty rubles from where it was sewn in, and your bag has already been tossed up above and checked out, and everything your sentimental wife collected for your long trip after you were sentenced stays up there, and they’ve thrown the bag back down to you with, …your toothbrush. Although not everyone submitted just like that, 99 percent did in the thirties and forties. And how could that be? Men, officers, soldiers, front-line soldiers![15]

It is said that in 1942 at the Gorky Transit Prison some officer prisoners (including Gavrilov, the military engineer Schebetin, and others) nonetheless rebelled, beat up the thieves, and forced them to stay in line. Another incident is said to have occurred at the Kotlas Transit Prison in 1940. The thieves started grabbing money out of the hands of the political prisoners lined up at the commissary. The politicals began beating up the thieves so badly that they couldn’t be stopped. The guards entered the compound with machine guns to defend the thieves. Solzhenitsyn affirms his belief in this latter occurrence, “now there’s something that rings true. That’s the way it really was.”[16]

The prisoners were still not free even within the confines of their cellblocks. They were also exposed to juveniles. They were still boys, some as young as twelve years old. They had already been processed through a thieves’ trial a la the Criminal Code, and they continued their apprenticeship with their seniors Solzhenitsyn recounts with almost total recall, he and his fellow zeks being jumped by three of them, who then proceeded on in stealing their food parcels.

It took no more than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon, sugar and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid. We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.[17]

In persisting to put the Gulag archipelago in its proper perspective, the following is imperative. During the years when the prisoners’ cases did not carry any indication of their final destination, the transit prisons turned into slave markets. The conscientious merchants demanded that the ‘merchandise’ be displayed alive and bare-skinned for them to inspect.   “Well, what merchandise have you brought? asked a buyer at Butyrki station, observing and inspecting the attributes of a seventeen-year old girl named Ira kalian. Solzhenitsyn continues in documenting an incident whereby twenty-four officers of the Gulag came for a ‘buy’ at Usman Prison in 1947. All the women prisoners were forced to undress and parade before these officers. Solzhenitsyn observes, “These officers were very seriously selecting bedmates for themselves and their colleagues.”[18]

Moving along in time, let us now make reference to 1960, when Gennady Smelov, a non-political offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad Prison. The prosecutor went to his cell and asked him” “Why are you torturing yourself?” And Smelov replied: “Justice is more precious to me than life.” This phrase so astonished the prosecutor that the very next day Smelov was taken to Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor proceeded to tell him: “We suspect you may be a schizophrenic.”[19]

As the political scientist Sidney Hook (1965) affirms in Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy, Stalin transformed dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union into dialectical terrorism.[20] The former constituted a view of the world as developing systems based upon the material forces which exist independently of all consciousness, human or divine. The latter, established by Stalin, held that the Central Committee leaders were the only person(s) vested in interpreting dialectical materialism. In brief, this meant that the power to decide what was valid and invalid rested with Stalin. Class enemies would be extirpated vis-a-vis purging.

Continuing along this line, Stalin manifested social fascism in order to achieve hegemony over the working class.[21] All Social democrats were thus the moderate wing of fascism and they were to be destroyed due to their intermittent involvement in Western coalition governments. It appears that, unfortunately, consistency was maintained most methodically with relation to terroristic means. So pervasive was the repression, so fragile the human condition that, dissent had no demonstrative function.

Tyrannous and oppressive governments are as old as mankind. Some human experiences, which occur under them are so traumatic that they leave forever their mark on those who have endured them-and survived. Few, not only feel compelled to recall the events, but thereafter to bear witness, to give testimony, to tell the world what they were like. So it has been and still is with the survivors of Hitler’s holocaust; so, too, with those who lived through the Stalinist reign of terror. Sporadically yet definitively, purposely and accidental, legally and illegally, works bearing witness are emerging out of the Soviet Union, and they have been on the increase since the death of Stalin. None of these Russian writings whether they be fiction, or non-fiction, has received greater attention than the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn’s work presents to a great extent a powerful attack on the Soviet system from inside. He constantly calls into question the morality of the Soviet leaders and their institutions, both high and low. The stress is on ethical rather than socialist principles: Solzhenitsyn’s views are basically moral rather than political, except insofar as ethics are ancillary to politics. As we will observe, Solzhenitsyn is more obsessed by the problem of man’s evil and goodness than he is by the political ramifications of those ethical considerations.

Solzhenitsyn is unable to uncover the roots of evil or of goodness by tracing them to the social system and its production and class relations, by employing the orthodox and vulgar Marxist analysis of base and superstructure.

Prior to examining the question of resistance as encountered in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle, it is imperative that we first come to appreciate how the Russian, generally speaking, perceives ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’. Materialism, too, indubitably plays a role here. As we will see soon, materialism served as a catalyst to certain forms of resistance manifested in the Gulag camps.

One finds no deep-rooted tradition of and love for personal freedom per se, but there does exist a profound commitment to “justice”; it is from this commitment that Solzhenitsyn truly speaks for his people. Andrei Amalrik writing in his Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970) may be correct in maintaining that for most Russians “freedom” is synonymous with disorder, that “individual” and “personal” human personality has no particular value, and thus must be considered subordinate to the “communal” interest. He may even be accurate in contending that Russian love of justice is far less vigorous than Russian respect for brute force, and that in practice, what passes for love of justice is simply a kind of equalitarianism which says that no one should live better than the next person.

This idea of justice is motivated by hatred of everything outstanding which we (Russians) make no effort to imitate, but, on the contrary, try to bring down to our level, by hatred of any sense of initiative, of any higher or more dynamic way of life than the life we live ourselves. This psychology is, of course, most typical of the peasantry and least typical of the “middle class.” However, peasants and those of peasant origin constitute the overwhelming majority of our country.[22]

Yet Solzhenitsyn’s position is inimical to that which has been expressed by Amalrik. For Solzhenitsyn is convinced, that his stubborn insistence on justice may find more fertile ground in the Russian spirit, than his equally stubborn concern for freedom and the individual personality. Because Solzhenitsyn earnestly believes that the urge to justice is inherent, in the spirit of men, everywhere.

Justice has been the common patrimony of humanity throughout the ages. It does not cease to exist for the majority even when it [is] twisted in some (“exclusive”) circles. Obviously it is a concept which is inherent in man, since it cannot be traced to any other source. Justice exists even if there are only a few individuals who recognize it as such. The love of justice seems to me to be a different sentiment from the love of people (or at least the two only coincide partially). And in periods of mass decadence, when the question is posed, “Why bother? What are the sacrifices for?” it is possible to answer with certainty: “for justice.” There is nothing relative about justice, as there is nothing relative about conscience. Indeed, justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually also recognizes the voice of justice. I consider that in all social or historical questions (if we are aware of them, not from heresay or books, but are touched by them spiritually), justice will always suggest a way of action (or thinking) that is not in conflict with one’s conscience.[23]

But Solzhenitsyn and the remainder of that courageous band of dissidents and reformers in the Soviet Union, are living in a period and a society of mass decadence, and despite their intrepidity and moral courage, their prospects are surely bleak. Their numbers are small, their power is extremely limited, and they are trapped between a hostile regime and an indifferent populace. This represents a precarious position to say the least.

Yet, both Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and The First Circle end on a note of contingent optimism. In the former, Oleg Kostogolov finds that his body and the body politics have had simultaneous remissions from the cancers afflicting them, and though he returns to exile, he knows that it is no longer perpetual exile, and he has the hopes that things are on the mend. In the latter, Gleb Nerzhin deliberately has himself sent from the first circle of hell to its lowest depths, consciously heartened and hardened by the determination to survive and to write his history, which will indict the institutions and individuals responsible for having brought him and his country to such a state. Throughout, Solzhenitsyn’s hopefulness is guarded, made ambiguous by irony and humor, sometimes even by gallows humor, but the hope is there nevertheless, refusing to die.

In The First Circle we are witnessing a penal society throwing into dramatic relief the basic human condition: the trivial becomes tragic; the absurd becomes profound; weakness becomes strength and unseasoned faith gives life its only logic. Solzhenitsyn sets his story in a few fleeting hours from December 24th to the 28th, 1949. The scene is a special prison “institute” in Moscow. The characters are the prisoners, their guards, the directors of the Institute, the high officials of the Police Ministry.

A Stalinist directive issued in 1948 has created this special prison and given it its purpose: a crash program to invent a voice scrambler and voice-identification technique. This technique will be used by Stalin and the Organs to indict those who thrive as “enemies of the state.”

The spirits who inhabited Dante’s First Circle had committed no sins and this, in essence, is equally true of those who inhabit Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle. The gulag was hell on earth, and Solzhenitsyn was its Dante. As in Dante’s, this Circle stands on the edge of the eternal abyss, and descent is easy, frequent and almost inevitable. But Solzhenitsyn deals not with the spirits of the past. His men and women are composed of flesh and blood. All of their dreams are possible. Gleb Nerzhin, the brilliant prisoner-mathematician, distinguishes between the rhetorical objectives of the Bolshevik Revolution and the unequal operative values.

What was the Revolution against? Against privileges. What were the Russian people sick of? Privileges: Some being dressed in overalls and others in sables, some dragging along on foot. While others rode in carriages, some listening for the factory whistle while others were fattening their faces in restaurants. True? Of course. Right. Then why is it that people don’t shun privileges but pursue them. I’ve simply come to the conclusion that if it’s to be equality, then it must be equality for everyone, and if it isn’t, then shove it.[24]

Solzhenitsyn is resisting national inequality in the Soviet Union. This problem was foreseen by Marx and Engels as the noted Soviet historian Roy A. Medvedev (1972) documents in Let History Judge.

Marx and Engels, who foresaw the possibility of the bureaucratic degeneration of a proletarian state, thought two measures would provide effective protection: universal election and recall of all officials and a level of salaries not exceeding workers wages.[25]

Yet, the Soviet Union possesses no means, no organizations, and no political institutions to guarantee citizens democratic rights. For the most part, restrictions on official salaries turned out to be a livid deterrent to degeneration. Undoubtedly, there were some prisoners who constantly inquired into the limitations of the law and as to their rights. Solzhenitsyn, as portrayed by Gleb Nerzhin, was indubitably cognizant of his rights and the governmental violations thereof.

The lieutenant colonel left Nerzhin waiting in the corridor of the Staff headquarters because in general Nerzhin was an insolent person (prisoner) always trying to find out what the law was.[26]

For the most part, resistance in the Mavrino Institute focused on psychological games that were being played out by the zek prisoners seeking concessions from the prison administration. Nerzhin is protesting vis-a-vis a way of thinking by not being carried away by the exalted Joseph Stalin. Nerzhin, a righteous individual, is accepting of the consequences inherent in his outlook.

…he [Gleb Nerzhin] clearly sensed the falsity in the exaggerated stifling exaltation of one man! If he was everything, did it not mean that other men were nothing. Out of pure protest Nerzhin refused to let himself be carried away.[27]

A constant theme throughout much of Solzhenitsyn’s work is the belief in the reemerging of the free man, who has been previously been denied of everything, that which gave him freedom. This belief undermines those who imprison, whether they be high or low.

Just understand one thing and pass it along to anyone at the top who still doesn’t know that you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.[28]

This line of thought is dynamic for suddenly we are given to understanding that prison, terror, corruptibility, and sadism refine and purify the human ethos. It is not in the end the prisoners who are destroyed, even though they may lose their lives. It is the jailers Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the army of jailers which Stalin created and which flourished until, quite literally, one-third or one-half of Russia became a prison enterprise, run by prison engineers, directed by police generals, inhabited by police victims.

The problem of finding new cadres of prisoners to satisfy the inexorable needs of the system was tremendous. In the end, of course, the system devoured its creators. The doomed are the oppressors. Stalin is doomed. Beria is doomed. His lieutenant, Abakumov, is doomed. The prison chief, Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev, is doomed. The system devours all of whom have been coopted by Stalin. The prisoners will endure in the end, if not found to have prevailed in a Faulknerian sense.

No… that’s not hell. That’s not hell at all! We are returning to hell. The sharashka is the highest, the best, the first circle of hell. It was almost paradise… yes the taiga and the tundra awaited them, the record cold of Omyakon and the copper excavations of Dzhez-Kazgan; pick and barrow; starvation rations of soggy bread; the hospital; death. The very worst. But there was a peace in their hearts. They were filled with the fearlessness of those who have lost everything, the fearlessness which is not easy to come by, but which endures.[29]

Cancer Ward is, in this writer’s opinion, Solzhenitsyn’s work of true genius on several levels. The story takes place in the cancer wing of a hospital in a city of one of the Soviet Asisatic republics. This novel, like The First Circle proceeds by episodes, many of which present sketches of the varieties of Soviet man. The least flattering of which is assigned to that of Rusanov, in civilian life a functionary in the record-keeping apparatus of the state; Rusanov’s records concern people, and accordingly bestow upon him the power to dispose of the lives of his fellow citizens.

In the name of the proletariat, he Rusanov tyrannizes over proletarians, questioning, imprisoning, exiling, searching out subversion and disaffection, inventing them at need-whether at the request of the government—or on his own account. Once in the cancer ward as a patient, however, he finds himself cutoff among sufferers who cancer has too afflicted to acknowledge his power, and physicians who, on their own ground, exercise even greater power, and in a better cause.

The most striking contrast to Rusanov is Oleg Kostoglotov, a former junior officer in the army who has been sentenced to forced labor for political disaffection, and later, to perpetual exile. Here we witness a clash between Kostaglotov and Rusanov.

“Well why do you swallow all this talk about social origin then. That’s not Marxism. It’s racism.” “What did you say?” shouted Rusanov, almost roaring with pain. “Exactly what you heard.” Kostoglotov threw the reply back at him. “Listen to this! Listen to this!” shouted Rusanov, staggering and waving his arms as if calling everyone in the ward to gather round him. “I call you as witnesses, I call you as witnesses! This is ideological; sabotage. Quickly Kostoglotov lowered his legs off the bed. Swinging both elbows, he made a highly indecent gesture at Rusanov, at the same time exploding with one of the filthiest words written up on walks: “Go and ____ yourself, you and your ideological sabotage! A fine habit you’ve developed, you mother…… Every time someone disagrees with you, you call it ideological sabotage!… Why do you keep cackling on about social origins like a witch doctor? You know what they used to say in the twenties? ‘Show us your calluses! Why are your hands so white and puffy?’ Now that was Marxism.”[30]

Through Kostoglotov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn expresses his vehement disdain for the lack of respect for those who have gone to war out of patriotic reverence for Russia. This passage is indicative of Stalin’s blatant mistrust of Russian soldiers who were captured during the war and later returned as prisoners of war.

The novel Cancer Ward, however, takes place following Stalin’s death yet, as we continue witnessing Stalinist attitudes remaining pervasive post mortem.

Many of the cemeteries are shamefully neglected. I saw some in the Atlai Mountains and over toward Novosibirsk. There are no fences. The cattle wander into them, and pigs dig them up. Is that part of our national character? No, “we always used to respect graves…” “To revere graves”, Kostoglotov.[31]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn also takes serious issue with the public fear in response to Stalin’s fanatical purging. It is not that the nation purchased Stalin’s demands wholesale, but rather, that they kept silent for they feared the loss of their own lives. To some extent, one cannot disregard this pregnant observation. Yet how far does it justify…

“What sort of man are we talking about?” he continued. “Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turn out to be wreckers, and he believes it! The best Civil-War divisional commanders turn out to be German and Japanese spys, and he believes it! His own friends and acquaintances are unmasked as enemies of the people, and he believes it! Whole nations, old men and babies are mown down, and he believes it! Then what sort of man is he may I ask? He’s a fool. But can there really be a whole nation of fools? No, you’ll have to forgive me. The people are intelligent enough. It’s simply that they wanted to live. There’s a law big nations have-to endure and to survive. When each of us dies and History stands over and asks ‘What was he?’ there’ll be only one possible answer Pushkins: “In our vile times… man was, whatever his element, either tyrant or traitor or prisoner!”[32]

Kostoglotov is one of those extraordinary persons who actually-learn from experience—that his, his reflections on his own history are original with him, and not derived from the recent opinions that constitute the body of social superstition at any time. He knows that his life of exile is a terrible injustice, that the Soviet state is a tyranny-the more shameful for its claim to incarnate a lofty ideal of political decency. Without for a moment hankering after the other social systems of which we have examples, he is shrewd enough to guess at the forms that injustice must assume in other states that claim to represent the popular will and the interests of the common man, he longs with an exile’s yearning for a community of fair dealing, of love and truth.

Kostoglotov is neither a saint nor a lay-figure representing an ideal of primitive Christianity that is appealing in proportion as it is obviously inadequate to deal with the problem of evil. He is a man, with a man’s faults, and a man’s aspirations to do better than he does. The problem of evil is indeed, in many forms, the deepest concern of Kostoglotov, and the particular preoccupation of his author. By instinct, both Solzhenitsyn and Kostoglotov confront the question without reticence. As we witnessed in the opening pages of this thesis, Solzhenitsyn typifies Stalin to an “evil prince” in his earlier cited short story, “Lake Segden” (1972) as encountered in Solzhenitsyn’s Stories And Prose Poems, at 198-9.

In the novel Cancer Ward this imagery is promoted in two other noteworthy incidents worth recounting here. Oleg Kostoglotov receives a letter from two close friends relaying to him that their dog “Beetle” has been killed. A senseless act, that was committed with the sanction of the “village council”:

Dear Oleg,

We are in great distress. Beetle has been killed. The village council hired two hunters to roam the streets and shoot dogs-They were walking down the streets, shooting. We hid Tobik (another pet dog), but Beetle broke loose, went out and barked at them. He’s always been frightened even when you pointed a camera lens at him, he had a premonition. They shot him in the eye. He fell down beside an irrigation ditch, his head dangling over the edge. When we came up to him he was still twitching-such a big body, and it was twitching. It was terrifying to watch. You know, the house seemed empty now…… So now they had killed the dog as well. Why?[33]

Under Kostoglotov’s release from the cancer wing, he enters a department store in a nearby metropolitan area. He is overcome by the tedious vacuum created by excessive materialism. His conclusion is inescapable.

What was this? There were men rotting in trenches, men being thrown into mass graves, into shallow pits in the perma frost, men being taken into the camps for the first, second and third times, men being jolted from station to station in prison trucks, wearing themselves out with picks, slaving away to be able to buy a patched-up quilt jacket-and here was this neat little man who could remember the size not only of his shirt but of his collar too!… If you remember your collar size, doesn’t it mean your bound to forget something else, something more important? (Kostoglotov).[34]

Kostoglotov proceeds on in visiting a zoo, and what do you know, the monkeys there are found to be bearing a strong resemblance to many of his former inmates; no doubt many of whom, were still behind bars (like monkeys).

They reminded him of many of his former acquaintances. In fact, he could even recognize individuals who must still be in prison somewhere.[35]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn continues exploring through the character of Kostoglotov, the fragility of the human (animal) condition and its relation to rational freedom in the world. The analogy created here is, in the writer’s view, an act of unabashed genius.

The most confusing thing about the imprisoned animals was that even supposing Oleg took their side and had the power, he would still not want to break into the cages and liberate them. This was because, deprived of their home surroundings, they had lost the idea of rational freedom. It would only make things harder for them, suddenly to set them free.[36]

It would be incomplete if the “evil prince” and “the hunters” who murdered Beetle were not present as the novel climaxes. Their presence is, as subtle here, as the consequences of Stalinism themselves.

He went there. The cage was empty but it had the usual notice reading “Macaque Rhesus.” He had hurriedly scrawled and nailed to the plywood. It said: “The little monkey that used to live here was blinded because of the senseless security of one of the visitors. An evil man threw tobacco into the Macaque Rhesus’ eyes. Oleg was struck dumb. Up to then he had been strolling along, smiling with known condescension, but now he felt like yelling and roaring across the whole zoo, as though the tobacco had been thrown into his own eyes, “Why?” “Thrown just like that! Why! It’s senseless! Why?” What went straight to his heart was the childish simplicity with which it was written. This unknown man, who had already made a safe getaway, was not described as “anti-humanist” or “an agent of American imperialism”; all it said was that he was evil. This was what was so striking: how could this man simply be “evil”? Children, do not grow up to be evil! Children, do not destroy defenseless creatures![37]

Kostoglotov does not linger long after the zoo. He now begins the long process of acclimating himself to rational freedom once again. He had survived whereby the others had not.

He hadn’t even died of cancer. And now his exile was cracking like an eggshell. He remembered the komendant advising him to get married. They’d all be giving him advice like that soon. It was good to lie down. Good. The trains shuddered and moved forward. It was that only in his heart, or his soul, somewhere in his chest, in the deepest seat of his emotion, he was seized with anguish. He twisted his body and lay face down on his greatcoat, shut his eyes and thrust his face into the duffel bag, spiky with loaves. The train went on and Kostoglotov’s boots dangled over the corridor like a dead man’s. An evil man threw tobacco in the Macaque Rhesus’s eyes. Just like that.[38]

With the question of evil and good fathomed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, how can Russian men and women rectify the horrendous predicament? What does he offer up to us as a possible remedy?

(Schulubin): We have to show the world a society in which all relationships, fundamental principles and laws flow directly from ethics, and from them alone. Ethical demands must determine all considerations: how to bring up children, what to train them for, to what end the work of grownups should be directed, and how their leisure should be occupied. As for scientific research, it should only be conducted where it doesn’t damage morality, in the first instance where

It doesn’t change the researchers themselves. The same should apply to foreign policy. Whenever the question of frontiers arises, we should think of not of how much richer or stronger this or that course of action will make us or how it will raise our prestige. We should consider one criterion only: how far is it ethical? “Yes, but that’s hardly possible, is it-not for another two hundred years?” Kostoglotov frowned.[39]

In consideration of the fact that torture has now (1974) become a state institution in more than thirty countries (including, in the Soviet Union), my prescriptive analysis here lacks Utopian theory.[40] We now have in these countries a rule of pain that is being carried out by technicians, scientists, parliamentary officials, judges and cabinet ministers. The only distant hope envisioned here is the international enforcement of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, this has not been made manifest to date (1974, at the time of this writing).

In summary, I would like to reiterate that the focus of this paper has been on resistance in the Gulag archipelago, as opposed to a blanket condemnation of Stalinism. The noted Soviet historian, Roy A. Medvedev (1972) synthesizes the weight of the evidence.

The people became more educated and cultured, Leninist ideas penetrated everywhere. Proletarian influences reached the petty bourgeois masses; the authority of the Communist Party increased markedly. But at the same time the masses were educated in another, unproleterian spirit of blind subjection to the authority of the chiefs, above all Stalin.[41]

Conclusively, the Soviet Union is not so much to be reproached for taking authoritarian measures considering the mitigating circumstances. Almost all systems of law contain martial law for such occurrences. Yet, Stalinism was an extreme phenomenon in that despite its rhetoric to the contrary, martial law went undistinguished. This is unforgiving and invites reproachment. And, in The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich (1970) the Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, eloquently brings the relevant issues to light. He finally concludes that

[T]he responsibility for this failure falls heavily on the working masses of people themselves. Unless they learn to rid themselves of authoritarian forms of government. No one can help them; they and they alone are responsible. This and this alone is true and affords hope. The Soviet government cannot be reproached for reverting to authoritarian and moralistic methods of control; it had no other choice if it did not want to endanger everything. It is to be reproached for neglecting self-government, for blocking its future development, and for not creating its preconditions. The Soviet government is to be reproached for forgetting that the state has to wither away. IT is to be reproached for neglecting to make the failure of self-government and self-regulation of the masses the point of departure for new and greater efforts; for trying to make the world believe that, despite everything, this self-regulation was developing and that “complete socialism” and “genuine democracy” prevailed.[42]

AUTHOR’S NOTE

IN RE THE TRADITION OF FREEDOM VS. TRADITION OF SOCIETY

The basic principle of a free society is that no single individual can come to know absolute truth. Thus, it is believed that the interchange of different ideas will serve to facilitate the maximum attainment of relative, approximate truth. This position is untenable to the Soviet Union with its long tradition of associating freedom with total chaos. The operative ideals of our root orientation in the West are diametrically opposed to those made manifest throughout Stalinism.

The evidence at hand dictates a failure to falsify the hypothesis. In the Gulag archipelago, there existed no channels representing the equities and grievances of the population at large, through which injured parties would have been permitted to seek recourse without threat of governmental retaliation. There existed neither any governmental implementation nor public support of a criminal justice system acting in the interests of Russian citizens. Thus, dissent was blatantly suffocated by Joseph Stalin’s draconic measures.

Dissent was weakened, in that when it did sporadically arise, there was tragically no one in a governmental position who was receptive and willing to act. Let us recognize the genius of our Founding Fathers in the United States, who by adopting the separation of powers — rejected Draconian dictatorships that would serve to jettison the free marketplace of goods, services, and ideas.

Hunger strikes proved ineffective as the government went about implementing coercive counteracting tactics (i.e., patience and deception on behalf of the prison administration, coercive feeding, directives telling the prisoners to go ahead and starve themselves to death-government assuming no responsibility therefore). As D.M. Sturley (1964) (16) observed, many of the peasantry class did resist Forced Collectivization. Rather than hand over their livestock to the state, peasants slaughtered and ate them and also refused to till the fields. Unfortunately, we are discussing a predominantly peasant culture faced with mass illiteracy and famine on an extensive scale. Peasants were ultimately forced into forced labor at the point of the machine-gun.

I concur wholeheartedly with Solzhenitsyn’s conviction that war crime criminals of the Stalinist era must be brought to justice through the Soviet criminal justice system. As he illustrates in The Gulag Archipelago, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals have been convicted on such charges in West Germany (p. 175). In the past quarter century, not one of Stalin’s accomplices has been brought to trial. These statistics, do not at all balance, with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous secret 1956 denunciation of Stalin. Unless the Soviet system recognizes and facilitates legal action with reference to these crimes against humanity, the process of extirpating the Stalinist ethos from the soil of “Holy Russia” will be drastically prolonged.

The right to life as a basic tenet of liberalism is desirable to all. Individual fulfillment is inextricably interwoven with the freedom of expression. The bell of the Gulag will continue tolling throughout the course of history.

Donald G. Boudreau

Montclair State College

Upper Montclair, New Jersey

Fall 1974

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Amalrik, Andrei. Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1970.

Camus, Albert. An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Pub., 1969.

Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion and Death. Translated from the French and with an introduction by Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Pub., 1961.

Gasset, Jose Ortega y. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1957.

Goldston, Robert. The Russian Revolution. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966.

Grazzini, Giovanni. Solzhenitsyn: a biography. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1974.

Hook, Sidney. Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1965.

Mayer, Milton. They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1969.

Medvedev, Roy A. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Publishers, 1970.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Parts I-II. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. Cancer Ward. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The First Circle. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Stories and Prose Poems. Translated by Michael Glenny. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.

Sturley, D.M. A Short History of Russia. New York: Harper & row Publishers, 1964.

Toynbee, Arnold J. Civilization on Trial. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

PERIODICALS

The New Republic — A Journal of Politics and the Arts

The New York Times

Time Magazine

Esquire Magazine

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: ADDITIONAL, MORE CONTEMPORARY READINGS, ISSUED SUBSEQUENT TO THE 1974 WRITING OF THE INSTANT SUBJECT PAPER

Applebaum, Anne. “Stronger Than The Gulag,” [Solzhenitsyn’s writings], The Washington Post, August 5, 2008, p. A19, col. 3.

Aron, Leon. “Death and the Dictator,” Soviet History, [Reviews of Stalin a Biography by Robert Service, Belknap/Harvard University and Stalin And His Hangmen, The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield, Random House], Book World, The Washington Post, Sunday April 17, 2005, p. 3.

Beichman, Arnold. “Crimes without just punishment,” The Washington Times, January 9, 1990, p. F1, col. 5.

Bozell III, L. Brent. “ ‘Circle’ of Stalinist Terror,” [Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky’s film, “The Inner Circle”] The Washington Times, February 15, 1992, p. C3, col. 4.

Cohen, Stephen F. “An Anti-Stalinist Tide Is Flowing Again,” International Herald Tribune, Opinion, February 3, 1987, p. 4.

Cohen, Stephen F. “Straining Mightily to Uproot Stalinism,” International Herald Tribune, March 11, 1987, p. 4.

Dobbs, Michael. “Inside Stalin’s ‘Marble Gulag’, Soviets Allow rare Visit to Siberian Camp for Uranium Miners,” The Washington Post, Final, October 1, 1989, p. 1, col. 2.

Dreher, Rod. “The Writer, The Pope, Tragedy Of The Half-heeded, Their words like silent Raindrops fell…’” The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va., Opinion, [ethical and ideological similarities between John Paul II and Alexander Solzhenitsyn], August 16, 2008, p. A6, col. 1.

Finn, Peter. “Mourners Pay respects to Solzhenitsyn, Though Thousands View Writer’s Body, National Grief Isn’t Apparent in Russia,” The Washington Post, the World, August 6, 2008, p. A12, col. 1.

Finn, Peter. “Russia’s Heroic Literary Curmudgeon, Onetime Dissident Acclaimed Even by Those Who Disagreed With Him,” The Washington Post, August 5, 2008, p. A6.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasant’s, Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gertz, Bill. “U.S. POWs sent to die in gulags,” [A Russian government search of Soviet secret police files has revealed that American prisoners of war were sent to die in gulag labor camps after World War II.] Washington Times, February 17, 1992, p. A1, col. 1.

Glasser, Susan B. “Gulag Survivor Wages Battle Against Oblivion,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2003, p.A20, col. 1.

Heintz, Jim. “Author Solzhenitsyn buried in Moscow,” The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va., August 7, 2008, p. C2, col. 1.

Hiatt, Fred. Russians Seek Rosier Past, Even Revising Stalin Image,” [“Russians are romanticizing their prerevolutionary era and have even begun to question whether Joseph Stalin and his gulag were as monstrous as perestroika-era revelations suggested.”], The Washington Post, October 30, 1994, p. A31, col. 1.

Hochschild, Adam. “A Toast to Stalin’s Ghost, Why Russians Still Mourn the Bloody Yesterday,” The Washington Post, May 5, 1995, p. C1, col. 4.

Hockstader, Lee. “While Solzhenitsyn Thunders, Russian lawmakers Barely Clap, Returned Exile Issues Stern Warning On Poverty and the Abuse of Power,” the Washington Post, October 29, 1994, p. A23, col. 1,2.

Hockstader, Lee. “Stalin Shrine to Reopen-Minus Deification,’ The Washington Post, October 12, 1993, p. A14, col. 1.

Hoffman, David. “A Prophet Without Honor In Profit-Driven Russia, Solzhenitsyn Perceived as ‘Out of Touch,’ Boring,” The Washington Post, September 27, 1995, p. A26, col. 1.

Hoffman, David. “Nostalgic for Lenin, Long-Dead Leader Is Still Exalted by many Who Equate Him With the Order Russia Now Lacks,” The Washington Post, April 8, 1996, p. A16, col. 1.

Hoffman, David. “Site of 1,100 Stalinist Executions Found,” The Washington Post, July 13, 1997, p. A21, col. 1.

Hochschild, Adam. “Bibliography and Acknowledgments,” in The Unquiet Ghost, Russians Remember Stalin. New York: Viking/Penguin Books, 1994:289-293.

Jack, Andrew. “Gulag’s economic prisoners glimpse the chance of escape, Pioneering World Bank pilot scheme of assisted migration offers hope to poverty-stricken inheritors of Stalin’s artic wastes,” Financial Times, July 17, 2002, p. 1, col. 1.

Jones, Radhika. “APPRECIATION, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The prophetic power and gentle touch of the man who could not be silenced,” TIME Magazine (USA), vol. 172, Issue 7, p. 63.

Kaiser, Robert G. “Appreciation, The Giant Of Russian Literature,” the Washington Post, Va. Ed., August 5, 2008, p. C1, col. 5.

Kennicott, Philip. “The Specter Of Joe Stalin, Scholars Assess Legacy 50 Years After His Death,” The Washington Post, March 6, 2003, p. C1, col. 1.

LaFraniere, Sharon. “Russia Keeps Stalin Locked In Its Past, Decades On, Nation Has Yet to Confront Murderous Reign,” The Washington Post, Home Edition, September 24, 2002, p. A1, col. 1.

Lipman, Masha. “Russia’s search for an identity,” The Washington Post, November 3, 2009, p. A17, col. 5.

Lipman, Masha. “Reins on Remembrance, 70 Years After Stalin’s Purge, Candor has Its Limits,” The Washington Post, Va. Ed., August 22, 2007, p. A17, col. 2.

Lipman, Masha. “On a Mission For Russia,” [Solzhenitsyn], The Washington Post, August 5, 2008, p. A19, col. 5.

Litinov, Pavel. “No American Gulag,” The Washington Post, Va. Ed., June 18, 2005, p. A19, col. 4.

Lord, Lewis. “A reign of terror, a world away,” 70 Years Ago, U.S. News & World report, June 30/July 7, 2003.

Lourie, Richard. “IN MEMORIUM, The Unyielding Solzhenitsyn, A Russia scholar sums up the life and work of a 20th century master,” Book World, The Washington Post, August 10, 2008, p. 2.

Nadler, Gerald. “Solzhenitsyn will return to Russia soon, wife says,” The Washington Times, May 24, 1992, p. A13, col. 1.

Pfaff, William. “The Stalinist Damage to be Undone Is Enormous,” Opinion, International Herald Tribune, March 30, 1987, p. 4.

Remnick, David. “As Gulag Fades, Warden Is Proud of His Career, Political; Prisoners Still Endure Cruelties,” The Washington Post, April 28, 1991, p. A1, col. 1.

Remnick, David. “KGB Plot to Assassinate Solzhenitsyn Reported, Russian Tabloid Says 1971 Attempt left Dissident Burned,” [The Russian crime tabloid Top secret reports that the KGB secret police poisoned Alexander Solzhenitsyn 21 years ago in an attempt to assassinate him with the same lethal chemical used to kill Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978,] The Washington Post, April 21, 1992, p. D1, col. 4.

Remnick, David. “Stalin’s Lethal Legacy Of Filth, 5-Year Plans, City Lies in Economic, Ecological Ruin,” The Washington Post, Final, May 21, 1991, p. A1, col. 4.

Remnick, David. “Witness to the Gulag, Soviet publication of Solzhenitsyn’s great work is an extraordinary event,” The Washington Post, July 9, 1989, p. B7, col. 1.

Rosenfeld, Stephen S. “The Hard-Liners Had It Right, And now the Soviet documents are coming out to prove it,” The Washington Post, January 20, 1995, p. A21, col. 2.

Satter, David. It Was A Long Time Ago, And It Never Really Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011, 400pp.

Shipler, David K. “Anatomies of a Murderer,” [reviews of Stalin In Power, The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941 by Robert C. Tucker, Stalin, The Glasnost Revelations by Walter Laquer, and Stalin’s War Against the Jews by Louis Rapoport.], The New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1990, p. 2.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “The Relentless Cult of Novelty And How It Wrecked the Century,” The New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1993, p. 3.

Stent, Angela. “What Is To Be Done?” [Her review of Rebuilding Russia by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Translated from the Russian by Alexis Klimoff, Farrar Straus and Giroux], The Washington Post, Book Review, February 16, 1992.

Sturua, Melor. “’How A Tyrant Made Us Believe In Him’” PARADE Magazine, July 28, 1991, pp.4-7.

Williams, Daniel. “The Loneliness Of The Outdated Soviet Dissident,” The Washington Post, October 15, 1997, p. A23, col. 1.

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, He lived not by lies.” The Washington Post, [editorial], August 5, 2008, p. A18, col. 1.

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Is Dead at 89,” The New York Times, nytimes.com, By The Associated Press, Obituary (Obit)-NY Times.com, August 3, 2008, Filed at 6:05p.m. ET.

“Gorbachev Faults Legacy Of Stalinism,” International Herald Tribune, [According to the leader of the Argentine Communist Party, Athos Fava, “Mr. Gorbachev said he was striving for more socialism and more democracy, which is what the people want, and we will not take one step backward.”), March 5, 1987, pp. 1,6.

“Holmodor-Famine in Soviet Ukraine, 1932-1933, 1st Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary,” An Exhibit in the Ralph J. Bunche Library, United States Department of State, Washington, DC, September 16-October 31, 2008. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, The Ralph J. Bunche Library, A/ISS/IPS/LIBR, Prepared by Librarians Oksana Gress, Greta Wilson, Dolores Fairbanks, 2008.

“In memory Soviet critic Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89, A Literary Giant of the 20th Century,” The Washington Post, August 27, 2008, p. H1, col. 4.

“Russians May Publish 2 Solzhenitsyn Works,” International Herald Tribune, [in re Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago] March 5, 1987, p. 1.

“Russian Politician Defends Stalin Election Posters,” The Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2011, 12:50 PM CET.

“Solzhenitsyn Report Denied,” [“There are no plans to publish Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s book “Cancer Ward” in the Soviet Union,” the Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, Gennadi I. Gerasimov, said Thursday.”], International Herald Tribune, March 6, 1987, p. 1.

“Stalin Is Blamed For War Errors,” Kiosk, International Herald Tribune, May 25, 1987, p. 1.

“The Time Has Now Come to reject the System Itself,” [This comment was prepared by seven dissident Soviet émigrés living in the West], International Herald Tribune, Opinion, March 24, 1987, p. 4.

About the Author

Dr. Donald G. Boudreau is an internationally recognized expert in the field of economic statecraft. He is also the author of the books, “American Business and Daytime Dramas,” and “American Sanctions Against the Soviet Union: From Nixon to Reagan.” Retired from Federal Government service, for nearly three decades, he held various United States Government appointments with the U.S. Postal Service, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of the Treasury, U.S. Department of Energy, and finally and extensively, with the U.S. Department of Defense. He holds the Ph.D. degree in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies at The University of Geneva, Switzerland, a Master of Public Administration (M.P.A.) degree with specialization in public management from Rutgers — The State University of New Jersey, and a B.A. degree in Political Science from Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, with Pi Gamma Mu and Pi Sigma Alpha honorary, the National Social Science and Political Science Honor Societies, respectively. Dr. Boudreau is the recipient of, including among other awards received during his distinguished Federal Government career, the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence, a U.S. Treasury Department Sustained Superior Performance Award, and numerous other U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Defense performance awards.

Dr. Boudreau’s articles on various foreign policy and national security subjects have appeared in the journals, World Affairs, Strategic Review, The International Journal On World Peace, European Security, Diplomacy & Statecraft, International Peacekeeping, and Strategic Analysis (New Delhi). He and his wife, Zoraida de, and their children reside in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Copyright

Copyright 2012 by Donald G. Boudreau

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part (beyond that copying permitted by U.S. Copyright Law, Section 107, “fair use” in teaching or research. Section 108, certain library copying, or in published media by reviewers in limited excerpt), without written permission from the publisher

Cover by Joleene Naylor

Notes

1

Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 394.

2

D.M. Sturley, A Short History of Russia, pp. 278-9.

3

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, (hereinafter “Gulag”), p. 283.

4

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 287.

5

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 288-9.

6

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 290.

7

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag” at 291.

8

Cf. Medvedev, at 239.

9

Cf. Medvedev, at 285-6.

10

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 364.

11

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 462.

12

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 469.

13

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 476.

14

Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 172-3.

15

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 503-4.

16

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 545-6.

17

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 547.

18

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 562.

19

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Gulag”, at 473.

20

Sidney Hook, Marx and the Marxists, pp. 107-22.

21

Cf. Hook.

22

Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? p. 35.

23

Giovanni Grazzini, Solzhenitsyn: a biography, pp. 249-50.

24

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, (hereinafter “Circle”), p. 268-9.

25

Cf. Medvedev, at 538.

26

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Circle”, at 179.

27

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Circle”, at 235.

28

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Circle”, at 96.

29

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Circle”, at 673.

30

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, (hereinafter “Cancer”), pp. 405-6.

31

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 138.

32

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 434.

33

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 411.

34

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 498-9.

35

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 506.

36

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 505.

37

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 506.

38

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 532.

39

Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer”, at 442.

40

The New York Times, Week in Review, August 4, 1974, p. 5.

41

Cf. Medvedev, at 537.

42

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, pp. 299-300.

Content

RESISTANCE IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (1918-1956)
By Donald G. Boudreau, PhD, MPA

INTRODUCTION

LAKE SEGDEN

SELF-IMMOLATION

HUNGER STRIKES

ERADICATING DISSENT

AUTHOR’S NOTE IN RE THE TRADITION OF FREEDOM VS. TRADITION OF SOCIETY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: ADDITIONAL, MORE CONTEMPORARY READINGS, ISSUED SUBSEQUENT TO THE 1974 WRITING OF THE INSTANT SUBJECT PAPER

About the Author

Copyright

Notes