The Gulag Archipelago

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1973

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-12

Part 2, Chapters 1-4

Part 3, Chapters 1-7

Part 3, Chapters 8-14

Part 3, Chapters 15-22

Part 4, Chapters 1-3

Part 5, Chapters 1-6

Part 5, Chapters 7-12

Part 6, Chapters 1-7

Part 7, Chapter 1-P.P.S.

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Fear-Driven Social Alienation

An important theme in The Gulag Archipelago is social alienation. This alienation manifests in many ways, with the people described as feeling they are disconnected from one another and the society they inhabit. At the beginning of the text, Solzhenitsyn describes the life of a free person in the Soviet Union. These people may be free in that they are not in prison, but they are not free to express themselves. They are scared and suspicious, as they are unsure whether anyone they speak to might be an informer. They are forced to guard their words and shy away from speaking too loudly on any matter out of fear of being sent to the Gulag. People therefore become suspicious of one another and socially distant, unable to form meaningful, lasting bonds with one another because they cannot bring themselves to trust anybody.

The alienation also manifests in an institutional sense. Solzhenitsyn describes the structures which ran the Gulag and mentions how the bureaucrats and the guards were too scared to make decisions for themselves. Any wrong decision could see them demoted or sent to the prison camps. They became paralyzed, dwelling on indecision. The result has been a stuttering, ineffective bureaucracy which benefits no one. The author recalls that, due to fear and alienation, the camp administrators and guards were so disconnected from the institution that they were unable to perform their jobs. Solzhenitsyn suggests that this is true of every institution in the Soviet Union.

The only people who are not alienated were the inmates, at least while they were in prison. The inmates had already sunk so low and endured so much that they were able to trust one another. Aside from the stool pigeons, the inmates formed social bonds with one another. Stuck out in the remote camps, they may have been alienated from society in a physical sense, but they were drawn together by their shared suffering. The irony of the only unalienated people being those closest to death becomes a commentary on the state of the Soviet Union. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the only people capable of social behavior in such a society are those who have already abandoned all hope. For Solzhenitsyn, only the imprisoned are free from alienation.

The Absurdity of Soviet Justice

The Gulag Archipelago begins with an overview of the arrests and interrogations that threaten everyone in the Soviet Union. The random nature of these arrests speaks to the absurdity of justice depicted in the text, which develops into a key theme. Solzhenitsyn describes how he was arrested because he sent a letter to a friend, while other people were arrested on far lesser charges. Some were arrested without any cause at all; they were simply fodder for the police’s arrest quota. Justice in the Soviet Union was completely arbitrary, and at any random moment, a person could lose 10 years (or the entirety) of their life to the Gulag. Any such sentence would include torture, isolation, and a high likelihood of death. Though the Gulag was theoretically a judicial system, it completely removed from any sense of justice.

Throughout the text, the absurdity of the Gulag as a judicial system is shown by the lack of rehabilitation achieved. Very few people who were sent to the Gulag had the chance to reform; not only had many not committed any crime, but most people were brutalized or killed before they could learn any lessons. Rehabilitation was evidently not a goal of the Gulag, highlighting the absurdity of framing the system as a tool of social reform. Instead, those who left the Gulag struggled to deal with their trauma and they could not reintegrate into society. When they were sent into exile, these people resent the absurd system which took so much from them.

Rather than a judicial system, Solzhenitsyn points out that the Gulag is heralded as an economic benefit for the Soviet Union. The Gulag is a source of free labor that affords expeditious industrialization. However, even this economic pretense is absurd. The system is so maladroit that the Gulag never pays for itself, as the free labor force costs the state more than if they simply paid the inmates as employees. The preposterous economic justification only serves to highlight the absurdity of a system propped up by half-truths and alienating terror.

The Inevitability of Failure within Corrupt Systems

In the bleak world Solzhenitsyn presents, failure seems inevitable, and every institution is destined to decay from inherent systemic problems. Solzhenitsyn views the Gulag as a byproduct of the Soviet ideology and he charts the rise of the prison camps through Lenin, Stalin, and into the post-Stalin world. For him, the essence of Soviet ideology is so anti-humanistic that the Gulag’s existence is a given. Though he admits that similar prison and labor camps exist in societies without this ideology, he believes that moral failure was particularly inevitable for the Soviet Union, whose ideological basis fostered the dehumanization necessary for the camps. He laments his country for furnishing the corrupt source of such immeasurable suffering.

This inevitability of failure also applies to those who were sent to the camps. Solzhenitsyn describes how so many prison sentences led to death, to the point where most prisoners would not return home. The sheer multitude of mortalities meant that death became an accepted part of the Gulag system. Administrators described how they could get three months of good work out of an inmate before their bodies were irrecoverably damaged. The inmates’ bodies inevitably failed and their spirits soon followed. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the only way to survive the Gulag was to abandon all hope. This is the inevitable failure of the human spirit.

The failure of the system was not tied to a single individual. Solzhenitsyn blames men like Stalin and Beria for exacerbating the Gulag’s cruelty, but he knows that the problems lay deeper in the core of Soviet society. When Stalin and Beria died, people celebrated—but until people collectively acknowledge the corruption and actively work to dismantle the system, failure of the society is inevitable.