First, it must be understood what the “Gulag Archipelago” is. In the western republics, criminals are tried in a public court and, if convicted, are sent to prisons where they are, generally speaking, often idle. In the Soviet Union, criminals go through an interrogation, and, if convicted (in a private court), are sent to a concentration camp where they are made to do forced labor for the benefit of the state; along with this system of camps, there are a series of transit prisons and jails for holding those convicted, called zeks in camp slang. This system is dubbed the gulag archipelago because the infrastructure is spread out across the Soviet Union like a series of small islands. One article of the criminal code is particularly important to understanding the gulag: Article 58, which dealt with “crimes against the state” and was used broadly in order to prevent any sort of opposition to Soviet power; those convicted under Article 58 (called simply 58s for short) were considered by the state to be common criminals rather than political prisoners, despite the political nature of the conviction.
The camps were both a means of political oppression2 via mass terror3 and a source of slave labor for the state. This source of slave labor was needed by the state for all of the degrading, difficult, and dangerous work which free citizens were not willing to perform under socialism and which could not justifiably be rewarded with capitalist incentives4. What made the Soviet form of slave labor particularly hostile to human life and decency was the penalty ration; zeks who did not complete the amount of work demanded of them by the state would receive less to eat5. Having the zeks sit idle in a cell was considered “forced parasitism”, while making them work was in keeping with the Soviet Constitution: “He who does not work does not eat”6. In practice, this meant exploiting the zeks by slowly starving them to death while profiting from their labor.
Within the gulag are many stories of calculated cruelty in addition to that of the ration system itself; to repeat all of the stories here verbatim would quickly dwarf the size of my writings. As such, I will repeat a select few stories as appropriate throughout this blog. I will organize the blog itself by explaining how the Soviets treated certain classes of people on the basis of Communist ideology, then I will analyze the patterns that I see emerging, drawing comparisons & and sometimes contrasting the Soviet regime with the regime to which I belong, that of the United States. By attempting to emphasize the connections between the aspects of the Soviet system which were influenced by Communism rather than particular flaws of the Soviets themselves, it is my hope that this analysis will help to explain why Communism does not actually result in a more compassionate society and why the Soviet system was likely not an atypical implementation of Communism, and was therefore real Communism.
Every crime is the result of a given social system...
— Comrade Krylenko, quoted in Vol. I, p319
The Communists embraced idea that criminal activity results from class-based societies such as Capitalism8, and they believed that their progressive society would be crime-free; after all, since crime resulted from classes, it was concluded that thieves were taught how to steal from their class enemies9 (believers, intellectuals, engineers, &c.). As the writer Gorky was quoted, “...any capitalist steals more than all of you combined!”10. In order to transition into the new, crime-free society, the Soviets developed a concept for their penal system which they called the reforging of the thieves11; Soviet jurist Averbakh is quoted by Solzhenitsyn explaining the prison regimen as such: “The tactic of re-education is based on class differentiation... based on the strata friendliest to the proletariat”12 . The idea of the thieves being a friendly strata came from the fact that the thieves were also enemies of private property, and it was concluded that the thieves therefore merely needed to be guided into the political consciousness of the Soviets13. Solzhenitsyn thus explains the regime in detail:
Professional criminals can in no sense be equated with capitalist elements (i.e., engineers, students, agronomists, and “nuns”), for the latter are steadfastly hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat, while the former are only (!) politically unstable! (A professional murderer is only politically unstable!) The lumpenproletarian is not a property owner, and therefore cannot ally himself with the hostile-class elements, but will much more willingly ally himself with the proletariat... That is why in the official terminology of Gulag they are called socially friendly elements. ... That is why the regulations repeated over and over again: Trust the recidivist criminals! That is why through the Culture and Educational Section a consistent effort was supposed to be made to explain to the thieves the unity of their class interests with those of the workers, to indoctrinate them in a “suspicious and hostile attitude toward the `kulaks' and counterrevolutionaries,” and the authorities were to “place their hopes in these attitudes”!
— Vol. II, p434
This tactic of reforging based on class theory played out in the gulag such that thieves were given the top positions in the labor camps while the other prisoners were explicitly denied such positions14, and the thieves were used against the “socially hostile” class elements by the Communists15 16.
Solzehenitsyn describes his first encounter with the thieves as such:
You see cruel, loathsome snouts,... wearing expressions of greed and mockery. Each of them looks at you like a spider gloating over a fly. Their web is that grating which imprisons you—and you have been had! They squinch up their lips, as if they intend to bite you from one side. They hiss when they speak, enjoying that hissing more than the vowel and consonant sounds of speech... Their sinewy purple necks, their swelling shoulder muscles, their swarthy tattooed chests have never suffered prison emaciation. ... And suddenly you see a small cross dangling from one of those necks. Yes, a little aluminum cross on a string. You are surprised and slightly relieved. That means there are religious believers among them. How touching! So nothing terrible is going to happen. But immediately this “believer” belies both his cross and his faith by cursing,... and he jabs two protruding fingers, spread into the “V” of a slingshot, right in your eyes—not even pausing to threaten you but starting to punch them out then and there. And this gesture of theirs, which says, “I'll gouge out your eyes, crowbait!” covers their entire philosophy and faith!
— Vol. I, p502
Solzhenitsyn later had his bundles of bacon, sugar, and bread stolen by the thieves while in the transit prison17, but that was hardly the worst that could happen:
In 1946, retired Colonel Lunin, a high-ranking official in Osoaviakhim... recounted in a Buturki cell how the thieves in a Moscow Black Maria, on March 8, International Women's Day, during their transit from the City Court to Taganka Prison, gang-raped a young bride in his presence (and amid the silent passivity of everyone else in the van). That very morning the girl had come to her trial a free person, as attractively dressed as she could manage (she was on trial for leaving her work without official permission—which in itself was a repulsive fabrication worked up by her chief in revenge for her refusal to live with him). A half-hour before the Black Maria, the girl had been sentenced to five years under the decree and had then been shoved into this Black Maria, and right there in broad daylight, somewhere on the Park Ring ("Drink Soviet Champagne!"), had been turned into a camp prostitute. And are we really to say that it was the thieves who did this to her and not the jailers? And not her chief?
And thief tenderness too! Having raped her, they robbed her. They took the fashionable shoes with which she had hoped to charm the judges, and her blouse—which they shoved through to the convoy guards, who stopped the van and went off to get some vodka and handed it in so the thieves could drink at her expense.
And when they got to the Taganka Prison, the girl sobbed out her complaint. And the officer listened to her, yawned, and said: “The government can't provide each of you with individual transportation. We don't have such facilities.”
— Vol. I, p529–530
Marxist compassion! The class enemies who stood by silently and passively did not interfere in part because they were fearful of being stabbed; for a class enemy, to have a knife would be terrorism, but the thieves simply didn't know any better18 (and is this so far from our school supervisors who refuse to punish bullies because the bullies do not know any better? Compassion as a virtue! ...and what of Justice?).
These thieves, so favored by the Communists are, as Solzhenitsyn points out, the same as the pirates, the privateers, and freebooters, “fascinating in romantic literary portraits... why are they so repulsive to you here?”19, and, furthermore, “...has not all of world literature glorified the thieves?” (“Pirates of the Carribean”, perhaps?). Solzhenitsyn describes them in detail; tattoos such as “...a droll stoker hurling coal into their rear orifice...”20, stories of “...the luxurious life which the hero always had to achieve in the end...”21 (sounds familiar), and their slogan: “you today, me tomorrow”22. This last point deserves further elaboration, and Solzhenitsyn describes their philosophy:
— Vol. II, p428 (uncensored)
What I find most striking about this philosophy is how rational it is. Is #1 not the guiding principle behind the “I've got mine!” political attitude? #2 is a clear-cut case of Darwinian Selection, so the thieves have not lagged behind the times with an irrational, superstitious faith in Justice. And is principle #3 not taught at our Universities, except there it's called the Prisoner's Dilemma and explained in less obviously profane terms (but is the end result not the same)?
Going back to the Soviets and their reforging, it appears that the thieves taught the Soviets rather than vice-versa. Solzhenitsyn explains of how, during inter-prison & camp transport in a Stolypin railcar, the convoy guard would intentionally mix a few thieves into each cell so that the thieves would plunder the class enemies, then pawn the things off to the guard in exchange for rations, vodka, tobacco, &c.23. In one case where there were no thieves on board to plunder the class enemies, the guard lowered the prisoners' rations until the prisoners sold their stuff to the convoy for the rations24. The thieves, however, were not as keen to acquire the official's traits:
The urka—the habitual thief—who adopted the Chekist faith became a bitch, and his fellow thieves would cut his throat. The Chekist who acquired the psychology of the thief was an energetic interrogator of the thirties and forties, or else a resolute camp chief—such men were appreciated. They got the service promotions.
— Vol. II, p428
The psychology did not stay confined to the gulag, though, and was transmitted from there via campside (the areas adjacent to the gulag) to undergo trial and selection for transmission to the broader Soviet Union25. Perhaps beyond, too; I've personally found the thief word “tukhta” (padding of the books) to be useful when referring to employer metrics, and is that not a result of “diversity” of culture?
Despite its basis in Communist class theory, the Soviet's social system and prison regime did not reforge the thieves as they had predicted. In the early fifties, when the thieves had gotten out of control, the administration played the bitches against the thieves26; this was known as the “bitches' war”27. Likewise, Stalin himself started putting the ringleaders of the thieves in prison28 or isolators29 rather than camp. The thieves were still intentionally used by the Soviets against their class enemies30, but the promise of reforging the thieves had failed.
Religion is the opiate of the masses.
— Karl Marx
There seems to me to be a growing trend to view Christianity as the “oppressor religion” (and, indeed, I had adopted this view in the past). This idea was tried thoroughly with Soviet Russia's state atheism, which persecuted believers for their faith. According to prosecutor Comrade Krylenko, the clergy were all “class enemies”31, and accuser Krasikov exclaimed, “The whole Orthodox Church is a subversive organization. Properly speaking, the entire church ought to be put in prison.”32. The problem was that, rather than always following the dictatorship of the workers, the believers would refuse to act in a manner contrary to their morality; as Patriarch Tikhon explained: “I recognize [the state's laws], to the extent that they do not contradict the laws of piety.”33. Judge Bek thus made the accusation against Patriarch Tikhon: “propaganda is an attempt to prepare a mood preliminary to preparing a revolt in the future.”34; that is to say that anything that contradicted state doctrine was counter-revolutionary and therefore a crime. The idea that individuals might make a conscious moral decision differing from the demands of state law of their own free will was not respected by the dictatorship. As such, the believers had to be re-educated, as Solzhenitsyn writes:
Believers must be dismissed from their jobs merely for their faith; Komsomols must be sent along to break the windows of believers; believers must be officially compelled to attend antireligious lectures, church doors must be cut down with blowtorches, domes pulled down with hawsers attached to tractors, gatherings of old women broken up with fire hoses. (Is this what you mean by dialogue, French comrades?)
— Vol. III, p514
Other pressures included: requirements to violate the secrecy of the confessional by becoming informers for the state35, refusing to work on Sundays being considered economic sabotage36, and non-atheist communes having their teachers arrested for not following the government programs37. There are many notable stories of this persecution, such as: the banning of religious famine-relief programs (a famine in which cannibalism, even parents eating their own children, was practiced) followed by the forced requisition of all church valuables38, the tracking down and arrest of an independent Yaruyevo commune39, and starving a group of arrested old monks that refused to sign paperwork40:
In the Summer of 1930 they brought to Solovki several dozen religious sectarians who rejected anything that came from the anti-Christ: they refused to accept any documents, including passports, and they refused to sign for anything or to handle any money. At their head was a gray-bearded old man of eighty, blind and bearing a long staff. Every enlightened person could clearly see that these sectarians could never ever enter into socialism, because that required having a great to deal to do with papers—and that therefore the best thing for them to do was to die. And so they sent them off to Maly Zayatsky Island, the smallest in the entire Solovetsky archipelago—sandy, unforested desert, containing a summer hut of the former monk-fishermen. And they expressed willingness to give them two months' rations, the condition being that each one of the sectarians would have to sign for them on the invoice. Of course they refused. ... And so they were sent off without food. Two months later (exactly two months because they were then to be asked to sign for their food for the next two months) they sailed over to Maly Zayatsky and found only corpses which had been picked by the birds. Everyone was there. No one had escaped.
— Vol. II, p66
In the current-day United States there are many people who identify themselves as “Christian”, yet a common question asks how many of them would have the willpower to stand by their convictions in the face of persecution? This ambiguity does not exist for those believers imprisoned in the gulag because of their faith, as Solzhenitsyn writes:
The Tao says: When faith collapses, that is when the true believers appear. Because of our enlightened scoffing at Orthodox priests... we overlooked the fact that the sinful Orthodox Church had nonetheless nurtured daughters worthy of the first centuries of Christianity—sisters of those thrown to the lions in the arenas. ... They were the best of Russia's Christians. The worst had all... trembled, recanted, and gone into hiding.
— Vol. II, p310
The perserverance of these determined few is inspiring. For example, one of the penalty camps where people wore numbers instead of names, a sect of women believers refused to wear what they considered the mark of Satan, and so were stripped to their shifts and made to walk in sub-freezing temperatures (Marxist compassion!) until the administration gave up and returned them their old clothing without numbers, but refused to issue new clothing without a signed receipt41. Most telling, though, is how, despite camp administration threats, a belief in Christ was one of the few means available to avoid becoming an informer42, and Solzhenitsyn added poetically:
And does the impartial reader not find that[the security officers]flee from Christ like devils from the sign of the cross, from the bells calling to matins?
— Vol. II, 374
Contrast this steadfastness with those who truly believe that the “rational” choice of betrayal in the Prisoner's Dilemma is the optimal one, and consider what kind people they are... do they inspire admiration, or revulsion? As Solzhenitsyn pointed out when stoolies began seeking shelter in the camp prison from their fellow prisoners who had begun knifing them (an event called the chopping):
...A stoolie is only wanted, only useful, so long as he can rub shoulders with the crowd and pass undetected. Once detected, he is worthless, and cannot go on serving in the same camp. He eats the bread of idleness in the Disciplinary Barracks, doesn't go out to work, isn't worth his salt. Even the MVD's philanthropy must have some limits!
So the flow of stoolies begging to be saved was stemmed. Late-comers had to remain in their sheep's clothing and await the knife.
An informer is like a ferryman: once he's served his purpose, nobody wants to know him.
— Vol. III, p242
The true believers, though, did not stoop to that level, and were persecuted by the Soviet dictatorship as result.
There is one final manifestation of the Soviet regime which I wish to include here, as I believe that it has symbolic significance. Although the Soviets had destroyed the Christian monks, they found that the monasteries that they had built, with their strong, stone walls in isolated locations were still useful as prisons43 44 45. Likewise, churches were turned into transit prisons46 (especially those in the actual prisons47), but others were put to even less holy uses, as Solzhenitsyn writes:
In Pskov alone, the NKVD set up torture and execution chambers in the basements of many churches, in former hermits' cells. And even in 1953 tourists were still not allowed into these churches, on the grounds that “archives” were kept there. The cobwebs hadn't been swept out for ten years at a stretch: those were the “archives” they kept there. And before beginning restoration work on these churches, they had to haul away the bones in them by the truckload.
— Vol. I, p438
So we can answer that question, “Is all the world jails and churches?” with a resounding, “No! In some places there are only jails!”.
In actual fact they are not[the nation's]brains, but shit.
— Comrade Lenin, quoted in Vol. I, p328
Comrade Lenin, Stalin's “humane” predecessor, had no love for the “rotten-liberal”48 intelligentsia of Russia. Although the intelligentsia were not bourgeois proper because they were not the land owners, they had worked for the bourgeois and their ideas were still bourgeois; Lenin therefore called them, “a pitiful petty bourgeois, imprisoned in bourgeois prejudices”49. Much like the Christians were subject by the Soviets to re-education, the intelligentsia were subjected by the Soviets to re-evaluation; they naturally found that the ideas held by the intelligentsia were lagging behind the times50. Not only that, but they were now considered as actively harmful, as Comrade Krylenko exclaimed:
The Russian intelligentsia which entered the crucible of the Revolution with slogans of power for the people emerged from it an ally of the black generals, and a hired and obedient agent of European imperialism. The intelligentsia trampled on its own banners, and covered them with mud.
— Comrade Krylenko, quoted in Vol. I, p328–329
The Soviets claimed that the intelligentsia had “betrayed the cause of the workers”51. For example:
Several dozen young people got together for some kind of musical evening which had not been authorized ahead of time by the GPU. They listened to music and then drank tea. They got the money for the tea by voluntarily contributing their own kopecks. It was quite clear, of course, that this music was a cover for counterrevolutionary sentiments, and that the money was being collected not for tea but to assist the dying world bourgeois. And they were all arrested and given from three to ten years—Anna Skripnikova getting five, while Ivan Nikolayevich Varentsov and the other organizers of the affair who refused to confess were shot!
— Vol. I, p43
Likewise, in the middle of the Civil War, the intelligentsia made works such as books, memoranda, and projects52, and Comrade Krylenko thus scorned them: “It was your duty to think first of all how you might die in battle”53. Worse, they had written books about what kind of system should replace the Soviet regime were it to fail. Not only did they think that Soviet power might fail, but they wanted Democracy rather than the Communist ideal: the dictatorship of the workers. This was unacceptable to the Soviets:
...even a conversation over a teacup as to the kind of system that should replace the Soviet system, which is allegedly about to fall, is a counterrevolutionary act... During the Civil War not only is any kind of action[against Soviet power]a crime... but the fact of inaction is also criminal.
— Comrade Krylenko, quoted in Vol. I, p332
Rather than thinking and then sharing their ideas, the Soviets demanded unwavering, unthinking loyalty to their dictatorship from the intelligentsia. Since the intelligentsia did not provide this unwavering loyalty, the tribunal sentenced the defendants to be shot (Marxist compassion intervened, though, and the sentence “was commuted to concentration camp until the end of the Civil War”54). As far as Krylenko was concerned, this was just:
The political instability and the interim nature of the intelligentsia... completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia made by the Bolsheviks.
— Comrade Krylenko, quoted in Vol. I, p333
Yet it is by their very nature that the intelligentsia are not capable of blind faith in any particular system, as Solzhenitsyn explains:
Over the years I have had much occasion to ponder this word, the intelligentsia. We are all very fond of including ourselves in it—but you see not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union this word has acquired a completely distorted meaning. They began to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't work (and are afraid to) with their hands. All the Party, government, military, and trade-union bureaucrats have been included. All book-keepers and accountants—the mechanical slaves of Debit. All office employees. And with even greater ease we include here all teachers (even those who are no more than talking textbooks and have neither independent knowledge nor an independent view of education). All physicians, including those capable only of making doodles on the patients' case histories. And without the slightest hesitation all those who are only in the vicinity of editorial offices, publishing houses, cinema studios, and philharmonic orchestras are included here, not even to mention those who actually get published, make films, or pull a fiddle bow.
And yet the truth is that not one of these criteria permits a person to be classified in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we must not devalue it. The intellectual is not defined by professional pursuit and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.
— Vol. II, p281
The Soviets, however, believed themselves to be on “the right side” of history and thus had no room for alternate ideas or deviant behaviors. As shown above, anything but perfect obedience and conformity to the cause of the Soviets was not only going against the state's notions on the progression of history, but was actually criminal, thus the intelligentsia had no place in the new society and had “outlived its time”55. In camp, the intelligentsia were destroyed:
...the system of Corrective Labor Camps in particular, with their obligatory and exhausting physical labor and their obligatory participation in the humiliating, buzzing ant heap, was a more effective means of destroying the intelligentsia than was prison. It was precisely the intelligentsia that this system killed off quickly and completely.
— Vol. II, p631
In this manner the intelligentsia was purged from the new, humanitarian society.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and look up to with reverent awe. ... It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
— Karl Marx, as quoted by Solzhenitsyn, Vol. II, p256
Which engineers, when concerned more with the integrity of their profession than pursuit of profit alone, do not feel on some level degraded by an avaricious Capitalist's demand for revenue over a quality product? Their energy directed only towards their own short-term interests without account of the customer, the Capitalist's peoples, or the trade's integrity, what contempt they inspire! Here Marx has voiced a similar contempt, implying that one might find solutions to this problem in a Communist system.
But, as with the intellectuals before, it turns out that the engineers are not “workers” but, as Solzenitsyn pointed out, merely “lackeys and servants of former capitalist bosses”56, and thus were also tainted by class corruption. The engineers then had to be made to subservient to the “real” workers, as this passage illustrates:
...while their superiors demanded successes in production from them, and discipline, they were deprived of the authority to impose this discipline. Any worker could not only refuse to carry out the instructions of an engineer, but could insult and even strike him and go unpunished—and as a representative of the ruling class the worker was always right in such a case.
— Vol. II, p391
Here again is the central theme of Communism: the dictatorship of the workers. Unsurprisingly, the engineers of Russia were not enthusiastic about their new rulers:
What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d'état was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn't the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?
— Vol. I, p390
But Democracy is not the goal of Communism, and so such ideas were counter-revolutionary and made the engineers as a class socially hostile. The threat to the engineers was not immediate after the revolution, as the engineers were still needed for production, but the new dictators did not trust the engineers who, “...had come to regard [themselves] as too irreplaceable and had not gotten used to catching instructions on the wing.”57 (am I getting Déjà vu?). The atmosphere the old engineers faced is summarized nicely in a footnote:
They say that when Ordzhonikidze used to talk with the old engineers, he would put one pistol on his desk beside his right hand and another beside his left.
— Vol. I, p45
Since it was impossible to correct socially hostile prisoners due to their class corruption58, the Communists' solution was to train a new generation of engineers in order to replace the old engineers. As these new engineers began to emerge and the Five-Year Plans of the Communists' began to run into trouble, the old engineers' social hostility was exposed by their failures to meet the state plan, not because the plans were unrealistic, but because the old engineers were engaged in a form of sabotage known as wrecking:
Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, of the People's Commissariat of Railroads, pretended to be terribly devoted to the development of the new economy, and would hold forth for hours on end about the economic problems involved in the construction of socialism, and he loved to give advice. One such pernicious piece of advice was to increase the size of freight trains and not worry about heavier than average loads. The GPU exposed von Meck, and he was shot: his objective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case of foreign military intervention! When, not long afterward, the new People's Commissar of Railroads, Comrade Kaganovich, ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled and tripled them (and for this discovery received the Order of Lenin along with others of our leaders)—the malicious engineers who protested became known as limiters. They raised the outcry that this was too much, and would result in the breakdown of the rolling stock, and they were rightly shot for their lack of faith in the possibilities of socialist transport.
— Vol. I, p45
This story is a great summary of the engineer's predicament: every design decision involves trade-offs, so how could they possibly make a decision that can't be construed as wrecking? In our oppressive Capitalist system, one weighs the costs and benefits of each decision before making it and, if the result displeases the bosses, that engineer may be fired; in an enlightened Communist system, a choice that displeases the bosses is criminal, as failure to meet the five-year plans is a sign of criminal wrecking rather than ineptitude and/or laziness. So now imagine the demands of avaricious Capitalist bosses, except failure to meet their demands now threatens one with the gulag (where labor would be credited to the camp, i.e. unpaid). Marxist compassion!
By design, the old engineers did not make it through the systematic purges (see the Oldenborger trial59 and the Promparty Trial60 for more examples), and they were eventually replaced with a new generation of engineers. Having known both the old and the new engineers, Solzhenitsyn contrasts the two, starting by describing the old engineers:
I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manner and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.
— Vol. I, p197
Solzhenitsyn appears to be describing what might be called a Victorian gentleman. A younger and more naive me had hoped that upon entering college I might meet such intellectuals, but they appear to be a relic of the past, a bygone era; indeed, these days it's difficult to imagine that such people could have even existed, and I imagine my contemporaries ridiculing me for romanticizing the past (I once read about a folk saying in “The Russians” about “the whore who thinks all women are whores because she is”)! But I have digressed from describing what types of people the old engineers were replaced with. Solzhenitsyn got to meet a few of the new engineers firsthand while imprisoned, and describes his first encounter thus:
He was short, stocky, very broad of shoulder and body, and notably fat in the face, but this fat, which had been acquired by eating well, endowed him, not with an appearance of good-natured accessibility, but with an air of weighty importance, of affiliation with the highest ranks. The crowning part of his face was, to be sure, not the upper portion, but the lower, which resembled a bulldog's jaw. It was there that his energy was concentrated, along with his will and authoritativeness... No one could deny him one point of superiority. He was much stronger, more visceral, than those others had been. His shoulders and his hands retained their strength even though they had not needed it for a long time. Freed from the restraints of courtesy, he stared sternly and spoke impersonally, as if he didn't even consider the possibility of a dissenting view.
— Vol. I, p196–197
As for this new engineer's career, Solzhenitsyn describes how the engineer had been, “one of those disheveled, unenlightened peasant boys whose wasted talents so distressed Belinsky and Tolstoi”61, but, thanks to the revolution, he instead advanced rapidly through the Soviet education system and immediately had “dozens of engineers and thousands of workers under him”62. As for the breadth of his knowledge, Solzhenitsyn writes:
The scope of[his]concepts of the world can be judged by the fact that he believed there was a Canadian language. During the course of two months in the cell, he did not read a single book, not even a whole page, and if he did read a paragraph, it was only to be distracted from his gloomy thoughts about his interrogation. It was clear from his conversation that he had read even less in freedom. He knew of Pushkin—as the hero of bawdy stories. And of Tolstoi he knew only, in all probability, that he was—a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet!
— Vol. I, p200
Oh dear. Well, he must have been a good engineer, so to hell with the rest of it, right?! As for what type of person he was in his personal life, the following should make it clear:
Women usually looked at him with another sort of glance. They came to him to get well fed, to get warmed up, to have some fun. He had wild money passing through his hands. His billfold bulged like a little barrel with expense money, and to him ten-ruble notes were like kopecks, and thousands like single rubles.[He]didn't hoard them, regret spending them, or keep count of them. He counted only the women who passed through his hands, and particularly those he had “uncorked.” This count was his sport. In the cell he assured us that his arrest had broken off the count at 290 plus, and he regretted that he had not reached 300. Since it was wartime and the women were alone and lonely. ... And he was quite prepared to describe one episode after another. ... Even though no danger threatened him during those last years, he had frantically grabbed these women, messed them up, and then thrown them away, like a greedy diner eating boiled crayfish—grabbing one, devouring it, sucking it, then grabbing the next.
— Vol. I, p199
A philanderer (and he was married to boot); focused on his life and his alone... but he was from the working class, focused on implementing the plan, and wasn't the type who would nurture counter-revolutionary ideas (was he even capable?), after all, those wouldn't help his career and his happiness!
There is more to the story of the engineer Solzhenitsyn mentioned, and another, similar tale of evening decadence63, but I've described enough of such people. It seems to me that the relationship between these people and Communism's dictatorship of the workers is like that of any tyranny: such people must exist in a dictatorship, for only they have the intelligence and energy to wield the highly technical skills that keep the system running while having the narrow, self-interested consciousness that looks only to their own selfish gain within the system, while not being able or willing to form even a glimmering of any idea that might challenge that system and thus their prosperous way of life. As for the other kind of engineers, sentenced to the gulag, one of them, a chemist's, story goes as such:
Something with a resemblance to a human being sits in a declivity above a pit in which brown peaty water was collected. Set out around the pit are sardine heads, fish bones, pieces of gristle, crusts of bread, lumps of cooked cereal, wet washed potato peelings, and something in addition which it is difficult even to name. ... The last-legger begins to dip out the dark slops from the mess tin with a wooden spoon and to wash down with them one after another the potato peelings, the gristle, then the sardine heads. He keeps chewing very, very slowly and deliberately (it's the common misfortune of last-leggers to gulp things down hastily without chewing). ... Basing himself on his still-remembered formulas for the chemical composition of substances, he demonstrates that one can get everything nutritionally necessary from refuse; one merely has to overcome one's squeamishness and direct all one's efforts to extracting nourishment from this source. ... He hoped to survive his term.”
— Vol. II, p212
I do not know whether he survived.
They almost slipped my mind, the socialists. This might seem improbable as there were once many parties, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Mensheviks, and Socialist Democrats, but, by the time Solzenhitsyn was sent to the gulag, they had all been killed. Solzehenitsyn explains that Stalin saw the other socialists as the biggest danger to the legitimacy of his revolution64, and hence the Soviets played what Solzhenitsyn called the game of “Big Solitaire” with them: slowly isolating them before finally killing them:
This whole operation was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed. It was essential to clean out, conscientiously, socialists of every other stripe from Moscow, Petrograd, the ports, the industrial centers, and, later on, the outlying provinces as well. This was a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now. Someone's far-seeing mind, someone's neat hands, planned it all, without letting one wasted minute go by. They picked up a card which had spent three years in one pile and softly placed it on another pile. And the person who had been imprisoned in a central prison was thereby shifted into exile—and a good way off. Someone who had served out a “minus” sentence[forbidding living in certain cities]was sent into exile, too, but out of sight of the rest of the “minus” category, or else from exile to exile, and then back again into the central prison—but this time a different one. Patience, overwhelming patience, was the trait of the person playing out the solitaire. And without any noise, without any outcry, the members of all the other parties slipped gradually out of sight, lost all connection with the places and people where they and their revolutionary activities were known, and thus—imperceptibly and mercilessly—was prepared the annihilation of those who had once raged against tyranny at student meetings and had clanked their Tsarist shackles in pride.
— Vol. I, p35–46
Despite their utopian visions, the socialists were destroyed as a consequence of the revolution they had helped to bring about. This is in part because the new government had learned from the previous government's leniency, and was not keen on losing power by providing the same mercy. In addition, the socialists' assisted their own demise as a result of their arrogance. Near the end of the Tsars, to be a political prisoner meant to be separated from the common criminals, afforded extra rations, and a certain amount of respect (such as being addressed formally by the jailers); as Solzehenitsyn describes, the post-revolution socialists demanded this treatment for themselves as well, but not for those on the wrong side of their progressive doctrine:
In part, too, the canopy of loneliness spread over[the socialists]because, in the very first postrevolutionary years, having naturally accepted from the GPU the well-merited identification of politicals, they naturally agreed with the GPU that all who were “to the right” of them, beginning with the[Russian Constitutional Democrats]were not politicals but KR's—Counter-Revolutionaries—the manure of history. And they also regarded as KR's those who suffered for their faith in Christ. And whoever didn't know what “right” or “left” meant—and that, in the future, would be all of us—they considered to be KR's also. And thus it was that, in part voluntarily, in part involuntary, keeping themselves aloof and shunning others, they gave their blessing to the future “Fifty-eight” into whose maw they themselves would disappear...
And, in turn, 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 as the rest, and they closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring.
— Vol. I, p475
So it was that, by refusing to recognize that others whom they disagreed with may have valid political views (the socialists were, after all, on the “right side” of history), they divided themselves from those who might have protected them and were thus weak enough to be purged. As such, I can only recall a single socialist from throughout the entire series of books.
This socialist appeared early in Solzhenitsyn's time in the gulag, when Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned during interrogation. The socialist's name was Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko, and he had been a Social Democrat. He'd been arrested, amnestied, re-arrested, used as a decoy for a prison escape, escaped from exile to Canada, returned to Russia for the revolution, and ended up taking a modest job before finally being arrested by the Soviets (a tenant in his apartment had bragged about owning a pistol while drunk, and Fastenko was taken down with him for terrorism)65. He was one of the last of his kind, though, as he explained to Solzhenitsyn:
“Hardly any of the old hard-labor political prisoners of Tsarist times are left. I am one of the last. All the hard-labor politicals have been destroyed, and they even dissolved our society in the thirties.” “Why?” I asked. “So we would not get together and discuss things.” And although these simple words, spoken in a calm tone, should have been shouted to the heavens, should have shattered windowpanes, I understood them only as indicating one more of Stalin's evil deeds. It was a troublesome fact, but without roots.
— Vol. I, p194
Perhaps the other socialists might have been able to explain those roots at one point, but they're long dead now, and we're left having to infer them on our own.
It is not possible for us at this time fully to investigate exactly who fell within the broad definition of insects; the population of Russia was too heterogeneous and encompassed small, special groups, entirely superfluous and, today, forgotten. The people in the local zemstvo self-governing bodies in the provinces were, of course, insects. People in the cooperative movement were also insects, as were all owners of their own homes. There were not a few insects among the teachers in the gymnasiums. The church parish councils were made up almost exclusively of insects, and it was insects, of course, who sang in church choirs. All priests were insects—and monks and nuns even more so. And all those Tolstoyans who, when they undertook to serve the Soviet government on, for example, the railroads, refused to sign the required oath to defend the Soviet government with gun in hand thereby showed themselves to be insects too. ... The railroads were particularly important, for there were indeed many insects hidden beneath railroad uniforms, and they had to be rooted out and some of them slapped down. And telegraphers, for some reason, were, for the most part, inveterate insects who had no sympathy for the Soviets. Nor could you say a good word about vikzhel, the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railroad Workers, nor about the other trade unions, which were often filled with insects hostile to the working class.
...
In addition, how many kinds of cursed intellectuals there were—restless students and variety of eccentrics, truth-seekers, and holy fools, of whom even Peter the Great had tried in vain to purge Russian and who are always a hindrance to a well-ordered, strict regime.
— Vol. I, p27–28
All of these people, being more fortunate than the stereotype of impoverished factory workers could thus be painted as oppressors and therefore criminals by the society of compassion. Proponents of Communism may argue that they would never (again) so carelessly stereotype and judge people, but, having regularly had arguments that I've made been dismissed by progressives as a result of my race and sex (like so many others), I can't find it in me to believe them.
In addition to a poorly-elaborated, binary view of classes, it's important to note what exactly the Communist's “classless” society means. It is easy to imagine a society where all people enjoy an equal outcome (equity) and live in harmony, but that does not appear to reflect the reality; indeed, what is less-easily grasped is the means by which the classless society is supposed to be created:
No matter how clear-cut the declarations of the class teaching, openly displayed and proclaimed everywhere, that the sole fate the enemy deserves is annihilation—still, it was impossible to picture to oneself the annihilation of each concrete two-legged individual possessing hair, eyes, a mouth, a neck and shoulders. One could actually believe that classes were being destroyed, but the people who constituted these classes should be left, shouldn't they? The eyes of Russians who had been brought up in other generous and vague concepts, like eyes seeing through badly prescribed eyeglasses, could in no wise read with exactitude the phrases of the cruel teaching.
— Vol. II, p46
Thus it was that, as Solzhenitsyn quotes Comrade Krylenko, “in regard to convicted hostile-class elements... correction is impotent and purposeless.”68. Rather than a system which takes inequities into account and places them in a harmonious relationship, Communism assumes that inequity necessarily means disharmony, and then tries to enforce equity by annihilating the outlying classes. For those that find themselves in an outlying class in a Communist society, not even good deeds will help them, as Chekist M. I. Latsis explains:
In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? ... These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.
— Chekist M. I. Latsis, quoted in Vol. I, p96
To these ideas of class guilt and annihilation are counterposed two other ideas: the inalienable rights of individuals, and the Free Will of individuals. Regarding the inalienable rights of individuals, it is, when faced with a rival of any kind, the simplest and easiest thing to wish that the rival would simply wasn't. Unfortunately, the rival is, so them not being is isn't a possibility... unless, of course, one were to stop him from being, by murder. Yet this simple idea, so easily formed in people's minds, when acted upon, tends to rarely have the good result that one expects. The counterposed idea, much more difficult to form, is the idea that, our rivals, too, have an inalienable right to life, and that they might actually have something worthwhile to teach us from our conflicts with them. Communism, though, makes no allowances for its class enemies and instead calls for their annihilation; the result is thus always murderous.
Does the idea of class guilt truly need additional condemnation? I find it would be dishonest not to break Godwin's Law here: is class guilt not the same justification by which the Nazis incinerated entire Jewish families? Instead of a world view where each individual has the Free Will to make a choice between Good and Evil, to follow the state's laws or to disobey them, to make their choices and suffer their consequences, instead, all who are lumped into the same class are to be given the same treatment of annihilation no matter what choices they've made in life (and is not equal treatment for different people inequitable?). There isn't any more that needs to be said here; nearly everyone is familiar with the pathologies of class guilt.
Thus we can accuse the Communists' class theory of the following flaws: a poorly-defined, black-and-white, binary view of classes; a solution which violates the inalienable rights of members of those classes, and a system of justice which annihilates people because of their class guilt. Counterposed to these flaws are: social systems such as the Western Democracies which have a model which, with varying degrees of success, allows a far broader range of classes to function within them; the idea that individuals have an inalienable right to life despite being a political enemy; and a system of justice which tries people for their individual crimes rather than class association. These social theories make for a more just and prosperous society than the class theory proposed by Communism.
“Progress” is a two-dimensional view of history (read “two-dimensional” as a slur): time is measured on the x-axis, and progress on the y-axis. The y-value is strictly increasing as time increases. From this viewpoint, the entire annals of history can be compressed into something that can be rendered as a single image on a standard-definition computer monitor, thus rendering as redundant and superfluous the life works of all historians. Notions of cyclicity, such as those implied by the well-know aphorism, “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it”, cannot fit within this viewpoint, nor can those notions which suppose something more complex than either progress or cyclicity alone.
In keeping with this notion of progress, Communism was supposed to bring only benefits; even now, radicalized students chant, “We have nothing to lose but our chains!”, yet many Russians lost far more than their chains because of Communism. Solzhenitsyn describes what actually happened via a metaphor, using the likeness between the Russian word for jail to that of a sharp horn, which I will refer to as the “Bull's Horns” hypothesis of history:
And if one glances over all Russia's jail customs and conduct, at the entire institution during, say, the last ninety years, then you'll see not just one horn really, but two horns. The Narodnaya Volya (“People's Will”) revolutionaries began at the tip of one horn, right where it gores, right where it's too excruciatingly painful to take even on the breastbone. They kept wearing it down gradually until it got rounded off, shrank to a stump, and was hardly a horn any longer, and finally became just a woolly open spot (this was the beginning of the twentieth century). But then, after 1917, the first swelling of a new knob could be felt, and there, there, splaying out and with the slogan “You don't have the right!”—it began to thrust upward again, and to narrow to a point and harden, to acquire a horny surface—until by 1938 it was pinning the human being right in that gap between the collarbone and the neck...
— Vol. I, p456–457
The Bull's Horns hypothesis suggests a more cyclical nature of events than the notion of progress, but it also suggests that each horn is a distinct entity corresponding to its particular regime. The horn of the Tsars and the horn of the Soviets can thus be compared.
First, with regards to the numbers of those condemned to capital punishment, an example from the tsarist regime is described by Solzhenitsyn as such:
During the years of the first revolution (1905) and its suppression, the number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoi and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions.
— Vol. I, p434
These numbers from the revolutionary years can be compared with the Communist purges of 1937:
What legal expert, what criminal historian, will provide us with verified statistics for those 1937–1938 executions? Where is that Special Archive we might be able to penetrate in order to read the figures? There is none. There is none and there never will be any. Therefore we dare report only those figures mentioned in rumors that were quite fresh in 1939–1940, when they were drifting around under the Butyrki arches, having emanated from the high- and middle-tanking Yezhov men of the NKVD who had been arrested and had passed through those cells not long before. (And they really know!) The Yezhov men said that during those two years of 1937 and 1938 a half-million “political prisoners” has been shot throughout the Soviet Union, and 480,000 blatnýe—habitual thieves—in addition. ...
How improbable are these figures? Taking into consideration that the mass executions went on not for two full years but only for a year and a half, we would have to assume (under Article 58—in other words, the politicals alone) an average of 28,000 executions per month in that period. ... (According to other sources, 1,700,000 had been shot by January 1, 1939).
— Vol. I, p438–439
Though I do not have at hand the explicit justifications for each of these executions, I imagine them being justified in terms of “historical necessity”, in other words, necessary for “progress”, most likely with regards to “the cause of the workers”. Yet the Soviet Union has fallen now, so who would now dare say that those executions were necessary and constituted any kind of “progress” rather than opportunistic brutality of the state?
A second example shows how not just physically, but spiritually, people were destroyed by the new regime, and this time using the very notion of “progress” itself:
...[Anna Skripnikova]complained to the interrogator that her cellmates were being dragged by their hair by the Lubyanka Prison chief. The interrogator laughed and asked her: “Is he dragging you, too?” “No, but my comrades!” And he exclaimed in deadly earnest: “Aha, how frightening it is that you protest! Drop all those useless airs of the Russian intelligentsia! They are Out of date! Worry about yourself only! Otherwise, you're in for a hard time.”
— Vol. II, p307
Here “progress” is invoked indirectly against Anna Skripnikova's attempt at defending her comrades by claiming that her ideas are “out of date” in the new society. This claim, of something being “out of date”, and therefore against the tide of progress, has become pernicious even in the United States. For example, it is used to justify our notions of privacy being “out of date” against the backdrop of technological change, as if such change were inevitable and not the intentional result of business' and government's economic and military ideologies. Yet us mere mortals are incapable of judging what the future holds and therefore what is “out of date”; C.S. Lewis illustrates this point well in “The Screwtape Letters”, in which an experienced demon is writing advice to a novice demon:
Of a proposed course of action,[God]wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions: Is it righteous? Is it prudent? Is it possible? Now, if we can keep men asking: “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future in order to help them make.
— C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters”, letter XXV
Societies, and the citizens within them, which choose a course of action based on their notions of “progress” are thus often drawn into self-fulfilling prophecy. The Soviets used this notion to help create a system of isolated individuals which they could easily rule over, unlike the Tsarist system which had no particular claim to “progress”.
Lastly, a comparison of the horns would not be complete if it was not mentioned how the new regime learned from the old regime. I have already mentioned the Big Solitaire game played on the socialists in freedom, but a similar game took place in their prison life as well. Early on, the Soviets isolated political prisoners by imprisoning them on Solovetsky Islands, unreachable for half a year due to their northern location, and imposed restrictions on them once the island was unreachable and isolated from the mainland69; when the Soviets moved the prisoners to the mainland, they placed the prisoner's spokespeople in a special, “staff” car, then drove that car to another location, isolating the prisoners from their leaders70. Methods of protest such as hunger strikes were defeated in general by the apathy of the regime and silence from the state-controlled newspapers, thus preventing any kind of public outcry71; at other times the prisoners were force-fed72 or beaten73. Bit by bit, the socialists lost to the new regime's adaptations, and a result they no longer had such privileges as: the right of self-government, the right to communicate in-between cells via knocking on walls, the right not to stand up when a staff member enters the cell, the right to talk in a normal voice in their cells, the right to move between cells, the right to freely use the toilet, &c., &c.74. Having understood how all of these privileges empower prisoners, the jailers progressed their system by taking all of these privileges away from the prisoners; the problem being, of course, that the progression was by no means humanitarian as had been anticipated.
Having now provided three examples of how, in contrast to the notion of “progress”, the Communist regime was far more cruel than the tsarist regime before it, what exactly is the link between Communism and the Progressive Doctrine? Though the two might well function on their own as independent concepts, they seem to always be interlinked in some kind of symbiotic relationship. Perhaps it is because Communist ideology, in order to function, implicitly relies on the civil society that came before it even though Communism itself is incapable of maintaining, let alone producing, such a society; thus, Communism can appear to offer benefits but, when actually injected into a society, is not capable of maintaining the foundations which that society was built upon. I do not know for sure, but I do know that even now many protestors complain about the status of certain political issues in “the current year”, as if the tide of “progress” will inevitably and irrevocably render society the way the protestors desire it. They should beware, lest they find themselves gored by the Bull's Horns.
Perhaps most telling of this merger of church and state is how, as I wrote earlier, the Soviets turned the churches and monasteries into prisons. To the Soviets, their moral judgements were the One, True morality to be enforced by the full force of law, individual conscience and competing belief systems be damned. When one cannot practice any moral system besides that proclaimed by the state, does that state's moral system then not take on a religious significance, despite its lack of a theology? Yet there is at least one crucial difference between those whose rule is supposedly granted by the divine and those who claim sole moral authority. To the former, their government role assumes the responsibility for ruling in accordance with divine law, but to the latter, their law alone is that by which they rule. In other words, the latter has become not only the state and the church, but God itself. Since the Communist leader lays sole claim to both moral and state authority, they thus naturally merge church, state, and God itself into their absolute despotism.
While Communism promised a more humane and compassionate society than those before it, in practice the resulting society was cruel and merciless. I wrote about several of those groups which were deemed class enemies and how they were treated with neither compassion nor with regards to their individual consciences, creating a system of perpetual fear which stifled the freedom and individuality of those living in it. Modern proponents of Communism tend to distance themselves from the Soviets, claiming that Soviet Communism wasn't “real” Communism, yet the trials described by Solzhenitsyn were conducted on a Communist basis. As such, I hypothesized how the class guilt, progressive, and authoritarian moral claims of Communism make it such a murderous and oppressive system regardless of who implements it.
It is no secret that, given the successive failures of the United States leadership to maintain prosperity under their Capitalist rule that Communist sympathies are on the rise, as Communism appears to some to offer a way out of the ills we are experiencing under the current system. Solzhenitsyn has provided “The Gulag Archipelago” as a powerful warning to those who seek solutions through the Communist ideology. We should take Solzhenitsyn's warnings seriously:
All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your back there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
— Vol. III, p518
We should take his warning seriously and learn from the mistakes of Russia before embracing an ideology that has been tried and found to murderous. Otherwise, we will repeat the mistakes history has already made, and lose far more than our chains.