Aleksander Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago 1918-56

This book was truly overwhelming to read. Not only is the subject matter dark and intimidating but the book’s structure is also dense and haphazard. The sheer variety of evidence and experience brought to bear is impressive and its emotional impact staggering. Solzhenitsyn himself comments on how the book was written in a piecemeal way and its a bit like that to read. Given that it must have been composed, at least in part, only in his mind while serving his time in the gulags this is understandable. Even once his personal experience had ended and the huge task of examining archives and the testimony of others had begun, this hardly renders the task of making sense of this brutal history any easier. The sheer volume of material suggests that Solzhenitsyn struggled to reduce the gargantuan scale of the archipelago and may have even found something therapeutic in the continual exploration of its myriad different faces and characters. It’s a work of true passion and reflection mixing unutterable anger with gut wrenching sadness, brutality and very deep reflection and introspection. That said, it is not a book that presents a tight, cohesive argument that the reader can easily follow; nor does it shy away from the contradictions and inconsistencies that inevitably arise from a deep enquiry into such a murky area.


There’s so much contained in this book it will be hard for me to say anything about it briefly without drastically misrepresenting the scope of the book and the responses it elicits. In an attempt to prevent this review from descending into an incomprehensible rant, I’ll try and group these observations together around a few themes. Equally, these themes are not distinct categories and are my creation rather than a reflection of the way the author presents the book. Necessarily, the categories are not as neat and delineated as my attempts to order them might suggest and I use them in order to help myself to try and make sense of what I’ve read rather than to suggest that this is the only way in which they could or should be read. The copy I read, of roughly 500 pages, was an abridged version. The original, I learn from Google, was three volumes rather than the one I read although I’m not sure if this means it was three times longer. In any case, the depth and scope of Solzhenitsyn’s work should not be underestimated and what follows will only scratch the surface of what it contains.


The first theme concerns the practical aspects of the archipelago and its necessity to the Communist system. The image of the archipelago, contained within the country but simultaneously completely detached and separate from it, as each island is from one another, is a powerful one. Solzhenitsyn suggests its existence was necessary for several reasons. One is to purge society of enemies and those deemed to be politically dangerous. Another is to provide free labour, which in turn supports the ever-rising production figures required for propaganda. This places those unfortunate enough to be trapped on one of the archipelago’s islands into an inextricable bind:

“Just as always in our well-thought-out social system, two different plans collided head on here too: the production plan, whose objective was to have the lowest possible expenditure for wages, and the MVD plan, whose objective was to extract the largest possible earnings from camp production. To an observer on the sidelines it seems strange: why set one’s own plans in conflict with one another? Oh, but there is a profound meaning in it! Conflicting plans flatten the human being. This is the principle which far transcends the barbed wire of the Archipelago.” (P218)

This situation, ironically, mirrors that of serfdom that Communism was supposed to bring an end to and replace with a more egalitarian and just form of social organisation:

“Serfs! This comparison occurred to many when they had the time to think about it, and not accidentally either. Not just individual features, but the whole central meaning of their existence was identical for serfdom and the Archipelago; they were forms of social organisation for the forced and pitiless exploitation of the unpaid labor of millions of slaves.” (P216)

The scale of this second society of human machinery is astonishing and incomprehensible. Of course, no official estimates are referenced - presumably because they do not exist. This touches on another important theme I’ll come to later: namely, the lack of recognition and reconciliation that took place internally or externally after this gigantic infrastructure of oppression was, at least partially, dismantled. Solzhenitsyn offers us this as a comment on the sheer scale of the archipelago in human terms:

“According to the estimates of emigre Professor of Statistics Kurganov, this “comparatively easy” internal repression cost us, from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of...sixty six million - 66,000,000 - lives. We, of course, cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official. And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons.” (P178)

This figure places it amongst the most deadly anthropogenic disasters in history. By comparison, WW1 is thought to have taken 25-40m lives and WW2 is thought to have cost between 60-120m lives. The Holocaust is estimated to have killed some 6m European Jews.


The second theme concerns morality and the various ways Solzhenitsyn’s experiences and research force a reevaluation of these ideas. It seems like this was one of the most profound parts of his experience and subsequent understanding of life on the archipelago:

“It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… An unuprooted small corner of evil.” (P312)

I was impressed with his nuanced understanding of morality and its inherently mixed and contextual character. Given his suffering, it might have been understandable, or even expected, that his memoir and history of the gulags might have had a more accusative tone and substance but his interpretation is far more circumspect:

“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (P75)

It is absurd to me that many people don’t want to admit the possibility that they might have been a person now considered to be ‘evil’ if they had lived in a different time and place. For example, who thinks they would have worked as part of the machinery of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany or Aparthied in South Africa? The answer is probably very few because of the highly unpalatable interpretation of one’s own morality that such a question requires. However, the figures are indisputable; most Germans did not actively oppose the Nazis and most South Africans did not actively oppose Apartheid. The risk of personal and familial danger silences most would-be insurrectionists. Solzhenitsyn understands this perfectly, from first hand experience, and does not shy away from the conclusions we all must draw from it. While most of us hope we would be brave and moral in trying times, history shows us that almost all of us would prioritise self-interest and safety above the lofty morals we all like to claim we subscribe to when it doesn’t cost us anything to do so:

“And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.” (P73)

He also quotes Fastenko whose aphoristic phrase, “To stand up for the truth is nothing! For truth you have to sit in jail!” (p90), succinctly captures the spirit of this theme.

From the perspective of the camp’s architects, the purpose of the camp is to dehumanise and literally demoralise the inhabitants. Solzhenitsyn quotes Shalamov (1907-1982), a Russian writer and gulag survivor, as writing:

“In the camp situation human beings never remain human beings - the camps were created to this end.

All human emotions - love, friendship, envy, love of one’s fellows, mercy, thirst for fame, honesty - fell away from us along with the meat of our muscles… We had no pride, no vanity, and even jealousy and passion seemed to be Martian concepts… The only thing left was anger - the most enduring of human emotions. We came to understand that truth and falsehood were kin sisters.” (P314)

However, Solzhenitsyn displays very little of this anger in some parts of the book and prefers to interpret his fate and the fate of those who put him on the archipelago in moral terms:

“And what would one then have to say about our so evident torturers: Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper?
(And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but… in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view, punishment is inflicted on those whose development… holds out hope.)” (P310-11)

In some senses, this seems to conflict with the dehumanising and demoralising effects of the gulag mentioned in the previous quote. However, in cases of such extreme psychological and physical distress it is hardly surprising that the experience is a discombobulating and contradictory one. For me, it is entirely plausible that the experiences of the gulag could rob one of almost all moral orientation and simultaneously show one the fundamental truth and value of the same. When you’re free and prospering, it’s too easy to deceive yourself with sophistry but when you’ve been stripped of everything and reduced to the lowest imaginable condition, in some sense, you are able to judge unencumbered.

Solzhenitsyn traces the history and development of this horrific situation and, for me, finds essential evidence of its roots in two interlinked concepts; progress at all costs and ideological justification for the preferred interpretation of that progress. The ends justify the means and the ends are justified by ideology so, in practice, everything is permissible and just. The following passages trace the this metamorphosis and interrelation far better than I ever could:

“To such an extent has everyone been indoctrinated with and absorbed the slogan: “The result is what counts.”
Whence did this come to us?
If we look back at our history, maybe about 300 years ago - could anything of the kind have taken place in the Russia of Old Believers?
All this came to us from Peter I, from the glory of our banners and the so-called “honour of our Fatherland.” We were crushing our neighbours; we were expanding. And in our Fatherland it became well established that: The result is what counts.
And then from our Demidovs, Kabans and Tsybukins. They clambered up, without looking behind them to see whose ears they were smashing with their jackboots. And ever more firmly it became established among a once pious and open hearted people: The result is what counts.
And then - from all kinds of socialists, and most of all from the most modern, infallible, and intolerant Teaching, which consists of this one thing only: The result is what counts! It is important to forge a fighting Party! And to seize power! And to hold on to power! And to remove all enemies! And to conquer in pig iron and steel! And to launch rockets!
And though for this industry and for these rockets it was necessary to sacrifice the way of life, and the integrity of family, and the spiritual health of the people, and the very soul of our fields and forests and rivers - to hell with them! The result is what counts!!!
But that is a lie! Here we have been breaking our backs for years at All Union hard labour. Here in slow annual spirals we have been climbing up to an understanding of life - and from this height it can all be seen so clearly: It is not the result that counts! It is not the result - but the spirit! Not what - but how. Not what has been attained - but at what price.” (P307)

To me this captures the central pillar of the philosophy that operates on every level and unit of society from the individual right up to the global scale. The fixation with the external qualities of a person, or a country, or a movement are totemised to the exclusion of more qualitative, internal characteristics. It’s almost impossible for me to over emphasise the importance of this idea. This obsession with ‘the result’ finds its apotheosis when it is allowed to become totally unconstrained by a supportive ideology. This ideology could be almost anything but the important point is that the perceived value of the ideology is so great that anything is allowable in the name of its continuance or advancement. Solzhenitsyn skillfully contrasts this with ‘evildoing’ on a smaller scale operating without the unchallengeable ideas that are so unquestionably ‘good’ that everything may be sacrificed in their service:

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honours. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the 20th century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.” (P77-8)

The psychological power of these ideas, repeated and drummed into the people from all sides and at every opportunity can amount to the kind of ‘social condition’ or brainwashing encountered in Adlous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Solzhenitsyn imagines a conversation between two orthodox Communists caught up in the archipelago’s conveyor belt of arrest, interrogation and detention. It would be almost comical where it not for the fact that thousands of conversations might actually have taken place between those who placed all their faith in Communism and may have paid a heavy price for it:

“It’s our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It’s a combat situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too soft hearted; and now look at all the rot that has multiplied in the country. There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are surrounded by enemies. Just listen to what they are saying! The Party is not obliged to account for what it does to every single one of us - to explain the whys and the wherefores. If they ask us to, that means we should sign.”
And another orthodox Communist sidles up:
“I sign denunciations against thirty-five people, against all my acquaintances. And I advise you too: Drag along as many names as you can in your wake, as many as you can. That way it will become obvious that the whole thing is an absurdity and they’ll let everyone out!” (P62)


The next theme concerns the legacy of this awful and horrific system. Few parts of the book convey such a sense of shock, injustice and anger even though these sentiments make regular appearances in the pages of the book. The lack of recognition and reconciliation, both domestically and internationally, seem to incense, depress and worry Solzhenitsyn. The damage he feels has been done to the country by this silent acceptance of the past is clear in passages like this:

“But about the silent, treacherous Plague which starved 15m of our peasants to death, choosing its victims carefully and destroying the backbone and mainstay of the Russian people - about that Plague there are no books” (P424)

When contrasted with other countries whose dark histories have, at least, undergone some reflection and exposure to the antibacterial qualities of sunlight his derision is plain to see:

“Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.” (P429)

Even though the comment is tongue-in-cheek, the point he is making is of the severest gravity and he is clearly deeply worried about what the long term effects of all this brushing under the carpet and leaving the past in the past will have. The following comment could been seen as remarkably prescient given the history of Russia in the latter part of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st:

“Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!” (P81)

I was strongly reminded of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and the constant revisions and rewritings that take place at the Ministry of Truth so that the historical record always conforms to that which the state finds most expedient:

“Like all embarrassing events in our history - which means three-quarters of what really happened - these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join. Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes - so that the risings have already become a myth, although some of them happened only 15 and others only 10 years ago. (No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. There you’re dealing in thousands of years…)” (P386)

Foreigners also come in for a lot of criticism for their complicity in believing what the Communist government told them and their critical failure to distinguish truth from propaganda. Some of this bitterness may come from the belief that foreign powers could have done much more to halt what was happening, or that they willfully overlooked the evidence in the interests of convenience. For example:

“And oh, you well fed, devil-may-care, nearsighted, irresponsible foreigners with your notebooks and your ball-point pens - beginning with those correspondents who back in Kem asked the zeks questions in the presence of the camp chiefs - how much you have harmed us in your vain passion to shine with understanding in areas where you did not grasp a lousy thing!” (P215)

There also seems to be a portion of his outrage directed at Communist-supporting students and academics for their part in helping to perpetuate the problem:

“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 backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.” (P468)

Alongside those who could be said to indirectly condone Russia’s Communist government, he also pours scorn on those countries who yielded up PoW to the Communists, which he views as tantamount to murdering many of them. Of course, Russia’s status as an ally in WW2 complicates the situation but one can easily empathise with Solzhenitsyn’s feelings of outrage and abandonment by those who cast themselves as protectors of morality in relation to Nazi Germany:

“After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise...They did not realise they were being repatriated...They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment “reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial. They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. The American authorities did the same: in Bavaria as well as on the US territory, they delivered tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to a cruel fate, turning them over to the Soviets against their will.” (P34)

As in other parts of the book, Solzhenitsyn seems sceptical that people will be able to appreciate the depths of the depravity of the archipelago or learn from it without either experiencing it for themselves or through some form of disclosure and recognition of what happened there. Of course, in some sense, he is trying to achieve just this type of revelation in writing the book. But in certain passages he seems dubious that it will ever achieve this end in a Europe he seems to feel abandoned Russia and turned a blind eye to the archipelago:

“Europe, of course, won’t believe it. Not until Europe itself serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy magazines and can’t get anything else into her head” (P241)

One especially touching passage shows some former inhabitants of the archipelago attempt to find some meaning in their suffering and that of those who didn’t survive:

“In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks live, the following ceremony takes place: On March 5, the day of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table all the photographs of those who were shot and those who died in camps that they have been able to collect - several dozens of them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment - somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a museum. There is funeral music. Friends come to visit, to look at the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together. And then leave without saying goodbye.
And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.
So that they should not have died in vain!” (P135)

It seems that the possibility that so many could have endured so much and yet have no recollection in the national or international consciousness is appalling to Solzhenitsyn. How could so much pain and destruction go unremembered? That life could go on without pause to reflect on the significance and import of such a colossal tragedy seem to be an abject failure of humanity in spite of his attempts to find some solace in these individual acts of remembrance. I feel strongly that this species of feeling helped motivate and sustain the immense task he has undertaken in this book. That something might be learned from it and it might not have all been in vain.


Another theme that emerged from my reading, was Solzhenitsyn’s apparent distaste for some of the major figures of 19th century Russian literature; namely, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is clearly unimpressed by the ‘hard labour’ that Dostoevsky claims to have undergone and details in his book “The House Of The Dead”. He writes:

“As for Dostoevsky’s hard labor in Omsk, it is clear that in general they simply loafed about, as any reader can establish.” (P222)

Not having read the book in question, I’m not well equipped to comment but Solzhenitsyn’s distaste for Dostoevsky resurfaces in several passages and it’s clear that the former considered the latter a charlatan. His critique of Tolstoy is more philosophical. It revolves around the belief that morality was more important than political freedom. Solzhenitsyn seems to attribute this to a lack of experience of the realities of totalitarian government:

P351 “Such were the circumstances in which Tolstoi came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom
Of course, no one is in need of freedom if he already has it. We can agree with him that political freedom is not what matters in the end. The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matters, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run: what about the beginning? What about the first step? Yasnaya Polyana in those days was an open club for thinkers. But if it had been blockaded as Akhmatova’s apartment was when every visitor was asked for his passport, if Tolstoi had been pressed as hard as we all were in Stalin’s time, when three men feared to come together under one roof, even he would have demanded political freedom.”


A theme that is discussed extensively and eloquently throughout the book is that of the psychology of jail and life on the archipelago. The centre piece of this is Part 4 of the book, “The Soul and Barbed Wire”, and within this, the first chapter, “The Ascent” is perhaps the most notable. It deals with the spiritual aspects of prison, how humans function within such a drastically different set of parameters, what it costs them and what it does to the consciousness and character. The following passage deals with the easily imagined vow to survive “at any price” and its observations are striking:

“This is simply a turn of phrase, a sort of habit of speech: “at any price”.
But then the words swell up with their full meaning, and an awesome vow takes shape: to survive at any price.
And whoever takes that vow, whoever does not blink before its crimson burst - allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world.
This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right - you lose your life, and if you go to the left - you lose your conscience.” (P302)

However, to assume that this was the vow that Solzhenitsyn took seems to be wide of the mark. “The Ascent” he talks about in the synonymous chapter refers to the internal transformation that takes place during incarceration. Quoting from that chapter:

“And as soon as you have renounced that aim of “surviving at any price,” and gone where the calm and simple people go - then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you.
And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings.
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you - and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels - patience.
You are ascending…
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness - and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself.
The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending…
With the years, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash with gladness over good tidings nor do they darken with grief.
For you still have to verify whether that’s how it is going to be. And you also have to work out - what is gladness and what is grief.
And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.” (P308-9)

It’s as if the harsh and horrific circumstances of the gulag create an accelerated understanding of the world and themselves for the zeks. Who, for instance, would disagree with the rule of life expressed in the last sentence of the passage above? One question that does arise from the preceding couple of quotations is: If Solzhenitsyn refused to lose his consciousness in rejecting the “survive at any price” philosophy, how did he manage to keep his life when the quote from p302 on the previous page implies the two are mutually exclusive? Perhaps it was luck or perhaps Solzhenitsyn was forced to do things against his conscience to survive. I don’t remember him discussing these in any detail, although I may be mistaken, and in this sense the book seems to be missing something. I vividly remember a passage from Primo Levi’s “If This Is A Man” where an inmate steals another’s cap and the next day the capless inmate is shot. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn didn’t have any experiences like this, perhaps he doesn’t want to recall them, perhaps these experiences were so traumatic he can no longer recall them. Whatever the reason, it does seem slightly like Solzhenitsyn wants to simultaneously claim that it’s not possible to survive in jail with a conscience and that he did indeed survive with his conscience intact and possibly even enhanced by the experience. Is it plausible that he survived so long without doing wrong by anyone? The drastic change in circumstance and the reality of dying soon must have driven many people to all sorts of behaviour in the belief that their life was precarious and could end at any moment. For example, this section on the subject of fidelity while in jail:

“And what of it if you loved someone out in freedom and wanted to remain true to him? What profit is there in the fidelity of a female corpse? “When you get back to freedom - who is going to need you?” Those were the words which kept ringing eternally through the women’s barracks. You grow coarse and old and your last years as a woman are cheerless and empty. Isn’t it smarter to hurry up and grab something too, even from this savage life?” (P233)

Sometimes it is hard to square the experiences described by the author with the effects he claims these experiences had on him. For example, he writes about being freed from confinement:

“Only on the threshold of the guardhouse do you begin to feel that what you are leaving behind you is both your prison and your homeland. This was your spiritual birthplace, and a secret part of your soul will remain here forever - while your feet trudge on into the dumb and unwelcoming expanse of freedom.” (P446)

In some sense, this could be understood by invoking the almost limitless capacity humans have for adaptation. In another way, it’s also possible to hold highly contradictory ideas about the same experience and for them both to be true. In many ways, most demanding and extreme experiences have this duality of character. For instance, the prisoners on the archipelago probably all draw their most distressing memories from this period of their lives but may also have found something positive in the extremity of the experience they’ve undergone. Solzhenitsyn writes, “It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship!” (P309). I can imagine there is some truth in this. In a society stripped of manners, money, influence and pretentious people probably find out a lot more about each other a lot more quickly. When everyone is in a hopeless position, there can be little suspicion of being befriended simply for what you could do for someone else. In this sense, everybody is equal in their misery and many of the malign motivations for friendship have been removed. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to agree with, or imagine the universal truth of, a statement like, “They are used to the worst the world can do, and nothing can depress them.”(P448). While Solzhenitsyn seems eager to emphasise the unexpected benefits of prison life, perhaps because they are unexpected and largely unacknowledged, it would seem incomprehensible to me that there were not significant negatives arising from the experience as well. Perhaps this sentence is an attempt to defy these negatives but, for me, it rings hollow. The whole book is a testament to the damage done by the archipelago’s existence.


You really don’t need to look far for evidence of the corrosive influence of Stalinism and the prison system in society. One obvious, and much discussed, aspect is the system of denunciation. Unsurprisingly, this seems to have been mainly used as a tool of personal advancement. In some ways this mirrors the failings of Communism more generally. It’s a really beautiful idea except for the fact that humans act in their own interests and not those of the community regardless of how fervently you claim the opposite. Denunciations are used to remove people the denouncers don’t want around, in exactly the same way the gulags were used to remove people Stalin didn’t want around. Solzhenitsyn writes:

“In the conflicts between people and freedom, denunciations were the superweapon, the X rays: it was sufficient to direct an invisible little ray at your enemy - and he fell. And it always worked. I can affirm that I heard many stories in imprisonment about the use of denunciations in lovers’ quarrels: a man would remove an unwanted husband; a wife would dispose of a mistress, or a mistress would dispose of a wife; or a mistress would take her revenge on her lover because she had failed to separate him from his wife” (P241)

The negative side effects of the gulag hardly stopped there either. In a system that was designed to re-educate disruptive elements away from capitalist ideas and towards communist ones all that really happened was that almost everyone was re-educated to be a criminal. Solzhenitsyn recognises this and expresses it well:

“And now, when more than forty years have gone by, one can look around and begin to have doubts: Who re-educated whom? Did the Chekists re-educate the thieves, or the thieves the Chekists? 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 service promotions.
And the psychology of the urki was exceedingly simple and very easy to acquire:

I want to live and enjoy myself; and fuck the rest!
Whoever is the strongest, is right!
If they aren’t beating you, then don’t lie down and ask for it. (In other words: As long as they’re beating up someone else, don’t stick up for the ones being beaten. Wait your own turn.)

Beat up your submissive enemies one at a time! Somehow this is a very familiar law. It is what Hitler did. It is what Stalin did.” (P262)

The topsy turvy nature of this situation wasn’t lost on Solzhenitsyn either:

“And here is how it was worked out. 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!)” (P264)

Writing in 2020 it seems unbelievable that the desire to better oneself financially was considered more dangerous and disruptive to society than murder. However, these are exactly the kind of perverse conclusions that can be expected when ideas are taken to be infallible and worth defending at any cost. I suppose at the time Communism was considered a bold and innovative new way of organising society that could create a more equal, better world for those who adhered to it. Looking back on it now, it seems to run contrary to the most fundamental aspects of human nature and was destined for abuse and failure from the start. It strikes me that this has almost nothing to do with the idea itself and everything to do with its interpretation. For example, even a society where the infallible idea was ‘freedom’ could end up a totalitarian state depending on how it was interpreted.


The book contains some amazing stories and, while I won’t retell all of them here, I wanted to keep a note of the ones I enjoyed the most. Part V, Chapter 6 (P360ish) tells the story of “The Commited Escaper”, a man called Tenno who is entirely deserving of the chapter’s title! Equally, the story of Boris (PP309-313) is well worth revisiting. Possibly the most incredible, awful and dramatic story is that of “The Forty Days Of Kengir” told in Part V, Chapter 12. The story of Zina is the stuff of screenplays but ends on a chilling note of omnipresent state surveillance.

“And we have learned of the successful escape of Zinaida Yakovlevna Povalyayeva because in the end it fell through. She got her term because she had stayed on as a teacher in her school during the German occupation. But she was not immediately arrested when the Soviet armies arrived, and before her arrest she was married to a pilot. Then she was arrested and sent to Mine No. 8 at Vorkuta. Through some Chinese working in the kitchen she established communication with freedom and with her husband. He was employed in civil aviation and arranged a trip to Vorkuta for himself. On an appointed day Zina went to the bath in the work zone, where she shed her camp clothing and released her hair, which had been curled up the night before, from under her head scarf. Her husband was waiting for her in the work sector. There were security officers on duty at the river ferry, but they paid no attention to a girl with curly hair who was arm in arm with a flier. They flew out on a plane. Zina spent one year living on false papers. But she couldn’t resist the desire to see her mother again - and her mother was under surveillance. At her new interrogation she managed to convince them she had escaped in a coal car. And they never did find out about her husband’s participation.” (P256)


After everything I’ve said in praise of this book, I must confess to some confusion over certain parts. Reading some passages, the zeks are treated worse than animals and the matter of their life or death is one of trifling insignificance. However, in other stories told in the book, and in Solzhenitsyn’s own opinion of Dostoevsky’s incarceration, there seem to be yawning discrepancies! For example, how is it possible to square the following section with descriptions of prisoners undergoing back breaking manual labour in freezing conditions, clothed in rags, with little more than scraps to sustain them?

“However, that Sunday there was also a parcel from home - his mother’s blessing on his escape. Glucose tablets, macaroni, oatmeal - these they could carry in the briefcase.” (P376)

Obviously, different camps and individuals conducted themselves in different ways at different times but there are some jarring contrasts in the scenes that are described. For example, take this story of prison guards attempting to find murders, “They were using torture! Not the dog pack themselves - they probably had no authorization for it, and might run into trouble, so they had entrusted the stoolies with the job: find your murderers yourselves!” (P395) In other parts of the book, guards take female prisoners to sleep with them and kill them if they don’t consent, starve their prisoners to death and subject them to the most unimaginably cruel torture with seemingly absolutely no regard for what they were and were not authorised to do. These huge differences in the descriptions given make you wonder which parts are being exaggerated and make it hard for the reader to get a good idea of what the average prisoner’s experience was in the gulag. Was it hellish interrogation, hunger, manual labour and then death? Or did most prisoners make it out alive? I find it hard to criticise the book for wanting to give a variety of experiences, and it does an excellent job in doing this, but it did leave me wondering what a representative experience might look like; are Solzhenitsyn’s stories the worst of the worst or just an everyday collection of the type of suffering that took place on the archipelago? Some of the passages I’ve cited above made me think more in terms of the former than the latter. Whatever the case, such a gigantic system would have produced all manner of experiences so perhaps it is beside the point.

My final complaint concerns Solzhenitsyn’s propensity for questionable aphorisms in the same vein as, “they are used to the worst the world can do, and nothing can depress them.”(P448). For example, “since sooner or later the truth is told about all that has happened in history.” (P451) made me stop and think, ‘that can’t possibly be true and even if you thought it was how would you prove it!’. Solzhenitsyn himself contradicts the idea several times. For instance,

“We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.” (P120)

Later he undermines the idea even further, writing a chillingly pessimistic interpretation of history that I’ve already quoted on earlier in this piece when discussing the archipelago’s similarities to Orwell’s 1984. The quote comes from p386 in the book and I’ll repeat it here for ease of reading:

“Like all embarrassing events in our history - which means three-quarters of what really happened - these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join. Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes - so that the risings have already become a myth, although some of them happened only 15 and others only 10 years ago. (No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. There you’re dealing in thousands of years…)”

Against this, one could argue that Solzhenitsyn is bringing ‘the truth’ to light by writing this book but this interpretation seems to invoke a understanding of ‘truth’ that is far too simplistic for the standards of this book. The two passages I have just quoted seem far closer to an accurate, nuanced representation of reality than something as glib as “sooner or later the truth is told about all that has happened in history”. My interpretation is that the book contains all sorts of material and categorically does not have a structured narrative or a coherent point to make; how could it when the subject matter is so large and varied? As I mentioned in the introduction to this marathon review, the book is haphazard and was constructed in a piecemeal way. Given these characteristics it’s both appropriate and inevitable that it contains a variety of perspectives, some of which might end up being contradictory. This aspect of the book didn’t meaningfully change my enjoyment of the book or the effect it had but it did give me pause for thought.


This book is almost too much to process. It contains so much material, even in its abridged version, and presents it in such an indiscriminate way it’s hard not to find it overwhelming. But what’s the alternative? Where do you begin and where do you end with a topic like this? The way Solzhenitsyn has chosen to do it preserves the raw emotion, the contradiction, the confusion and the disbelief that must have all existed in the experiences of those who spent time on the Archipelago. When dealing with such an intimidating and complex subject it doesn’t seem possible to make it structured, ordered and easily consumable without losing the fundamental character of the subject itself. So even though this wasn’t an easy book to read, the sheer magnitude of what it represents, the understanding it contains, what it must have taken to write and its historical significance cement it as a classic in my eyes.


Miscellaneous Quotes

P247 “There is a visible life and there is an invisible life. The spiderwebs are stretched everywhere, and as we move we do not notice how they wind about us.”

P283 “Stupidity always follows on the heels of smugness.”

P287 “the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.”

P341 ‘Remember Lenin’s words: “An oppressed class which did not aspire to possess arms and learn how to handle them would deserve only to be treated as slaves.”

P445 “The hard times brace you, and the soft times drive you to drink.”

Gina Apostol - Insurrecto

There was something I liked about this book in spite of the many things I disliked about it. One strong point was the depiction and description of what you might call Phillipine national identity. Perhaps because Phillipinos speak such good English, enjoy a lot of Western culture (music, basketball etc.) and because there’s such a heavy US military presence in the country I had always ignorantly assumed the two countries had an amicable history. The scenes from the Phillipine-American War (1899-1902) are either very well researched or very skillfully created or both. One of the book’s major characters, Magasulin, captures its forgotten quality well. Vietnam dominates the Western consciousness of American imperialism in Asia. The Philippines is where the other major character, Chiara’s, father shot the war scenes for his cult Vietnam war movie. This role for the country really resonated with other aspects of the book for me; the Philippines as a silent servant, helping to recreate another country’s history, perceived through the lens of an American, while forgetting its own. I was reminded of Magasulin travelling to America to study and work, like so many other Phillipinos in diaspora, and of her uncles reverence for Muhammed Ali and Elvis. I also really enjoyed the characters and the pacing of the narrative.

On the other hand, I struggled to work out exactly what was going on because of the books ‘inventive’ narrative structure. As far as I could tell, Magasulin and Chiara meet in the modern day, Duterte governed Philippines to scout locations for Chiara’s film with Magasulin playing the role of translator and guide. As well as this timeline, we also have flashbacks to Chiara’s childhood, to her father making his cult film in the Philippines, and to her parents meeting before she is born. Furthermore, the action includes the script for Chiara’s film, either translated into prose or described as it might have happened or possibly even as it might have been filmed - it wasn’t entirely clear. However, the book also makes it clear that Magasulin edits the script and writes her own version of Chiara’s story and this is included too. Chiara’s script revolves around a white American woman turning up to photograph a remote military outpost in the Philippines during the war. The soldiers are massacred by the locals and then go on a campaign of destruction and death as revenge. The photographer woman turns out to be Chiara’s grandmother. In Magasulin’s edit, the plot revolves around the cult film that Chiara’s Dad made in the Philippines using a remote location to mimic the rice paddies of Vietnam. This story was far less vivid and clear to me. The plot entails Chiara’s Dad filming with his wife and child, him having an affair with a local teacher and then commiting suicide. There is also another story about a novel writer called Stephane Real but I really couldn’t tell you what was going on there or how it relates to the other stories! If it all sounds overly complicated and confusing then I have done a good job in describing the atmosphere of the book. I’ve only been able to reconstruct this much using the lists of characters at the front of the book which are split into two parts - 1. A mystery and 2. Duel Scripts. On finishing the book, I didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened and what was going on and a week or so after reading it I feel this even more strongly. The prose follows this division too. However, each chapter has a number but the chapters are not in order. I found this to be pretentious and really unhelpful. I wondered what readers are supposed to do with this? Are they expected to write out the chapter titles in numerical order and see if things make more sense like this? I thought about doing this before deciding it wasn’t worth it. One of the chapters has two numbers indicating that it relates to two separate narratives but I couldn’t even properly locate it in one of the narratives there was so much going on. It’s as if the author wants the plot to be complex and polyvalent but has gone WAY overboard and ended up with a plot so complicated that it would actually require quite a lot of work on the part of the reader to work out what is going on. This is not a positive feature from my perspective. There is a definite sense in which the good parts of this book are overwhelmed by the pretentious and overly complex parts.

Chiara’s script detailing the American occupation, the revolutionaries attack and the subsequent massacre was by far the best and most coherent part of the book for me. This was closely followed by the modern day scenes involving Chiara and Magasulin. The other parts seem half finished and thinly rendered to me with highly superficial characters, incomprehensible chunks of narrative suspended in nothingness and incomplete plot twists. I feel like I would have enjoyed the book more if it had just been a story about the war or a story about the two women but instead it tries to be dazzlingly complex and ends up detracting from the overall impression. I would say a similar thing about the prose. Some of it is good, taught and evocative. Other bits are ludicrously overblown and pretentious, for example:

‘She watches Joe Frazier go at Ali again, one more time, in one more rope-a-dope. No moment is too small not to have contrasting attention. The existential condition of sharing the universe everyday with strangers hits her as Magasulin watches Ali in Joe Frazier’s soon-to-be blinded vision and Frazier is glimpsed from the frame of Ali’s not-yet-Parkinsoned arms.’ p111

Yuck! The whole thing is so overloaded with imagery and ugly, overly descriptive language but at the same time is so unclear about what the author is trying to say or demonstrate. Equally, this section tries far too hard to jam big, impressive ideas into what should be a descriptive detail about a scene:

‘The priest spits in solidarity with the captain’s gurgling, as if his thoughtful saliva were settling a theological quibble beginning in the captain’s throat and his meditative spit were thus giving the pair summative consequences in the awkward moment before the lady’ p161

Again, it’s just so overwrought and overburdened it really reduces the quality of the prose and the efficacy of what is attempting to be conveyed. There are plenty of good details, scenes, characters and dialogue in the book but far too often a good idea is ruined by attempting to put three or four more on top of it at the same time - just like the book and its multiple plotlines. The same problems occur in some of the dialogue where the characters talk more like they are part of the prose. For example, a lieutenant reports to his superior:

‘Scheetherly is all right, sir. The doctor, too, says he is not loony, sir. It is only a state of being on the islands. So says the medico. The harvest of the war in the shape of thousands of sick and wounded and insane wrecked in body and mind.’ p245

Moving seamlessly from matter of fact, militaristic reporting to philosophical reflection of the kind you might expect to find in high falutin literature in the space of barely a few sentences. There was also a general tendency towards sesquipedalianism and a truly extraordinary outbreak of the use of the word ‘vespertine’ in the final third of the book. I barely recall seeing the word in the early stages but by the end it feels like the author is required to use it every ten pages!

Overall, I found the book too pretentious and confusing to really enjoy as a whole but I did enjoy certain parts of it and feel like it could probably be a book I liked if it was heavily edited and drastically restructured. The author chooses themes well and interlinks them skillfully as well as being capable of good prose when she’s not trying to give every line six different levels of significance and cram in a couple of arcane words and facts to show just how clever she is for good measure!