"The Gulag Archipelago Two,1918-1956"
Pilon, Juliana G.
Book Review/Juliana G. Non The Soviet Labor Camps: A Requiem • The publication of The Gulag Archipelago Two continues one of the more monumental works to appear in this century. Ours is of course...
...One of them was hunched over beneath an overturned wheelbarrow, he had hidden his hands in his sleeves and frozen to death in thatposition...
...hasty and inadequate planning describes the situation there as follows: "At the end of the workday there were corpses left on the work site...
...in other words, on such days the records showed that the workers had not gone out to work...
...And the ones who were left who could no longer walk and were straining every sinew to crawl along on all fours on the way back to camp, the convoy simply shot, so that they wouldn't escape before they could come back to them...
...but they chased them out anyway, and whatever they squeezed out of them on those days was added to the other days, thereby raising the percentages...
...Our century has outdone its predecessors in demonstrating the excesses of man's inhumanity to man: totalitarianism legalized the practice of evil, giving it new names, denying it...
...and in their village simplicity they gave all their strength to their work and weakened very swiftly and then froze to death, embracing in pairs...
...Solzhenitsyn's claim that the so-called labor camps are nothing but a form of torture is hard to contest...
...Stories abound of people denouncing others for acts never committed, just to get a little more bread or an easier work assignment...
...When necessary, the authorities resorted to lying: "And here's another way The Gulag Archipelago Two, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Harper &Row $15.00, paper $2.50 they raised the norms and proved it was possible to fulfill them: In cold lower than 60 degrees below zero, workdays were written off...
...Can this cruelty be attributed solely to the inhuman camp conditions...
...Stealing food from ill prisoners ("You're going to die anyway...
...was not uncommon...
...Solzhenitsyn makes it clear that such behavior differs little from that of all too many ordinary Soviet citizens outside the camps: sacrificing others just to obtain more or less illusory, more or less temporary privileges...
...seldom has the experience of that beast been so movingly captured as in these tomes...
...Then they dragged the corpses off behind a hillock on tractor sledges...
...Or twenty-five...
...They would be imprisoned for 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 stealing a little grain spilled from a truck )r simply for having a religious father...
...they tried to break up families...
...The girls (`like the revolutionaries earlier') decided to protest...
...As one reads Gulag Two, in .act, it becomes clear that the Soviet sysem fosters not decency and virtue but leception and falsehood...
...Under Communist rule, for the sake of an amorphous and mythical "good of the people" the people themselves are being sacrificed, daily...
...Continuing the task of the first book, Gulag Two documents again the barbaric penal system engendered by the Russian Revolution...
...Inside us, it oscillates with the years...
...They wrote out their protests in their own handwriting on sheets of paper taken from their school notebooks and posted them in the marketplace themselves, expecting immediate and universal indignation...
...A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder noted it down on a sheet of newspaper...
...One has to yonder how a country can survive that for decades has systematically undertaken to exterminate its best, its strongest people...
...Prisons are swarming with innocents...
...But the West —will it listen...
...There was no other paper...
...A doctor's daughter, it would appear, was arrested immediately...
...This would not be so were Gulag simply another piece of "investigative journalism...
...This line shifts...
...Calling it a prose poem would be more accurate, without diminishing the importance of its informational content...
...He does, indeed, accuse—convincingly, without mercy...
...Many of the incidents he cites of corruption and mismanagement would even be amusing were they not so horrifying...
...Or have we grown deaf from the comforts of ignorance...
...Work, not leisure, for the enemies of the people...
...And right off they gave them norms...
...One survivor of a hopeless project doomed to failure because of (deliberately...
...Concentration camps, designed not for POW's but for citizens of one's own country, were conceived by Lenin, skillfully developed by Stalin, and have since been perfected to an art by millions of opportunists, cowards, or outright sadists...
...Solzhenitsyn' s own people are not allowed to hear it...
...It not only survives but continues in the same direction, fueled by the ubiquitous weakness of man's frail moral constitution...
...Gulag condemns, pities, loves: no merelist of atrocities, it is ultimately an exercise in ethics and therefore in self-knowledge...
...Yet Solzhenitsyn's own classification is still the most fitting: an "experiment...
...But the daughter of the charwoman was only noted on a list...
...The number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of Comrade Stalin...
...While the first book dealt primarily with describing the Soviet "prison industry," the second exposes the labor camps fiasco and its effect upon the whole of Soviet society...
...Yet in spite of their horrors, labor :amps were in some respects preferable co life outside...
...Slave labor...
...The challenge: legal brutality on an unprecedented scale...
...But the "work" appeared often to be designed mainly—perhaps exclusively—to kill...
...Work camps—or massacre sites ?: "At the Serpantinka they used to shoot from thirty to fifty men every day under an overhanging roof near the isolator...
...A shepherd in a fit of anger swore at a cow for not obeying: 'You collective-farm wh---!' And he got 58, and a term [ten years...
...The snow powdered their faces...
...After Garanin himself had been shot they shot all of them too...
...A customer observed this: Article 58, ten years (terrorism...
...Indeed, the very conscience of Russia...
...Someone had frozen with his head bent down between his knees...
...The scalpel of Solzhenitsyn's moral eye dissects men's reactions —their quivers of fear, their calm courage, the thrills of temptation...
...Yet his book is suffused with a gentleness, love, and admiration for those who have suffered innocently: a requiem so beautiful, and yet so simple...
...Two were frozen back to back leaning against each other...
...But at what cost...
...Is there a conscience left in Russia...
...As Solzhenitsyn's moral tale unfolds, we meet the unscrupulous guards, the informers, and prisoners grown callous—concerned to save their own skin at any price...
...The camps were designed not to "rehabilitate" anyone but only to break wills, bodies, minds...
...The tractor drivers, the stevedores, and the gravediggers lived in a separate barracks...
...Ours is of course the age of totalitarianism, the age of the ubiquitous state...
...Article 58, ten years...
...Peace of mind, a sense of freedom, is easier to attain when everything has been taken away—possessions, rnd family...
...Alongside the comparatively few nonpolitical prisoners, the so-called "socially friendly elements"—rapists, murderers, and thieves, whose ruthless acts would invariably earn them advantages in camp—were the "socially unfriendly," the political", the innocents: "A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn't get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of Kaganovich...
...The camps in fact were filled for the most part with ordinary people...
...They were sent to the canal in tens of thousands at a time, and the authorities tried to work things out so no one got to the same subcamp as his father...
...he survival of the morally unfit, are daily 'ealities...
...It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Solzhenitsyn ends on a pessimistic note...
...In confinement, Solzhenitsyn has come to understand: "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...
...The lives of millions...
...Nor are these exceptions...
...And on, and on...
...Having confronted it in his own experience, Solzhenitsyn strives to understand it, to observe what it does to people, to his countrymen, whose guilt and agony must be borne silently...
...His indictments are written in blood, burning with the fire that, between 1918 and 1959, consumed the lives of over 66 million people in the ' Soviet camps alone...
...And many were much younger...
...They were peasant lads and the best workers one could possibly imagine...
...Throughout, and especially in Gulag Two, Solzhenitsyn reveals his faith in man's boundless compassion and vitality...
...When 1937 came, she, too, was arrested—`for spying on behalf of Poland.' " Ten years...
...an unuprooted small corner of evil...
...To be sure, the prisoners did build railroads, apartment buildings,factories, canals, they cut wood and worked in the fields, they were very useful in "building socialism...
...Some children never left the camps...
...No one was able to teach them anything, to warn them...
...In Russia, that evil is encouraged to grow...
...Children too were taken to the camps: "...Vera Inchik, the daughter of a charwoman, and two other girls, all aged fourteen, discovered (Yeisk, in 1932) that in the course of the liquidation of the `kulaks,' little children were being thrown out to die...
...that you'd be unable to fulfill even in summer...
...And the servile Medical Section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other bases...
...Outside, on the other hand, he lack of trust (informers everywhere), he human price of privilege, (how many ies—and lives—did your new sofa cost...
...And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained...
...And even in the best of all hearts, there remains...
...In Solzhenitsyn's crucible lies the psyche itself, with its spectrum of ethical colors...
Vol. 9 • April 1976 • No. 7
