In this series I discuss the books on Jordan Peterson’s Great Book List in no particular order. My hope is to help those interested understand what they’re getting into and choose which books they decide to take on.
Why would anyone spend time looking into the darkest depths of the hell on earth created by the Soviet Union in the twentieth century? Because the only way to see the light of mankind is to look where it is darkest. And by doing so, you see what is truest about humanity itself. And that is just one thing that this book will do for you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago takes us on a journey to both the depths of both depravity and inspiration. This book is what history is supposed to be. Instead of simply learning what happened, when it happened, and who made it happen, Solzhenitsyn looks at the nature of people in these experiences and displays that nature for us.
Why do we need to do it in a Soviet work camp? Because you only get to know something when it is under stress and approaching its breaking point. And these camps did not simply break bodies, they broke souls. They completely warped the people not just in them, but those living with the threat of their existence. And they were not just a dozen camps, but many many strewn throughout the complete land mass of the Soviet Union which is larger than all of Europe.
These camps housed anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 humans at a time. Approximately eighteen million people at one time or another were residents in these camps, being broken through mental and physical attacks for decades. But there were a few who didn’t break. A few who held it together internally while their physical bodies were systematically destroyed. That’s where we see what humanity is made of.
But before we go too far down that road, it’s important to understand the context of this book and why it is so relevant.
Context
In the abridged version I read, Anne Applebaum, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, provides incredibly important context around how Solzhenitsyn came to be credited with writing a book that at the very least helped to bring down an empire.
Before he wrote The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a short fictional account of life in the camps titled One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In that book he describes just one day in a labor camp, but he does it with such well received prose and details that it became a lightning rod for any former inmate who read it. Lucky for Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet leader at the time, Krushchev, was looking to separate himself from Stalin. So he allowed it’s publication. What happened from there is what sparked Solzhenitsyn’s inspiration to write The Gulag Archipelago.
Thousands of letters poured in to Solzhenitsyn from people who read Ivan. They often described their own time in the camps, how they came to be arrested, and interrogation techniques. From these personal accounts, along with any official state documents he could get ahold of, Solzhenitsyn started putting together the manuscript for The Gulag Archipelago.
By the time Solzhenitsyn was compiling the manuscript for The Gulag Archipelago, the state had gone from celebrating Solzhenitsyn as a literary hero, to perceiving him as an enemy of the state who was under constant surveillance. Krushchev was now gone and control over the Soviet narrative needed to be reclaimed. But that didn’t stop Solzhenitsyn.
He bobbed and weaved his way to writing three volumes of the accounts of the camps, along with several friends and colleagues helping him along the way. But when the woman who was helping him type up the manuscript was found out by the KGB, and then committed suicide (or maybe was murdered), he decided it was time to release the transcript. But he couldn’t get it published in the Soviet Union. So, it was published underground in the “sazimat” system.
What people did was somehow make it known that they wanted to read the three volume text, and somehow they received a copy, but they only were given twenty-four hours to read it. Then, they had to pass it on. So anyone who received a copy would have to spend a whole day sitting in secret, reading as much as they could. And this is how this text first spread throughout the Soviet Union.
Now if you are intimidated at all by a book about Russian history, that’s totally understandable. The idea of reading about history is not attractive to everyone. But this is written much more like a biography of several people, and with surprising wit considering the subject matter. While describing the manner in which the Soviets found new and ever crueler ways to break their spirits with labor, torture and deprevation, Solzhenitsyn remarks, “On the other hand, no one can accuse us of gas chambers.”
It is not simply a boring list of dates, times, and occurrences.
Arrest
Solzhenitsyn was an infantry officer who made the grave mistake of writing a letter to a friend in Ukraine, and criticizing Stalin in that letter. What’s worse, is that the friend ratted him out. But it’s important to understand why he ratted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn out.
In a nation that monitors everything, including your letters, just receiving a letter that critiques the leader puts you in a position of fear. They are not your words, but if you don’t report that digression from orthodoxy, you too will be suspect and you could disappear, along with your family, into a system of soul-crushing imprisonment. So, you see the politically incorrect speech, and you let someone know.
And that is how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gets arrested and sent off to interrogation, spending eight years in the labor camps before his time in internal exile prior to returning home.
This chapter on his arrest also tells the stories of many others and their experience with being arrested. The common theme is the common reaction: “Me? What for?” It’s the human reactions to these situations that Solzhenitsyn is so apt at capturing and communicating — how people in these situations think they would react and then how they react are never the same.
Very telling was the manner in which those arrested always complied. Some, when asked, even walked on their tip-toes as to not make too much noise and disturb other residents in their building as they were carted away.
Maybe if I just go along, they will figure out that that they have made a mistake. Because of course, I am innocent.
The Bluecaps
If you choose only to read one chapter, read The Bluecaps. It is in both the three volume set and the abridged version, which I’d recommend reading first.
Bluecaps is what they call the state officials given the power to imprison people. The brilliant thing that Solzhenitsyn does is write it not only from the perspective of a victim, but from the perspective of the oppressor. And he does this throughout the text.
It’s easy to read history and assume that you will be the shining light in the darkness. That you will be the one they write about if and when you are in a situation where someone has to stand up to tyranny. But that is highly unlikely. Very few people do. So we need to understand what it is that creates the oppressor, how the game works, and assume that you will need to know how to avoid being that person.
Almost nobody is an actual hero.
Lessons Learned
The most important lesson I learned from reading The Gulag Archipelago is encompassed in the following quote.
“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”
Tyranny doesn’t live in some other country across an ocean.
It doesn’t live in a neighboring country, waiting to invade at the first sign of weakness.
It doesn’t live in some other political party.
It isn’t simmering in some other ethnic group or gender.
It isn’t hiding in your neighbor’s house.
It lives in my heart.
It lives in your heart.
It lives in the hearts of every human being.
So when looking for a map of the world of humanity — some kind of template to help you navigate your life — look for something that puts the ownership and responsibility for good in the world first and foremost on you and you alone. Anything that farms out responsibility, and thus guilt, onto any other individual or group of people will shift your attention away from the true threat that lives in your own heart and open up the door for your deep and permanent tyrannical instinct to hammer people into whatever your shallow, uninformed view of what they should be. And you will become the thing that you claim to be fighting.
This book is a true masterpiece and it’s easy to understand why Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 prior to even publishing The Gulag Archipelago. His storytelling and deep investigation of the human spirit in the context of this important time in history brings history to life. You feel the spirit of all of those involved as you read through his accounts of their experiences.
“And thus it is that I am writing this book solely from a sense of obligation — because too many stories and recollections have accumulated in my hands and I cannot allow them to perish.”
I hope this short introduction to this text can help you decide if it’s something you too would like to read. If you have read it, let me know what you thought and what kind of ideas it sparked for you.