Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn

An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-VII

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

里森

Victoria

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over?

The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake! They’ll set things straight and let me out!” Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe he was guilty. ?” But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn’t just that you don’t put up any-resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won’t hear.

A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.

And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you, either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself. You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy?

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: You can pray freely. But just so God alone can hear.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Andrea Stothard 

As a millennial picking up this book, I went into it with little knowledge pertaining to the Gulag and the Soviet ruling of Stalin in general. I chose this after watching my favourite Youtuber, "Bald and Bankrupt," exploring Perm 36. How is this not taught in Western curriculum? Overall, an incredible book that I believe should be mandatory reading in high-school. I can't stop talking about it - and I don't think I ever will. I am parting from this book with a such gratitude for the life I am living. I pray the stories of these individuals never die and history never repeats itself in this manner.

João Ferreira

A Soviet "political" prisoner's autobiographical description of the forced labor camps in Communist Russia, and of the millions of people who were victims of the regime, either through said camps, forced starvation, or simply deliberate killings.

A must read, especially at a time when Communism is back in vogue.

"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 honors."

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Describes individual escapes and attempted escapes from Stalin's camps, a disciplined, sustained resistance put down with tanks after forty days, and the forced removal and extermination of millions of peasants

The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-VII

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