The GULAG Archipelago

I've lived long enough now to feel that books rarely change me. Probably the last one was Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt that I read in 2004 or 2005, early in my doctoral program. Even then I wouldn't say that it changed me as much as it shook me in realization that human history was full of misery and suffering universally until quite recently and that we are probably living in the best human times in terms of life's comfort and personal security. And it all is incredibly fragile.

That said, there were a lot of books that have literally changed me in young adulthood, when Gorbachev's perestroika started and we received the flood of literature, both Soviet and Western, that had been banned in the Soviet Union. I will never forget the profound impact that Orwell's 1984 and Camus' The Stranger had on me as a university student. But the book that changed and turned me from a patriot into a dissident at the time was Solzhenitsyn's The GULAG Archipelago.

There were so many things that the book opened for me: historical facts and the full context and scale of Stalin's GULAGs (labor concentration camps) that everyone in my family knew about but never discussed. This, despite the fact that we had two people in the family - my great uncles - who suffered in them directly as "traitors of the Soviet people" because they had been drafted into the infantry of Gen.Vlasov who surrendered his entire army to Nazis in 1942. My great uncles never talked about their experiences, even after they were fully rehabilitated in late 1980s. Khruschev's exposure and de-culting of Stalin as the leader of the Soviet State in the 196os did not result into the full revision of the Soviet history regarding GULAGs: KGB stayed strong and de facto running the country. Information about GULAGs that had been set up and run by KGB was considered discrediting the Soviet ideology, their discussions were still a tabu well into mid-1980s. Solzhenitsyn experienced this first hand when, after The Achipelago's first installment was published in 1973 in Western Europe, in 1974 he was stripped of the Soviet citizenship as a traitor and dissident and deported to Western Germany.

The first Soviet publication of the book in its entirety happened in 1990, when I was a young and impressionable student of English and foreign literature. I remember I gobbled it up in 3-4 nights (I was studying during the day and had a night job), taking short breaks to process the unimaginable cruelty described in the book, and to stop crying. I could vividly picture Solzhenitsyn living through all that nightmare trying to remember the details (he himself was in the GULAG system from 1945 to 1953 and got rehabilitated only in the 1960s). He was taking meticulous mental and physical notes of experiences of and interactions with 267 people he met in the GULAGs and included into the book as its characters.

While reading the book, I was constantly asking myself how people (esp. camp supervisors and administrators) could be so cruel to other human beings. The whole GULAG system was designed to break and kill people with hard labor, denial of medical care, severe cold exposure, and systematic starvation, and there was an entire army of people who worked for and administered the camps. "How could they just watch other people die slowly in the system?" I kept asking myself. Solzhenitzyn had the answer before the words "dehumanization" and "othering" entered our lexicon: You think of them as your enemies who are bent on destroying your and your children's lives. He also had deep reflections about the nature of human evil and how as human beings we straddle the line between the good and the evil all the time. That really changed my understanding of humans and what they are capable of doing to each other, even in our modern times.

I will leave you with one of the most profound quotes from the book about evil dwelling among and within us: “If only it were 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?”