Difference between revisions of "The Gulag Archipelago"

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The Gulag Archipelago is an influential book written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published in 1973 that documents the implementation of Progressivism and failure of Socialism in Russia, and the murderous system of compulsory behavior. The Gulags were a system of "corrective labor camps" for people with politically incorrect views or attitudes, however they were often populated by people caught up in random round-ups by government bureaucrats to fill production quotas in a leftist system that promised a "guaranteed income".

Solzhenitsyn, who served as a captain during World War II, was imprisoned immediately afterward, along with German POWs. In 1955, the German prisoners were amnestied and returned home, while Solzhenitsyn and other Red Army soldiers, who defeated the fascists and won World War II, remained imprisoned by their leftist communist slave masters.

The Gulag Archipelago, 3 volumes and 1,800 pages, is required reading in all Russian high schools today. Because of liberal censorship, "official" histories and encyclopedias published in Soviet times are virtually useless, The Gulag Archipelago provides much of the missing history of the Soviet Union.

Prof. Jordan Peterson wrote a new Forward for the 2018 Penguin Books English language edition of The Gulag Archipelago.^[1]

Outline

Volume I: Covers Solzhenitsyn's arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment. Solzhenitsyn comes into contact with other political prisoners serving long terms, who had served time at other gulags and work projects throughout the Soviet Union. Prior to its publication in 1974, V.I. Lenin was still considered in the West and much of the world as a benevolent dictator while communist atrocities had all been blamed on Stalin.^[2] Solzhenitsyn documents Lenin and other early revolutionaries employed terrorism and mass murder to establish rule.^[3]

Volume II: Goes into every day life in the camps, the different groups of prisoners and charges under which they were held, including Socialist party members whose interpretation of progressive views fell out of favor with the elite bureaucrats. The Volume goes into much detail of the history of the KGB, which administered the camps, under different KGB heads. The leftist and collectivist ideology eliminated the problem of unemployment during the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s by making unemployment illegal; the leftist ideology also abolished greed and the profit motive, making forced labor vital to production and the functioning of the economy.

Volume III: Covers the period of Solzhenitsyn's exile, a form of parole from the Soviet judicial system. The Soviet Union being so vast, barbed wire wasn't necessary in some remote areas. Each camp had a little village beside it which housed prison guards and their families. Many "cities" plotted on National Geographic maps in the United States were actually leftist slave labor camps.^[4] A prisoner who served his term could be released, with no money, and still barred from living within so many kilometers of the Moscow Center. These longterm exilees then took up residence in the village, living in chicken coops and basements of prison guards, employed as handymen and servants or in other services the village needed. Also covers much of World War II and the early Cold War history of the 1950s.

The Progressive Doctrine

In this study. if nothing prevents us. we intend to, make an important scientific discovery. In the development of our hypothesis we would in no way wish to come into conflict with the Progressive Teaching. The author of these lines, attracted by the enigma of the native tribe populating the Archipelago, undertook a lengthy scientific expedition there and collected abundant material. And as a result it is very easy to prove that the zeks [prisoners of the gulag ]^[5] of the Archipelago constitute a class of society. For, after all, this multitudinous group (of many. millions) has a single (common to them all) relationship to production (namely: subordinate, attached, and without any right to direct that production). It also has a single common relationship to the distribution of the products of labor (namely: no relationship at all, living only that insignificant share of the products required for the meager support of their own existence). And, in addition, all their labor is no small thing, but one of the principal constituents of the whole state economy.^[6]

The fathers of the Archipelago, having, in accordance with the Progressive Doctrine, multiplied these socially friendly elements beyond all rhyme and reason...How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police, didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed cases - why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be given only six months, and then be given three months off for good behavior? And anyway, it wasn't certain that the bandits would even be tried when caught. After all, prosecutors2 "lowered the crime rate" - something demanded of them at every conference - by the curious method of simply quashing cases, especially if they foresaw that there would be many defendants. Finally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course for habitual criminals especially. Watch out there now .. witness in the courtroom! They will all be back soon, and it'll be a knife in the back of anyone who gave testimony! Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window, or slitting a pocket, or your neighbor's suitcase being ripped open - shut your eyes! Walk by! You didn't see anything! That's how the thieves have trained us - the thieves and our laws! The·thieves flourished because they were encouraged.^[7]

Elsewhere Solzhenitsyn documents how forced labor, a cruelty of Czarist times that led to the Russian Revolution, was adapted to Progressive Doctrine.^[8]

Solzhenitsyn goes into some detail how progressives deal with political opposition and dissenters in socialist re-education camps (gulags):

It has been known for centuries that Hunger . . . rules the world! (And all your Progressive Doctrine is, incidentally, built on Hunger, on the thesis that hungry people will inevitably revolt against the well-fed.) Hunger rules every hungry human being, unless he has himself consciously decided to die. Hunger, which forces an honest person to reach out and steal ("When the belly rumbles, conscience flees"). Hunger, which compels the most unselfish person to look with envy into someone else's bowl, and to try painfuIly to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor is receiving. Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to allow it to be distracted by anything else at all, or to think about anything else at all, or to speak about anything else at all except food, food, and food. Hunger, from which it is impossible to escape even in dreams - dreams are about food, and insomnia is over food. And soon - just insomnia. Hunger, after which one cannot even eat up; the man has by then turned into a one-way pipe and everything emerges from him in exactly the same state in which it was swallowed.^[9]

Historical context

True to leftwing politically correct censorship, Solzhenitsyn refers to the internal agencies tasked with political surveillance and repression as "our beloved organs" of state security, and begins tracing The History of Our Sewage Disposal System to deal with dissenters of political correctness, leftism, and Progressive ideology.

Concentration camps

The Roosevelt administration, which granted diplomatic recognition and legitimacy to the leftist regime in 1933, was aware of the human rights violations, systematic malnutrition ("systematic malnutrition" was deemed a Crime Against Humanity by Soviet, American, UK and French prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal), and mass murder occurring in the Soviet concentration camps before the U.S. entrance into World War II, and before Adolf Hitler's implementation of the holocaust. An April 14, 1941 Memorandum from the U.S. Military Attache (G-2) in Moscow, found in the Harry Hopkins Papers at the FDR Presidential Library, entitled NKVD of the USSR, states in part,

Although the Soviets disclaim forced labor in this country, the organization of this commissariat is interesting to note. In it are the means to apprehend (militia), try and sentence (advisory council) and imprison offenders (corrective labor). Any governmental organization that has a crying need for labor simply calls upon the NKVD to supply it. If the amount of labor is insufficient to supply the need, it is relatively an easy matter to institute a reign of terror on any pretext and fill up labor colonies to meet requirements....Its close supervision over the people, its pogroms, its raids and arrests, has instilled fear...^[10] The NKVD has every individual under observation from birth to death...its secret agents are everywhere; its actions are swift. An individual simply disappears in the middle of the night and no one ever sees or hears of him again. ...When Stalin needs scapegoats to cover government mistakes he unleashes his NKVD...The Soviet Union is in itself a prison and the NKVD and State Security are its keepers.^[11]

In Volume III Solzhenitsyn discussed the motivations of the Russian National Army (also known as the Vlasov movement) organized during World War II by the Germans and consisting of POWs from the Soviet Union. The Vlasovites, led by Gen. Anatoly Vlasov to fight against the Red Army and liberate Russia from Soviet communism, ended up in the gulag.

Remember Lenin's words: "An op-pressed class which did not aspire to possess arms and learn how to handle them would deserve only to be treated as slaves" (Fourth Edition, Volume 23-, page 85). There is, then, reason to be proud if the Soviet-German war showed that we are not such slaves as all those studies by liberal historians contemptuously make us out to be. There was nothing slavish about those who reached for their sabers to cut of 'Daddy Stalin's head (nor about those on the other side, who straightened their backs for the first time when they put on Red Army greatcoats - in a strange brief interval of freedom which no student of society could have foreseen).

These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism - no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else. Came the time when weapons were put in the hands of these people, should they have curbed their passions, allowed Bolshevism to outlive itself, steeled themselves to cruel oppression again - and only then begun the struggle with it (a struggle which has still hardly started anywhere in the world)?...^[12]

In 2001, a Russian Federation-based patriot organization applied to the Russian Federation's military prosecutor for a review of Gen. Vlasov's case,^[13] saying that "Vlasov was a patriot who spent much time re-evaluating his service in the Red Army and the essence of Stalin's regime before agreeing to collaborate with the Germans". The military prosecutor concluded that the law of rehabilitation of victims of political repressions did not apply to Vlasov and refused to consider the case again. However, Vlasov's Article 58 RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic) Penal Code conviction for anti-Soviet agitation (ASA) and propaganda was vacated. A memorial dedicated to Gen. Vlasov and the participants in the Russian Liberation Movement was erected at the Novo-Diveevo Russian Orthodox convent and cemetery in Nanuet, New York. Twice annually, on the anniversary of Vlasov's execution and on the Sunday following Orthodox Easter, a memorial service is held for Vlasov and the combatants of the Russian National Army. While Solzhenitsyn was a Red Army captain who served with distinction, by the personal stories of Vlasovites and what happened to their families in the decades before World War II under the leftwing ideology and regime, Solzhenitsyn came to understand why they took arms against the Red Army.

Post-War New Order

Commenting on the Yalta and Teheran Conference, where much of a post-War War II, New World Order was worked out, Solzhenitsyn remarked,

In their own countries Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious. How could they, in their decline from 1941 to 1945, fail to secure any guarantees whatever of the independence of Eastern Europe? How could they give away broad regions of Saxony and Thuringia in exchange for the preposterous toy of a four-zone Berlin, their own future Achilles' heel? And what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin's hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens [Vlasovites] determined not to surrender? They say it was the price they paid for Stalin's agreeing to enter the war against Japan. With the atom bomb already in their hands, they paid Stalin for not refusing to occupy Manchuria, for strengthening Mao Tse-tung in China, and for giving Kim Il Sung control of half Korea! What bankruptcy of political thought! And when subsequently, the Russians pushed out Mikolajczyk, when Benes and Masaryk came to their ends, when Berlin was blockaded, and Budapest flamed and fell silent, and Korea went up in smoke, and Britain’s Conservatives fled Suez, could one really believe that those among them with the most accurate memories did not at least recall that episode of the Cossacks? ^[14][15][16]

Solzhenitsyn brought to the attention of Western readers for the first time The Keelhaul Agreement (Keelhauling is defined as a form of punishment once used for sailors at sea. The sailor was tied to a line looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard, and dragged under the ship's keel; keelhauling amounted to a death sentence by extreme torture, or physical trauma resulting in permanent maiming.) Mass deportation of populations was another Crime Against Humanity charged by the U.S., the USSR, the British Empire, and France at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, however the practice was in place in the Soviet Union from its earliest days, and the secret Keelhaul Agreement worked out at the Potsdam Conference resulted in the mass deportation of over two million refugee fleeing communism. Many of these refugees were executed upon repatriation; the rest ended up int the gulag.

See also

References

External link

• A Day in the Life of Jordan Peterson (Fan Parody)