A priest, a Communist and a farmer walk into a bar.
No, no they don’t. But as dire as the Gulag was, there was certainly an interesting cast of characters. An Estonian cabinet minister might share a cell with a starving peasant who had stolen unharvested grain at night. A renowned Moscow engineer might haul a tree trunk with an illiterate who had accidentally desecrated a newspaper picture of Stalin while practicing how to write his name. A right-wing Ukrainian rebel might drink gruel beside a bewildered Communist. But whoever you were and whatever you’d done, or hadn’t done, you were all prisoners. Together you would endure savage interrogations, stifling train journeys, frigid arctic winters, exhausting work assignments and bleak exile. And one by one you would die, of starvation or typhus or pellagra or scurvy or beating or execution.
Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet officer arrested in the last months of WWII. He was a Communist at that point but had some reservations about particular policies, and he exchanged letters with a friend in which he shared these views. Later when he recounted how he and his friend were caught, other inmates were amazed he would be so stupid as to criticize Stalin in a letter that would obviously be read by censors and pronounced him and his friend the two biggest idiots in the Soviet Union. He would barely survive his eight years in Gulag but the experience would transform his political and religious views, and would allow him to write one of the most important non-fiction books of the 20th century, The Gulag Archipelago.
The three volumes largely derive from Solzhenitsyn's memories, those of the numerous prisoners he spoke with, and the contents of letters sent to him from various ex-prisoners and officials during the less restrictive Khrushchev years. He orders Volumes 1 and 2 roughly along the lines of the experience of an individual convict: arrest, interrogation, trial (didn't happen for common prisoners, but of course Show Trials were a thing), sentencing, transit, and life in the labor camps. Volume 3 is about the changes and rebellions in the camps during the early 1950s, and Solzhenitsyn's experience and observations of exile in Kazakhstan. For a compendium of atrocities, it’s quite readable. Solzhenitsyn combines powerful storytelling, scholarly analysis and scorching Russian humor.
Central theses
Like any three-volume account of anything, there is a lot of ground covered over and over in Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn clearly wants to establish the following two points above all others: 1) The Soviet Union was far more brutal than Czarist Russia and was not in any conceivable sense a step up and 2) the brutality was not an aberration of the late 1930s, or even of Stalin, but started with Lenin and continued at a lower scale under Khrushchev.
On 1), there's no question that executions were far rarer in Russia under the Czar. They numbered in the hundreds during the entirety of the 19th century. There was an uptick in executions in the last 20 years of Czarism, but even then they occurred at a rate of about one hundred per year. I might quibble with the numbers. Pre-emancipation, nobles abused serfs outside the purview of the formal legal system. Pro-czarist paramilitary Black Hundreds killed several thousand people in the revolution of 1905. Even the traditional Russian aversion to capital punishment for non-political crimes has an elitist edge to it. A nobleman might feel very Christian giving a light sentence to a bandit who murdered a couple serfs. Serfs might take a dimmer view of such leniency. If the English hangman was busier than the Russian one, perhaps that’s precisely because England was more democratic. But whatever, Solzhenitsyn is right. The scale of executions under Communism was orders of magnitude worse than under the Czar.
Likewise, at least in the last fifty or so years, Czarist courts functioned as courts. People had rights, the courts sometimes acquitted people the government didn't like. Communist trials were about showing off how bad the defendants were, not about allowing them a chance to prove their innocence. Prisons were also generally less awful under the czar. People usually got enough food and weren't tortured. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of an old activist whimpering after awful Soviet torture and remarking that under the Czar the guards weren't even allowed to address him impolitely. You can find instances of starvation and beatings among exiled prisoners during Czarism, but the scale was far smaller.
On 2) he is also correct. First there was a spate of mass killings during and immediately after the civil war, which was admittedly somewhat understandable in context. There was also a famine during this period of similar magnitude to the Ukrainian famine of the early 30s, but again it was partly the fault of "war" rather than of Communists so it gets less attention.
During the subsequent moderate period (~1922-1928) things were vaguely less horrible, but people who had been members of any non-Bolshevik political movement got arrested or stayed arrested in this period and were shuffled endlessly from Gulag to exile (being forced to live in an isolated small town on parole) back to Gulag. Religious believers and clergy were also arrested through the 1920s with little fanfare, and nasty tactics were used to extort hidden jewelry or gold from people suspected of hiding such goods.
The collectivizations of the early 30s swelled the gulags and the number of executions spiked during the Great Terror (1936-1938). The late 30s were when famous old Bolsheviks met bad fates, which allowed people not paying much attention to imagine that this era was an aberration. WWII meant some people from Gulag were allowed to fight, but also meant that large numbers of Vlasovites (Russians who fought for Germany), Ukrainian partisans and even Soviet soldiers who surrendered and were recaptured were sent to Gulag. Millions were interned until Stalin's death in the 1950s.
Under Khruschev the vast majority of political prisoners were freed, but even then thousands remained in custody and the state made a sneaky policy shift. Under Stalin, lots of essentially apolitical crimes were classified as political, whereas under Khruschev political enemies were arrested under seemingly non-political grounds. Apparently they realized it just looked bad for the Soviet Union if lots of people were still sabotaging the revolution forty years after it happened, and so they would sentence political targets for crimes like "hooliganism" or even unrelated crimes like rape.
Resisting interrogation
Solzhenitsyn's own words describe the mindset you need better than I can: "From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: 'My life is over, a little early to be sure but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die, now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder so the sooner the better. I own nothing, I am dead to my loved ones, they are dead to me. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirt and my conscience remain precious and important to me."
Suffice it to say, this is very hard, especially the pretending your family is dead part. The few success stories were generally extremely religious types. The best most people could hope for was not incriminating others, and even then they usually failed under some combination of trickery and torture.
Sentencing
One of the strangest part of the Soviet system was sentencing. Most political offenders (called "Politicals") got ten years in prison no matter what they did. This was true of people convicted of trivial crimes (expressing some sort of dissatisfaction with socialism, stealing small amounts of food from collective farms), trumped up nonsense (collaborating with the United Kingdom and Japan to sabotage steel production) or real rebels and dissidents (although these were often just shot). Superficially this makes no sense. Why doesn't the justice system distinguish between the guy who smirked at an article in Pravda and an armed Ukrainian rebel? It doesn't make sense until it does. You are either on our side or not, and the punishment for "not" is ten years in prison and a life as a parolee.
Traitors
Traitors came in two varieties, imaginary and real. The imaginary were arrested en masse in the late 30s. The whole thing was ridiculous, hundreds of thousands of people arrested for spying for some combination of enemy countries. What's amazing in hindsight is how most people believed this was really happening, including Soviet leadership.
The real were the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who fought, or more often did non-combat work, for Nazi Germany or worked as officials in Nazi-occupied parts of the USSR. Since Solzhenitsyn was arrested near the end of the war, he interacted with a lot of these types. Their motives were mixed. On the one hand, many were just starving people who saw a way of getting out of prison camps where several million captured Soviet troops indeed starved. As Solzhenitsyn put it, “people who have been forced to gnaw on bats for sustenance have been released from all moral obligation to the Motherland, or the rest of humanity” (please remember this sentence was written pre-COVID). On the other hand, some people really hated Communism enough to fight for Germany.
At any rate, the military effectiveness of the German-Russian units was limited. The main thing the formal "Vlasov's army" did was prevent the Nazis from destroying Prague near the end of the war, and the Cossack and Tatar units were fairly small. Generally speaking, the Germans were too committed to the idea of Slav racial inferiority and enslavement to make much use of Russians until they were already losing the war, at which point nobody really wanted to fight for them. The "what if the Germans had been nice to Russians" alt-history is too stupid to even contemplate.
Arguably, the surprise is how many "Kulaks" and other victims of the Soviet Union were willing to fight for the motherland when it was invaded.
Wreckers
Lawyers and judges of the old regime were of no use and had to go, but engineers were a different matter. You can't just execute all of your engineers, even the ones with bad politics. The result was that for twenty years the Soviet Union was dependent on people it mistrusted, until it could educate engineers from "friendly" classes.
This was not a sustainable equilibrium in such a paranoid state, and there were periodic "wrecking" trials for engineers. Wrecking was deliberate sabotage of production, and wrecking trials featured a mixture of the subjective and the absurd. The engineers took time to decide something, that was proof they were deliberately stalling to reduce Soviet production. The engineers built a high ceiling in a textile factory so that the workers wouldn't overheat on summer days: they were deliberately running up costs. The engineers bought less than maximally automated machinery from abroad because the Soviet Union was manpower rich and cash poor. That was proof they were buying obsolete equipment on purpose. Of course, if they had not made careful decisions, forced workers to sweat on summer days, and wasted money on super-advanced equipment, they could have been tried for those crimes.
Oh, also the engineers were part of a combined French/British/Romanian plot to invade the USSR. Sure, why not.
Wrecking became something of a national obsession, and people believed in it. Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore notes in Court of the Red Czar that industrial accidents were a natural consequence of breakneck industrialization, which made it easier to imagine sabotage everywhere. Solzhenitsyn remarks that even people put on trial for other nonsense crimes generally believed in wrecking, and "wreckers" likewise believed that there were spies and traitors everywhere. It took years in the Gulag to realize that it was all nonsense.
When everyone is a criminal, the cop is king
The documentary "Street Fight", about Corey Booker's failed first run for Newark mayor, was an eye opener. If you put a Cory Booker sign on your business or hosted a Cory Booker event, the police would find a bunch of code violations at your business and shut you down. If you have enough codes, police have this power. The Soviet Union was this on steroids.
One of Solzhenitsyn's cell mates was a young engineer of good working-class origin who was in prison for a couple of seditious jokes he made. But not really. He was in prison because he refused to donate building supplies for a judge's vacation home, and so they dredged up the jokes from his file and threw him in prison. There's a number of stories like this. The secret police and judges seem to have been extremely aware of their power and used them to obtain material benefits and sex. They were helped by the fact that everyone was a potential prisoner. For example, if you survived behind German lines for any period and did any form of work, you'd committed a crime. They didn't arrest everyone in the western USSR of course, but they could have. As discussed above, an engineer who made any decision could be imprisoned for not making a different decision. And of course, they could always make stuff up.
Labor camps
Labor camps were miserable. If you wanted to survive a ten-year term, you needed to avoid being put on "general work" (mining in a mining camp, cutting timber in a timber camp etc.) and get a special job. The prison barber wouldn't burn too many calories, the cook could steal food, and "trustees" were prisoners in leadership positions who could profit in various crooked ways. Not all trustees were bad, but few could resist opportunities for theft, even at the expense of the general prison population.
The Saga of Naftali Frankel
Naftali Frankel stands out as one of the most remarkable figures in the history of Gulag, the great evil polymath. To this day his early biography is a mystery, but supposedly he was a merchant in the Ottoman Empire who made a fortune in the Black Sea timber trade. After the revolution, he was invited back to the Soviet Union to create a black market in gold. Apparently lots of people had gold hidden from the Communists which they were willing to sell for paper rubles but couldn't legally. Frankel was successful and was then arrested for black marketeering and sent to Gulag.
Through events which are also somewhat uncertain, Wikipedia claims he left an extremely detailed complaint note explaining how everything could be run more efficiently, he was made a trustee and then an official in Gulag. He pioneered the use of Gulag as a labor force and was allegedly responsible for creating a system that directly linked inmates’ rations to their work outputs. Even upon rereading I don’t quite understand it, but the gist is that workers and small teams of workers would be penalized if they failed to hit “work norms” but could get some extra food if they achieved X% above norms. It’s worth stressing here that the people implementing this system called themselves Marxists.
In addition to boding poorly for weak or sick prisoners, Frankel’s system had an unpredictable consequence. The extra food was never enough to compensate for the calories expended in exceeding work norms. People would burn themselves out trying to get six extra ounces of bread and die within the year. Prisoners would warn each other that "the big ration kills you, not the small one". This may have been a gross calibration error, or it may have been a feature. As with slaves at Caribbean sugar plantations, it was cheaper to work people to death and get new people rather than to carefully keep people alive. Gulags never turned profits. The costs of guarding prisoners and their apathy to quality of work meant the best Frankel could do was loss-mitigation, so working people to death in a few productive months probably made economic sense.
Frankel himself seems to have been a genius. He was supposedly capable of remembering tens of thousands of faces and corresponding names and prison sentences, performing complex calculations in his head, and finding errors after glancing at architectural blueprints.
Solzhenitsyn has been accused of anti-Semitism, mostly for other stuff he wrote, but partly for his treatment of Frankel. In particular, he theorizes that Frankel was motivated by a hatred of Russians. Whether or not this is anti-Semitic, it is a silly argument. He's accusing Frankel of wrecking! This seems unlikely, both because wrecking isn't real and because there is an easy competing explanation. Frankel was extremely capable and completely amoral. If he'd lived in America, there would be university buildings named after him. Like the scientists, engineers, and artists extinguished at menial work, Frankel was a great mind wasted in gulag.
Channeling Corruption
The last years of Czarism featured a bizarre combination of an effective secret police and a horribly ineffective prison system. The dreaded Okhrana could insert informants deep into the ranks of the Communist party and arrest top leaders. These leaders would then be sent to prison or Siberian “exile”, where they could communicate easily with other revolutionaries and pay a bribe whenever they felt like escaping. Stalin escaped from prison or exile eight times. It was mostly a matter of coughing up a couple hundred rubles.
The Communists, having first-hand experience with how bad Czarist prisons were at suppressing them, successfully created a system in which political opposition was completely squelched. They did so not by eliminating corruption, but by channeling it in directions that were harmless for the state.
The Thieves in Law (sometimes translated as "Brotherhood of Thieves", hereafter abbreviated "Thieves"), perhaps best known in the west for their coded tattoos, are an age-old presence in Russian criminality. In the prison camps, they effectively allied with guards and could terrorize inmates at will. Solzhenitsyn marvelled at how three or four Thieves could just take stuff from new prisoners one by one in prison cars filled with war veterans and nobody would fight back. He reflected that most people are only capable of courage if they feel they have societal backing, and that people correctly intuited that guards would back Thieves over Politicals.
The Soviet tolerance of Thieves was partly ideological and partly pragmatic. Despite its hardness, the Soviet state had some of the liberal idea that criminals were products of misfortune. Soviet law, at least initially, was very lax with criminals, producing a bizarre situation where you would get one year in Gulag for stealing all of a family's possessions and ten years for stealing a bag of potatoes from the collective farm. The first crime was venal, the second ideological. On the pragmatic end, the Thieves were no threat to the Soviet state. Guards could indulge their corrupt impulses by profiting off trade with the Thieves (e.g. reselling stolen goods outside the camp at markups). Perhaps the Communists understood that corruption was inevitable, so it was better if it took the form of Politicals being extra abused rather than allowed to escape.
Periodically though, things would go badly for the Thieves. During the brief period when Yezhov was in charge of the NKVD (internal security ministry) and the number of executions skyrocketed, large numbers of Thieves were killed because of the perception that they were allies of the deposed NKVD chief Yagoda. There were fights between Thieves aligned with the guards (called "bitches"), culminating in the charmingly named "Bitch Wars". Solzhenitsyn attributes the Bitch Wars to a kind of population control effort by warders but notes that he lacks the sources he'd need to write a chapter about them. Finally, around 1950, the Thieves were separated from Politicals for some reason, whereupon they no longer had anyone to prey upon.
More corruption
The intersection of the Gulag and the broader Soviet economy/culture is its own interesting story. The word "tukhta" comes up over and over. It means something along the lines of "padding production numbers to fool the higher ups" and suffice it to say it happened a lot. Paroled prisoners ended up introducing the phrase to the Soviet lexicon, kind of the way gangster slang enters the American vernacular. The phrase "stretching the rubber", meaning "making a task take as long as possible because they will assign you a new task when it is done", also passed from the camps to the general population.
The best tukhta story involves a work foreman (himself a prisoner) who lied about the number of trees his crews cut down so that fewer men would work themselves to death. When the camp boss figured out what he was up to, the foreman made some argument to the effect of "you'll go to prison if this is every caught, so we're in the same boat now. Play along". And then the log-rafting office, the sawmill, and lumberyard didn't want to get in trouble so they dutifully processed the imaginary logs, which acquired additional attributes such as length, weight, construction-suitability etc. In fact, these enterprises were happy to process the imaginary logs; it allowed them to hit production targets without doing anything. And none of it mattered because the region had too much lumber to export so all the imaginary logs were allowed to float into the White Sea.
Women
For a long time, many gulags were coed establishments, albeit with single-gender barracks. This had a number of consequences. The most obvious was guards, Thieves, and "trustees" taking sexual advantage of female prisoners. Again, this is the kind of corruption a state can tolerate. There were genuine romances too, and "camp marriages" that made life more tolerable. Some women seemed to have a powerful need to take care of a man, non-sexually. There are stories of starving old women doing domestic tasks for starving old men in terminal games of house.
At some point, separate female prisons were created. On the plus side, this provided some protection from sexual predation. On the negative side, women had previously been given easier jobs at camp, and when they got their own camps they had to chop down trees with the same work norms as men.
Conservatives and kulaks
Conservatives like the Gulag Archipelago, and it's easy to see why. First, it bashes Communism. Second, it ridicules the idea of social engineering. Solzhenitsyn was interacting with the last generation who grew up under the czar and the first who grew up under Communism. In his telling, the latter were more lazy, cynical, selfish and venal. At the top there's the NKVD officer extorting sex from a woman who doesn't want to be arrested, and the bottom there's the free bakery worker bartering away bread meant for prisoners on the black market. Whatever was supposed to happen, Communism completely failed to instill any sort of collectivist values in people. Third, the book is strongly pro-religion, and most of the people who successfully resisted interrogation or retained their moral bearing in gulag were driven by religious devotion.
The most interesting conservative argument pertains to the story of the Kulaks. Some quick economic history. During and after the Russian Revolution, land was redistributed and an extreme form of Communism (so called “War Communism”) was imposed. Amid crashing economic production and mass famine, the Soviet state switched to New Economic Policy (NEP), in which the government controlled major enterprises but capitalism was allowed at the village level. Farmers grew food and sold it. Then c. 1929, the government embraced collectivization of agriculture and began killing, exiling and Gulaging so-called “Kulaks”.
Kulak is often translated as "wealthy peasant” but if Solzhenitsyn is to be believed, there were no wealthy peasants. Everything had been made equal in the revolution, and disparities c. 1929 reflected hard work and ability from 1922-1928. “Kulak” was just the Soviet word for “above average farmer”. Kulaks had to be found in every village, so you didn't need to have a commercial empire to be a kulak, just be a little better off than your neighbors. Some guy improved his house in the spare time, or cleared a few acres of wasteland for extra money? Die, Kulak. Meanwhile, worthless sorts made good "activists" and were happy to embrace the redistribution that came with collectivization. The lazy prospered, the capable were killed. People learned that individual initiative was dangerous, agricultural production sunk, and the moral character of the society rotted.
That’s some Ayn Rand shit I just wrote, but it's real-life Ayn Rand shit, not Galt's Gulch. The hero isn't some mythical architect but rather a guy who ran a small sausage-making concern from 1924-1927 and died young in the arctic. And the victims are far more human. They grew potatoes, worshiped God, worked with their hands, and were starved, shot, exiled or worked to death for no good reason.
I should clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican party. I also think it’s a tacky business to try to pretend Joe Biden, or even Bernie Sanders, is somehow part Stalin. But reading Solzhenitsyn is a good reminder of the value of some conservative ideals. There's certainly something to be said for the doctrine of "economic freedom", the idea that people are better off if they don't rely on the state for survival. Ultimately, whatever ideology the state has, people in power use it for venal purposes, and it's not great if the same entity controls your benefits, the courts and everyone's job. Furthermore, hard work, self-reliance and ingenuity are virtues that need to be cultivated alongside compassion and empathy. Every society needs some Kulaks.
Changes 1950-1954
Solzhenitsyn's life took something of an unusual turn. At some point, a survey was distributed to inmates asking about their skills. People made stuff up and he claimed to be a nuclear physicist. This wasn't totally not true; he was quite good at math and science. Anyway, on the basis of this he was taken to a "paradise island", a prison where he was fed normal amounts and given work in an office. Then around 1950, he was fired for spending too much time writing poems at work and sent back to the camps.
By this time, the camps seemed a bit less harsh. I suspect the real driver was that the Soviet Union was short on men post-WWII and realized it could no longer work them to death in months. But there were a couple factors Solzhenitsyn could observe. First, the removal of Thieves to separate camps. Second, the large-scale internment of Ukrainian rebels from the newly conquered parts of Poland. The camps could handle hapless Soviet citizens protesting their innocence but had a harder time with actual rebels. The Ukrainians were quite good at attaching electrical tape to sharpened metal spikes and murdering stool pigeons and devoted Communist prisoners. Other prisoners followed suit. In 1945, sharing the wrong thought in earshot of the wrong guy could get you another ten-year sentence. A few stabbings later, there was no more tattling and prisoners could converse freely. The death of Stalin and particularly the purging of ex-NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria had another big effect. As the higher ups in Gulag got executed for their ties to Beria, the guards started to get very nervous and a lot nicer. To quote the CIA interrogator in Zero Dark Thirty, "you don't want to be the last one holding the dog collar".
In several prisons, there were outright rebellions in 1953/1954. These didn't end well. Nonetheless, eventually, most prisoners were freed and given pardons of sorts, and the remaining prisons became markedly less hellish.
Factuality
The main contemporary criticism of Gulag Archipelago was that, in the words of Solzhenitsyn's ex-wife, it's a bunch of "camp-fire stories". It’s true that the book is largely a collection of anecdotes and Solzhenitsyn anticipates and pre-empts this criticism. Virtually all relevant archives were closed, anecdotes were the only evidence he had access to. If the Soviet State disputes his estimates of death tolls and mortality rates, he argued, they should open the books.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, more records have become available. There’s clearly a consensus that Gulags were terrible places and I’ve seen no evidence that Solzhenitsyn was personally dishonest. That said, the death tolls he estimates at various camps and projects are generally considered too high, and there’s extensive dispute over the mortality rates in Gulags.
Wikipedia cites estimates that 18 million people shuttled through the gulag and only 1.5-1.7 million died, plus another ~800,000 outright executions. The Gulag Archipelago gives a strong impression that a ten-year term on "general work" was usually a death sentence, and that certain assignments invariably killed you in months. Lots of people did short stints for things like negligence at work, but the numbers above are just too low to fully support Solzhenitsyn’s asssessment. Other scholars cite far higher numbers (even Russian archives can suffer from tukhta) and there seems to be some dispute about how deaths in work sites vs. more permanent camps vs. executions are counted.
Occasionally Soviet apologists cite the lower numbers as proof the Soviet Union was a perfectly nice place. All I can say is that “if you told a joke about Stalin and got sent to Gulag for ten years, there’s a decent chance you would survive” is not a very strong defense of a political system.
Ending
The novel Red Plenty, which Scott reviewed on the old blog, ends with fictionalized Khrushchev contemplating life immediately after being deposed from power. He thinks about all the bloodshed he has seen, all the people he helped kill during the Stalin years. He could rationalize these things because he reasoned that he was building a superior economic system, one that would deliver so much joy and prosperity that a few hundred thousand people shot in 1937 would be a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. With the ascent of Brezhnev, he realizes that will never happen. All those people died to produce an inefficient, mediocre, cynical bureaucracy.
The first big Gulag labor project was the Belomorkanal, a canal which connected the Baltic and White Seas. Built with minimal equipment and a complete reliance on convict labor, the Belamorkanal was celebrated throughout the USSR. A collective of writers, led by Leopold Averbakh and the world-famous Maxim Gorky, published a series of essays describing it as a humane project that restored prisoner’s souls. Not a few of these writers, including Averbakh and possibly Gorky, would meet their own fates at the hands of the security state they extolled.
Some years after his freedom and post-Stalin rehabilitation, Solzhenitsyn visited the Belomorkanal and learned its darkest secret. Not all the dead prisoners, everyone knew that. It’s just a crappy canal, too shallow and shoddily built to support most economic activity or be of much military use during WWII. The day he visited, he saw exactly two ships. Each was carrying what appeared to be firewood, and they were travelling in opposite directions. Illiterates and intellectuals, monks and Tolstoyans, priests, Communists and farmers had toiled until they collapsed in the snow so that some firewood could drift up and down a pointless canal. That’s the story of Gulag.