The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 summary

“Me? What for?” This is the question millions of Russians asked before they were sent to an island on the Archipelago. But few, if any, ever received an answer.

Before they knew what was happening they were being escorted through the front gate of their new home – their previous lives now but memories.

The use of torture has had its ups and downs throughout Russia’s history.

Under the seventeenth-century rule of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, it was considered a useful tool, while his successor, Peter the Great, considered it a barbaric practice. At the end of the eighteenth century, under Catherine the Great, it was similarly forbidden. But under the banner of socialism in twentieth-century Russia, torture returned with a vengeance.

If you were to take out a map of Russia and put a pin in every railroad junction, railroad terminal and provincial capital, what do you think you’d get? That’s right – a precise map of all the ports of the Gulag Archipelago.

As you may have surmised, the ships that would travel to these island ports and drop off prisoners weren’t boats, but trains with sealed prisoner cars.

The moment you arrived at your first camp, you officially became a native of the Gulag Archipelago. You were reborn into a new existence as a prisoner, which will likely be your identity for the rest of your life.

But before the coming of death, the day-to-day routine of the Archipelago people consisted only of work, each and every day, from morning to night.

In examining the lives of the different people who washed ashore on the islands of the Gulag Archipelago, three peculiar, but not unusual, groups emerge: women, children and those loyal to the Communist cause.

Loyal communists stood out because the gulag life was particularly hard for them to cope with.

Seeing as prisoners worked 12 hours every day and were paid nothing, you might be wondering just how efficient and productive the Gulag Archipelago was at turning out things like building materials and agriculture.

The answer is that the labor being done in the gulags was worthless.

Since a successful escape was so unlikely, when someone did disappear from the camp, the staff wouldn’t do much more than shrug. For them, a prisoner was treated with less interference than a stray cow wandering off the farm.

Ultimately, we didn’t hear from escaped prisoners, so there’s no way of knowing how many died in the wilderness or made it to safety. If they did survive, they didn’t tell their stories, as doing so would put them in danger of repercussions.

Prisons have existed in our civilization for a long time. But even before the dungeon cells and labor camps, there was another punishment: exile – the forced expulsion from the tribe.

From the works of writers like Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin, we know what Russian exile was like, all the way back to the days of czardom. As described by Tolstoy, exile conditions were tolerable. For Lenin, who was exiled to Siberia in 1897, no forced labor meant that he was able to write his political essays.