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Zusammenfassung von The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Name: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Rating: 4.6 (216 reviews)
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

4.6 (216 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

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The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
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What’s in it for me? Find out what life was like in the brutal gulag prisons of Stalin’s Russia.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago holds an interesting place in literary history. While rightfully regarded as a vitally important document of the horrible acts committed by the government under Stalin’s rule, it’s also a great work of literature, both unflinching and deeply poetic. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn’s work is not your average non-fiction account of life in a prison camp – it’s also an attempt to capture the bleak absurdity and desperate humanity of it all.

The central literary device Solzhenitsyn uses is the metaphor of Stalin’s gulag network as a chain of islands – otherwise known as an archipelago – separate and out of view from the rest of Russia. This allows Solzhenitsyn to take an anthropological approach, describing to the reader what life was like on those strange and brutal islands.

These blinks will take you through some of Solzhenitsyn’s thoughts and stories about the gulag system that brought misery to millions.

In these blinks you’ll find out

the function of the Organs in Stalin’s regime;
how many years of hard labor you could get for stealing potatoes; and
why escape from the gulags was virtually impossible.

The Archipelago rose with the October Revolution, spread from Solovki prison, and was firmly rooted after World War II.

The gulags, or forced labor camps, of the Soviet Union were not unlike an archipelago – a series of islands unto themselves, spread throughout the country. These islands were invisible to much of the world, but any soul who entered one would discover they were all too real.

There were thousands of islands in the Gulag Archipelago, scattered here and there across the Russian motherland – from the Bering Strait in the east to the Bosporus in the west. But you won’t find tickets to these destinations being sold at any travel bureau.

The reality of these spellbound islands remains a mystery to all, even though the first peaks of the Gulag Archipelago emerged in 1918 – the year after the Great October Socialist Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin would go on to take control of the Soviet government, calling for “decisive, draconic measures” only months after the revolution in order to “tighten up discipline.” And so the islands began to form.

Those familiar with communist politics will not find the gulags particularly surprising. After all, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in their Communist Manifesto, called for the old bourgeois system of compulsion to be destroyed. In its place, a new system of compulsion for the working class. Since the old system included prisons, it was only logical that this new system would come with a new kind of prison.

On September 5, 1918, the Gulag Archipelago was born when the following decree was published: “Secure the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.”

True to its name, the very first gulag in the Archipelago appeared on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, where an old monastery was turned into a prison camp. This first camp, the Solovki gulag, was the model from which all future camps would take their cues.

From there, the Archipelago grew through the dense forests of taiga and barren lands of tundra – places where mostly hares, deer, foxes, and wolves had called home. Now, these animals would appear as curious neighbors to the inhabitants of these quickly sprouting islands.

While the origins of the Gulag Archipelago can be traced back to before World War I, it was following World War II that these islands hardened into the massive workforce they would become.

After World War II, the Soviet Union faced a pressing economic concern to grow and build, and what better workforce to take on this task than all the manpower sitting in the gulags? Not only did you not have to pay them, but they had no families to look after and so could be easily moved from place to place. You also didn’t have to worry about housing, schools, hospitals or even food and bathing.

You get to the Archipelago by being arrested by the Organs.

“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.

Interrogations in the Gulag were accompanied by violence and torture.

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.

Sealed steel ships traveled between the ports of the Archipelago.

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 life of the natives of the Archipelago was one of work, starvation, and death.

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.

The Archipelago washed ashore loyal communists, women and even children.

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.

All prison camp labor was worthless. The only thing the Archipelago produced was corrupted souls.

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.

There were the committed escapers and those who wished to tell of the Archipelago life.

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.

Prisoners were “released” from the Archipelago into exile, and with Stalin’s death, the Archipelago sank into the waters once again.

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.

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Worum geht es in The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956?

The Gulag Archipelago (1973) is a literary chronicle of the Soviet work camps known as gulags, which existed between the years 1918–56. Drawing from his own experience as a prisoner, as well as the reports, memoirs and letters of hundreds of others, author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provides a chilling account of the constant dread and horror of life in the gulags, while also charting the psychology and organization behind the government-sanctioned prison system.

Bestes Zitat aus The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Just give us a person - and well create the case!

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Wer The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 lesen sollte

Students of Soviet history
Advocates and critics of communism
Freedom fighters

Über den Autor

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was a Russian novelist who authored many books, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and Cancer Ward (1968), and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. An outspoken critic of the Soviet regime, he was imprisoned from 1945–53 for making unfavorable comments about Josef Stalin. Beginning in 1974, he spent 20 years in exile from the Soviet Union, during which time he lived in West Germany and America. He finally returned in 1994, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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