The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume work of nonfiction by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer and Soviet dissident. He wrote it over a decade, from 1958 to 1968. It first came out in Russian in 1973 through YMCA-Press in Paris, with English and French translations appearing the next year. The book offers a detailed look at life inside the Gulag, the Soviet system of forced labor camps. Solzhenitsyn built his account from reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own time as a prisoner in the camps.

After its release, the book circulated secretly in the Soviet Union through samizdat, an underground publication network. It wasn’t widely available there until 1989, when the literary journal *Novy Mir* published about a third of it across three issues. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, *The Gulag Archipelago* has been officially published in Russia.

Most printed editions divide the text into seven parts across three volumes: parts 1 and 2, parts 3 and 4, and parts 5 through 7. On one level, the book traces the history of the forced labor camp system that operated in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956. Solzhenitsyn starts with Vladimir Lenin’s early decrees after the October Revolution, which set up the legal and practical basis for camps where political prisoners and common criminals were sentenced to hard labor. He then describes the waves of purges and show trials under Stalin in the 1930s, showing how they fit into the larger Gulag system and examining its deliberate legal and bureaucratic growth. The narrative ends in 1956, with Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress, where he denounced Stalin’s personality cult, his autocratic rule, and the widespread surveillance of the Stalin era.

Alongside this historical and legal story, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical path of a *zek*—slang for a prisoner, from the abbreviation *z/k* for *zakliuchenny*—through the Gulag. He covers arrest, show trial, initial imprisonment, and transport to the camps. Inside, he explores prisoner treatment, living conditions, slave labor gangs, the technical prison camp system, camp rebellions and strikes (like the Kengir uprising), the practice of continued internal exile after a sentence ended, and the uncertain release of prisoners who survived. His examination includes both ordinary, everyday events in a prisoner’s life and major incidents in the Gulag’s history, such as revolts and uprisings.

In Chapter 4, Solzhenitsyn argues that ideology is what allows evildoing to flourish. He writes that Shakespeare’s villains, like Macbeth and Iago, faltered after a few murders because they lacked an ideology. Ideology, he says, gives evil a long-sought justification and gives the evildoer steadfastness, making acts seem good instead of bad. He compares this to the Inquisition invoking Christianity, conquerors extolling their motherland, colonizers citing civilization, Nazis using race, and Jacobins appealing to equality and brotherhood. Without evildoers, he concludes, there would have been no Archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn carefully places the theoretical, legal, and practical origins of the Gulag system with Lenin, not Stalin. He argues that Stalin expanded a camp system that already existed, a point he stresses because many Western intellectuals saw the camps as a Stalinist deviation. Solzhenitsyn claims that while some practices had stopped, the system’s basic structure remained, capable of being revived and expanded by future leaders. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and Western supporters of the Soviet Union viewed the Gulag as a Stalin-era mistake, Solzhenitsyn and other opposition figures saw it as a systemic flaw in Soviet political culture and an inevitable result of the Bolshevik project.

After the KGB seized Solzhenitsyn’s materials in Moscow between 1965 and 1967, he worked on turning his drafts into a finished typescript, sometimes hiding at friends’ homes in the Moscow region. While imprisoned at the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison in 1945, he had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education captured after the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1944. Solzhenitsyn gave Susi the original typed and proofread manuscript, after making copies on paper and microfilm. Susi passed it to his daughter, Heli Susi, who kept the master copy hidden from the KGB in Estonia until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. In 1973, the KGB seized one of the three remaining copies still in the Soviet Union by interrogating Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, one of Solzhenitsyn’s trusted typists.