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There are many Americans today who think that socialism, or even communism, would be a great way for the United States to go, dropping all that nasty capitalism and democracy. Almost anyone who has lived under a Communist government would beg to disagree. The ideal of Communism in this world was the old Soviet Union, especially the early years under Lenin and Stalin, say 1918 to the early 1950s. Many who lived in those times thought that the Soviet Union showed what heights that the new man, created with Marxist thought, could climb. The famous author, persecuted in the Soviet Union and eventually exiled from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, would also beg to disagree.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived during much of that time and did an immense amount of research, in secret, about the early years of Lenin and Stalin. His most famous book is The Gulag Archipelago, which was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in three parts. “Gulag” was the Russian name for the labor camps that were the place of punishment for dissidents and regular criminals. Geographically, an archipelago is a collection of islands that are linked together. There were many labor camps spread over the entire Soviet Union, all linked together by the secret police bureaucracy, so it was fair to call the collection the “gulag archipelago,” hence the title of the book.
After Stalin, who was truly a monster as bad or worse than Hitler, died in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev took over as the leader of the Communist Party and hence the leader of the Soviet Union. There was a thawing of the intense repression of the Stalin years and an easing of the labor camps for dissidents. There was also an easing of repression in the area of free speech and literature - criticism of the Stalin years was allowed and even encouraged. This time of more freedom did not last but during this time, Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his great short work of fiction, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
This book is an incredible, simple, short book about what life was like in the camps for one man who tried hard to stay out of trouble. Solzhenitsyn based the novel on his own personal experience of being in a labor camp after World War II, and the experiences of others that he had studied. The labor camps were where two kinds of prisoners, regular criminals and dissidents, were sent after their “fair trial” and sentencing. In the camps, the Soviet authorities allowed the criminals, whose only crime was against property (e.g., stealing, fraud), to rule over the dissidents. This made life for those who were imprisoned for defying the state even more miserable, since criminals are not known for their altruism. Ivan Denisovich attempts to avoid conflict with the camp authorities and with other prisoners. He rejoices in the little pleasures that he has access to – an extra ration of bread, warmer gloves that he has traded for, and satisfaction in doing his work well. The reader is left with conflicted feelings: on the one hand, pride in the triumph of the human spirit because Ivan is not broken by the camp, and on the other hand, sadness that such a mundane, hopeless life could be inflicted on a human being. All in all, I would say that pride in the triumph of the human spirit wins, so that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is ultimately a hopeful book. It is certainly great literature and can be enjoyably read by high school students and adults. A mature middle school student might also profit by this novel.