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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. He wrote many great books but his magnum opus 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. 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.
The first part of The Gulag Archipelago is about the early years under Lenin and Stalin, detailing the secret police apparatus that Lenin set up right at the beginning of Marxist rule that was aimed at suppressing freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly. American supporters of communism have stated that Stalin was a monster who corrupted the pure communism of Lenin and it is Lenins’s pure communism and socialism that the United States should adopt. Solzhenitsyn showed that this was not true at all. He showed that Lenin started the repressive police state, which was strongly tied into Lenin’s “pure” communism and was necessary to its functioning. Solzhenitsyn describes how the arrest and interrogation apparatus worked, which almost always resulted in a sentence to the labor camps, if not outright execution.
The second part of The Gulag Archipelago describes life in the labor camps, which was grim. There were two kinds of prisoners – regular criminals and dissidents. 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. Book II makes for hard reading. However, reading it is like a splash of cold water in your face in the morning – it wakes you up from socialist fantasies. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, also by Solzhenitsyn, 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 (see my review).
The third part of The Gulag Archipelago gives a ray of hope. It describes some of the resistance to the repressive government, even up to and including camp uprisings and rebellions. The book also discusses how the camp system, the “archipelago of gulags,” changed when Stalin finally died and Khrushchev came to power. Most of the change was for the better but it was only temporary. The repressive system of government in the Soviet Union never again became quite as bad as it was under Lenin and Stalin, but it was essentially unchanged – just a little bit “kinder and gentler.”
The three parts of The Gulag Archipelago are not easy reading. However, Solzhenitsyn was a great writer so this literary quality shines through the Russian to English translation. This trilogy is definitely high school level and higher, for reading level and for content (I read most of it in high school). I guarantee that any student who reads it seriously will have a level of understanding of the Soviet Union and the rise of communism that is far above 99% of Americans in general and even farther above all the US citizens who think that socialism and communism is a good way for our country to go. This will armor him or her to face the challenges they will face in today’s public square.