"In order to have utopia, you need to have dictatorship."
Elie Wiesel

Book of the Century

Brian Aldiss
London Telegraph
24 January 1998

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
says that he is speaking for "mute Russia".

The phrase crops up in his great work, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Britain in three volumes between 1974 and 1978. Yet this "history and geography" of the Soviet Union's prison and forced labour camp system is addressed to a wider audience than mute Russia; it strikes at the heart and intellect of everyone.

The opening of the book detains us like one of the great Russian novels:  How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it - but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination.

So we travel under the wing of Solzhenitsyn's metaphor to encompass that chain of camps scattered across the wildernesses of the Soviet Union, and meet the inhabitants.

The author himself was a zek (prisoner) in the Kolyma camp, "the pole of ferocity". He brought away the material for his work, as he says, "on the skin of my back, and with my eyes and ears". Every word was forged by labour, exile, starvation. 

One of the most vivid and scathing chapters, "What the Archipelago Stands On", comes in the middle of the second volume. Here, in the forced labour camps, the principle of tukhta is introduced. The timber-fellers are set impossibly high production targets. So the boss credits his teams with fictitious cubic yards of wood  cut, thus increasing the zeks' bread allowance. The log-rafters, who launch the timber down river, do not denounce this mistake. It helps their production figures to pass on the fictitious amount. The lumber yards downstream do the same, adding a little to the figure. Eventually, the Ministry of the Timber Industry makes serious use of these fictitiously inflated figures in their reports. Thus the entire GNP of the Soviet Empire becomes founded on a fiction. "They simply could not stand up against people's pressure to live."  

Gulag, though, is not merely an account of the lies and injustice on which the Soviet system was founded; it addresses the human condition. Solzhenitsyn is a moralist writing with savage irony. How do you survive uncorrupted in this world? Those who are free, living in cities, are also at risk.  

Gulag is a long and vivid meditation on the good and evil in men's hearts. We who live out our lives in better circumstances must still confront its relevance.  There is no book like it in the world.

In June 1998, the Hoover Institution signed an agreement with the State Archives of the Russian Federation to publish the records of the Soviet Gulag ... covering the entire history of the Gulag from 1922 to 1960.

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