The Gulag Archipelago

"it impacted me in a lot of ways. A lot of what he talks about is that happiness can't be our ultimate goal in life. We have to have purpose."

"Another interesting thing for me was that this reveals that the KGB knew about Gulag Archipelago in the mid-60s. He’d been writing it furtively while he was publicly writing Cancer Ward , and they bugged a conversation in which he told a friend he was secretly writing this book that would be a huge bombshell when it was published in the 1970s. The KGB couldn’t then have doubted that there was another, secret book that was not Cancer Ward, which was basically pretty innocuous. This was a good five or six years before they actually located a copy of Gulag Archipelago and before the brouhaha that culminated in his expulsion in the 1970s. So the Soviets, allegedly, made Solzhenitsyn the menace he became. But here, in these archives, we can see that he clearly did have an agenda already that would rock the Soviet Union on its heels and the KGB knew about it. The KGB report and transcript were sent by Semichastny to the Central Committee back in 1965. This material also details all the counterfeits that were brought out to damage Solzhenitsyn’s reputation. There is a sizeable black museum of these things. One is a document alleging that he was an informer at Ekibastuz labour camp. Everyone knew he’d been approached and asked to be an informer because he wrote about it in Gulag Archipelago , and here is a forged document in which he denounces fellow prisoners who are planning an escape. The dates are all wrong but it’s a good forgery. This material shows you the wonderful world of spy stuff."

"It is, and it’s relentless. That’s one of its qualities. It piles detail on detail on detail, and all with this very highly charged and often sarcastic tone. I was, of course, extremely interested in the content when it first came out, but I was also tremendously struck by the way it was written. I remember giving a paper called “The Humour of Solzhenitsyn.” It was not thought to be funny at the time‚ or now, probably, but I was very struck by it. It’s in that tradition of Marxist-Leninist polemic, which is odd to say about Solzhenitsyn, because one sees him as an anti-communist. But his style of polemic is one that runs, to my mind, through Marx and through Lenin. Then there was a loyal opposition journal called Novy Mir (New World) in the 50s and 60s that used the same kind of tremendous, relentless sarcasm. Lots of words, always very long—longer than you would think you could bear to read—and, yet, you do read it. With Solzhenitsyn, there is also the informational content. By now, much of that has been absorbed by us; it’s not got the surprise element. But he calls it ‘an experiment in literary investigation,’ and it is a remarkable work of literature. I’m not saying its factual content isn’t excellent, but other people have taken it up and explored it in more detail, archives have emerged, and all of that. But nothing is going to replace the sheer flair and vigour of The Gulag Archipelago as a literary work. Yes, that’s true. He has this wonderful image of a parallel continent, this ‘archipelago’, which is unseen until you accidentally cross into it and you realize it’s there. That’s one of the remarkable aspects. He has a wonderfully systematic and obsessive way of setting it all out. There’s “Arrest.” We get a long discussion of arrest, including the description of his own, which is fascinating. He insists on being treated as an officer—in other words, more important than the other people arrested—something that, later on, he’s quite ashamed of. Then there’s a chapter headed “First Cell, First Love.” We go through it all in vivid detail, as experienced by him, but also as gathered by him from the memoirs of all those people he interviewed and solicited manuscripts from. So we go through all the steps, because the journey itself takes a long time: you get arrested, you go to prison, you get interrogated, you get sent to Gulag. Then you’re in Gulag. You’re given some work, and you try to find a place in Gulag where you can survive. Then there’s the trip back when you finally get released. That’s not a big part of this book, but he has wonderful descriptions of it in his novel, Cancer Ward. In a way, that’s a question for economists, but by the late 1940s, as the numbers in Gulag got so big, it was decided that it was far too expensive for the output. On the face of it, convict labor is really cheap, but actually it isn’t, because of the maintenance cost and the very low productivity. That was part of the rationale for really cutting back Gulag after Stalin’s death. Prison labor was very useful in some areas, like timber, but I don’t think it was driving the economy."