Gulag archipelago short description. Gulag archipelago

» (1959). Then he called the future book - "The Gulag Archipelago". A possible presentation scheme was drawn up, the principle of successive chapters on the prison system, investigation, trials, stages, forced labor camps, hard labor, exile and mental changes of prisoners during the years of confinement was adopted. Some chapters were written at the same time, but the author postponed the work, realizing that the experience of his own and his camp friends was not enough to cover such a topic.

The secret history of the Gulag Archipelago. Documentary

Immediately after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Novy Mir, 1962, No. 11), the author was overwhelmed by hundreds of letters from former prisoners or from their surviving families, where personal stories and observations were heatedly, sometimes in detail and voluminous. During 1963-64, Solzhenitsyn processed letters and met with prisoners, listening to their stories. In the summer of 1964 in Estonia, he drew up a complete and final seven-part plan for the "Archipelago", and all new supplementary materials fell into this design.

In the autumn of 1964, Solzhenitsyn began to write The Archipelago in Solotch near Ryazan, work continued until September 1965, when the KGB seized part of the author's archive, and all the finished chapters and blanks for the Archipelago were immediately taken away by fellow convicts to a reliable Shelter. There, on an Estonian farm near Tartu, the writer secretly left to work for two winters in a row (1965-66 and 1966-67), so that by the spring of 1967 the first six Parts were written. In the winter of 1967-68, the revision continued, in May 1968 the final edition of the book was made and printed, which now had to await publication, which was planned by the author, first in 1971, then in 1975. However, in August 1973, under tragic circumstances, the State Security Service discovered in one of the storages an intermediate version of The Archipelago - and thus pushed its immediate publication.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

A. I. Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago in 1958-1967 in conditions when not only all official documents on the system of political repressions and forced labor camps in the USSR since 1918 remained strictly classified, but also the very fact of many years of work on this topic he had to carefully hide.

The Gulag Archipelago, volume one, was published on December 28, 1973 in the oldest émigré publishing house YMCA-PRESS in Paris. The book was opened by the words of the author (which were not reproduced in any subsequent edition):

“For years, with embarrassment in my heart, I refrained from printing this already finished book: the debt to the still living outweighed the debt to the dead. But now that the state security took this book anyway, I have no choice but to immediately publish it.

A. Solzhenitsyn

September 1973».

On February 12, 1974, a month and a half after the release of the first volume, A. I. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the USSR. In 1974 YMCA-PRESS published the second volume, in 1975 the third.

The first edition of The Gulag Archipelago in Russian corresponded to the then latest edition of 1968, supplemented by clarifications made by the author in 1969, 1972 and 1973. The text ended with two author's afterwords (from February 1967 and May 1968) explaining the history and circumstances of the creation of the book. Both in the preface and in the afterwords, the author thanked the witnesses who brought their experience from the depths of the Archipelago, as well as friends and helpers, but did not give their names due to the obvious danger to them: “The complete list of those without whom this book would not have been written, not altered , has not been preserved - the time has not yet come to entrust paper. They themselves know. I bow to them."

The Gulag Archipelago has been translated into European and Asian languages and published on all continents, in four dozen countries. A. I. Solzhenitsyn transferred the copyrights and royalties for all world publications to the “Russian Public Fund for Assistance to the Persecuted and Their Families”, established by him in the very first year of his exile. Since then, the Foundation has helped many thousands of people who inhabited the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, and after the dissolution of the political Gulag, continues to help former political prisoners.

As "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in the early sixties at home caused a flood of letters and personal stories, many of which became part of the fabric of the "Archipelago", so the "Archipelago" itself gave rise to many new testimonies; Together with previously inaccessible printed materials, they prompted the author to some additions and refinement.

The new edition was published in 1980, as part of the Collected Works of AI Solzhenitsyn (Collected works: In 20 volumes. Vermont; Paris: YMCA-PRESS. Vol. 5-7). The author added a third afterword (“And after another ten years”, 1979) and a detailed “Content of the chapters”. The publication was supplied with two small dictionaries (“prison-camp terms” and “Soviet abbreviations and expressions”).

When the publication of The Gulag Archipelago at home became possible, it began with a reprint reproduction of the "Vermont" edition (M .: Sov. Pis.; Novy Mir, 1989) - and in the 1990s in Russia, all subsequent ten editions were printed according to the same text.

A significantly updated edition of The Gulag Archipelago was published in 2007 by U-Faktoriya Publishing House (Yekaterinburg). For the first time, a complete list of witnesses who provided material for this book was published. Initials are revealed in the text: they are replaced by full names and surnames - wherever they were known to the author. Added a few later notes. Footnotes have been streamlined and Soviet abbreviations in camp names have been brought to uniformity. Also, for the first time, the publication was accompanied by a Name Index of all the persons mentioned in the "Archipelago" - both historical figures and ordinary prisoners. This voluminous work was carried out by N. G. Levitskaya and A. A. Shumilin with the participation of N. N. Safonov. Additional search for information and editing of the Index was undertaken by the historian, senior researcher of the Russian National Library A. Ya. Razumov. Subsequent domestic editions reproduced the above.

Photo by RIA Novosti

The Gulag archipelago is a system of camps spread across the country. The "natives" of this archipelago were people who went through arrest and wrong trial. People were arrested mainly at night, and half-dressed, confused, not understanding their guilt, they were thrown into the terrible meat grinder of the camps.

The history of the Archipelago began in 1917 with the "Red Terror" declared by Lenin. This event became the “source”, from which the camps were filled with “rivers” of innocently convicted. At first, only non-party members were imprisoned, but with the coming to power of Stalin, high-profile trials broke out: the case of doctors, engineers, pests of the food industry, churchmen, those responsible for the death of Kirov. Behind the high-profile trials, there were many secret cases that replenished the Archipelago. In addition, many “enemies of the people” were arrested, entire nationalities fell into exile, and dispossessed peasants were exiled by villages. The war did not stop these flows, on the contrary, they intensified due to the Russified Germans, spreaders of rumors and people who were in captivity or rear. After the war, they were joined by emigrants and real traitors - Vlasov and Krasnov Cossacks. Became "natives" of the Archipelago and those who filled it - the top of the party and the NKVD periodically thinned out.

The basis of all arrests was the Fifty-Eighth article, consisting of fourteen points, with terms of imprisonment of 10, 15, 20 and 25 years. Ten years were given only to children. The purpose of the investigation on the 58th was not to prove guilt, but to break the will of a person. For this, torture was widely used, which was limited only by the imagination of the investigator. The protocols of the investigation were drawn up in such a way that the arrested person involuntarily dragged others along with him. Alexander Solzhenitsyn also went through such an investigation. In order not to harm others, he signed an indictment dooming him to ten years in prison and eternal exile.

The very first punishing body was the Revolutionary Tribunal, established in 1918. Its members had the right to shoot "traitors" without trial. It turned into the Cheka, then into the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, from which the NKVD was born. The shootings did not last long. The death penalty was abolished in 1927 and reserved for the 58th only. In 1947, Stalin replaced the "capital measure" with 25 years in the camps - the country needed slaves.

The very first "island" of the Archipelago arose in 1923 on the site of the Solovetsky Monastery. Then there were TONs - special purpose prisons and stages. People got to the Archipelago in different ways: in wagons, on barges, steamboats and on foot. The arrested were delivered to prisons in "funnel" - black vans. The role of the ports of the Archipelago was played by transfers, temporary camps consisting of tents, dugouts, barracks or open-air plots of land. On all transfers, specially selected urks, or "socially close ones," helped to keep the "political" in check. Solzhenitsyn visited Krasnaya Presnya in 1945.

Emigrants, peasants and "small peoples" were transported in red trains. Most often, such echelons stopped at an empty place, in the middle of the steppe or taiga, and the convicts themselves built a camp. Especially important prisoners, mostly scientists, were transported by special escort. So Solzhenitsyn was also transported. He called himself a nuclear physicist, and after Krasnaya Presnya he was transferred to Butyrki.

The forced labor law was passed by Lenin in 1918. Since then, the “natives” of the Gulag have been used as free labor. Correctional labor camps were merged into GUMZak (Main Directorate of Places of Confinement), and from which the Gulag (Main Directorate of Camps) was born. The most terrible places in the Archipelago were ELEPHANTS - Northern Special Purpose Camps - which included Solovki.

It became even harder for prisoners after the introduction of five-year plans. Until 1930, only about 40% of the "natives" worked. The first five-year plan marked the beginning of the "great construction projects". Prisoners built highways, railways and canals with their bare hands, without equipment and money. People worked 12-14 hours a day, deprived of normal food and warm clothes. These constructions claimed thousands of lives.

It was impossible to do without escapes, but it was almost impossible to run "into the void", not hoping for help. The population living outside the camps practically did not know what was happening behind the barbed wire. Many sincerely believed that the “politicals” were in fact guilty. In addition, the capture of those who escaped from the camp paid well.

By 1937, the Archipelago had expanded throughout the country. Camps for the 38th appeared in Siberia, the Far East and Central Asia. Each camp was run by two chiefs: one was in charge of production, the other was in charge of the labor force. The main method of influencing the "natives" was the "pot" - the distribution of rations according to the fulfilled norm. When the "Kotlovka" ceased to help, brigades were created. For failure to fulfill the plan, the brigadier was put in a punishment cell. All this Solzhenitsyn fully experienced in the New Jerusalem camp, where he ended up on August 14, 1945.

The life of the "aboriginal" consisted of hunger, cold and endless work. The main work for the prisoners was logging, which during the war years was called "dry execution". Zeks lived in tents or dugouts where it was impossible to dry wet clothes. These dwellings were often ransacked, and people were suddenly transferred to other jobs. In such conditions, the prisoners very quickly turned into "goal". The camp medical unit practically did not participate in the life of prisoners. So, in the Burepolomsky camp in February, 12 people died every night, and their things again went into action.

Women prisoners endured prison more easily than men, and died faster in the camps. The most beautiful were taken by the camp authorities and the "morons", the rest went to general work. If a woman became pregnant, she was sent to a special camp. The mother, who finished breastfeeding, went back to the camp, and the child ended up in an orphanage. In 1946, women's camps were created, and women's logging was abolished. Sat in the camps and "youngsters", children under 12 years old. For them, too, there were separate colonies. Another "character" of the camps was the camp "moron", a man who managed to get an easy job and a warm, well-fed place. Basically, they survived.

By 1950, the camps were filled with "enemies of the people". Among them there were also real political ones, who even in the Archipelago staged strikes, unfortunately, to no avail - they were not supported by public opinion. The Soviet people did not know anything at all, and the Gulag stood on this. Some prisoners, however, remained loyal to the party and Stalin to the last. It was from such orthodoxies that informers or sexots were obtained - the eyes and ears of the Cheka-KGB. They also tried to recruit Solzhenitsyn. He signed the obligation, but did not engage in denunciation.

A person who lived to the end of his term rarely got free. Most often he became a "repeater". The prisoners could only run. The caught fugitives were punished. The Correctional Labor Code of 1933, which was in effect until the early 1960s, prohibited isolation wards. By this time, other types of intra-camp punishments had been invented: RURs (Reinforced Security Companies), BURs (Reinforced Security Brigades), ZURs (Reinforced Security Zones) and ShIZOs (Penalty Isolators).

Each camp zone was certainly surrounded by a village. Many villages eventually turned into big cities, such as Magadan or Norilsk. The camp world was inhabited by families of officers and guards, vohra, and many different adventurers and rogues. Despite the free labor force, the camps were very expensive for the state. In 1931, the Archipelago was made self-sustaining, but nothing came of it, since the guards had to be paid, and the camp commanders had to steal.

Stalin did not stop at the camps. On April 17, 1943, he introduced hard labor and the gallows. Hard labor camps were created at the mines, and this was the most terrible work. Women were also sentenced to hard labor. Basically, traitors became convicts: policemen, burgomasters, "German bedding", but earlier they were also Soviet people. The difference between the camp and hard labor began to disappear by 1946. In 1948, a kind of fusion of camp and hard labor was created - Special Camps. The whole 58th sat in them. The prisoners were called by numbers and given the hardest work. Solzhenitsyn got a special camp Stepnoy, then - Ekibastuz.

Uprisings and strikes of prisoners also happened in special camps. The very first uprising took place in a camp near Ust-Usa in the winter of 1942. Unrest arose because only “political” people were gathered in the special camps. Solzhenitsyn himself also took part in the 1952 strike.

Each "native" of the Archipelago after the expiration of the term was waiting for a link. Until 1930, this was a "minus": the liberated could choose a place of residence, with the exception of some cities. After 1930, the exile became a separate type of isolation, and from 1948 it became a layer between the zone and the rest of the world. Every exile could at any moment be back in the camp. Some were immediately given a term in the form of exile - mainly dispossessed peasants and small nations. Solzhenitsyn ended his term in the Kok-Terek region of Kazakhstan. The exile from the 58th began to be removed only after the 20th Congress. Liberation was also difficult to endure. A person changed, became a stranger to his loved ones, and had to hide his past from friends and colleagues.

The history of the Special Camps continued after Stalin's death. In 1954 they merged with the ITL, but did not disappear. After his release, Solzhenitsyn began to receive letters from modern "natives" of the Archipelago, who convinced him: the Gulag will exist as long as the system that created it exists.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "Gulag archipelago"

The multi-volume work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is not as simple as it seems at first glance. The formal content of the book is reflected in its title - this is a work about the Gulag. But what is the essence of the work? What conclusion should readers draw from what they have read? Here everything is not as obvious as many people think. Even the author himself until the end of his life did not understand what he actually wrote his book about. Otherwise, not only the terrible "200 Years Together", but also the "Red Wheels" would not have appeared. And Solzhenitsyn would not have returned to Russia from Vermont. This happens: the author's intention, in addition to the will of the creator, led to a completely different result than intended. But more on that later.

Obviously, for Solzhenitsyn himself, this book is not just a tribute to the memory of his brothers and sisters in the Gulag, not a transparent hint to his fellow citizens about the need to repent for their deeds, but, above all, a political manifesto denouncing the criminal Bolshevik regime. Solzhenitsyn challenged the Soviet state, being completely at the mercy of those ghouls, about whom he wrote in his book. An act worthy of respect! Courage takes the city - says the saying. And as it may seem, not only cities, but entire countries. At first yielding to his opponent in all respects (the book was not published in the USSR, the author received the stigma of "literary Vlasov" and was expelled from the country), Solzhenitsyn eventually won the battle with the monster: the USSR died in 1991, and the Gulag Archipelago is being studied in modern Russian school.

In fact, this is only an external outline of events that have nothing to do with each other. The explosive power of the "Archipelago" went into the sand - the Soviet Union did not notice this book and fell apart for other reasons. The author himself was clearly counting on a different result. In chapter 7 of part 1 of The Archipelago, he wrote: “I sit and think: if the first tiny drop of truth exploded like a psychological bomb (Solzhenitsyn means One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Yu.Ya.) - what will happen in our country when the Truth will fall like waterfalls? Nothing special, as we know, did not happen. We read "Archipelago" when the fate of the USSR was predetermined. "Pravda" came to us in other books, but how many of them were influenced by it, if even now millions of Russians firmly believe that Stalin was an "effective manager" and "won the war"?...

While in the USA, Alexander Isaevich made the second edition of the book (1979). It would seem logical that after returning to Russia in 1994, when he was finally able to work in the Soviet archives, it is necessary to make a final edit - correct a number of estimated figures and correct some information received from prisoners, since in the 60s Solzhenitsyn could not verify this information. But Solzhenitsyn did not return to the "Archipelago", but took up journalism and a showdown with the Jews. This seemed more important to him. For what reason? After all, The Gulag Archipelago is his main work, and it would seem that God himself ordered to bring it to mind. And the reason, I believe, is simple: for the author himself, the "Archipelago" was only a weapon in the fight against Soviet power. The USSR collapsed, and the book for Solzhenitsyn became only a part of his heroic biography - nothing more.
But has it lost its meaning for modern readers? I don't think.

But first, a few general thoughts about this work.

The first thing that immediately catches your eye: "The Gulag Archipelago" is a real feat of writing! In just a few years, working in conditions that were not the most suitable for creativity (when the "organs" had already begun to actively tighten the screws after the Khrushchev "thaw" and "herded" the author), without access to Soviet archives and any funding for their activities, Solzhenitsyn wrote, preserved and managed to distribute the most voluminous work, which contains tens of thousands of information, assumptions and assessments relating not only to camp issues, but also to a variety of topics in the history of the USSR, Russia and the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn swung so broadly that one can only wonder how he still managed to bring all the material together and finish this work. Who could read this epic, perfectly understands all the difficulties of working on a text of such a volume. It's just titanic work.

Not only the creation of the "Archipelago" is hard work. The reader is also required something like a feat. For an encyclopedia edition, 3 thick volumes is normal, but for a novel it's overkill. And for a work that combines history with reflections on life, where unbearable horrors are seasoned with unbearable human pain, such a volume is completely unacceptable. Couldn't you say everything you want in a more compact way? - Can. For example, the author's personal recollections related to his stay under investigation and in the camps, his stories about his camp comrades and enemies scattered in different parts of the Archipelago would be quite enough for a separate book of the memoir genre (about a third of the volume of the Archipelago ). It would be much more logical to place all this under one cover, and not to cram among the chapters of a work dedicated, by and large, to the Gulag. In addition, the entire fifth part of the "research" is extremely lengthy - the author talks in too much detail about the technologies for escaping from Soviet camps. There are other very long chapters that would not interfere with the "scissors" of the editor, and a number of chapters could be completely thrown away, from which the book would not lose anything.

The trouble with many great writers is that they are not able to limit themselves, and they cannot stand literary editors. Now the brilliant D.L.Bykov creates in this style. He simply mocks readers, splashing out on the pages of the next book absolutely everything that he has accumulated in his head lately. And there is no one to slow him down... But Bykov can still be helped - he is still a young man, but Solzhenitsyn's "Archipelago" will remain a block that is difficult for the reader to lift.

The second thing to note about Solzhenitsyn's epic. This is an extremely versatile piece. The book contains the author's reflections on a variety of topics (essays), Solzhenitsyn's memories of his own stay in the "archipelago" (memoirs), the history of individual prisoners (biographical essays), a detailed history of the Gulag itself (Solovki, Belomorkanal, the spread of "cancer cells" of the Gulag throughout country...), stories in the genre of documentary prose about various aspects of "life" in the Gulag (stay in a pre-trial prison, on transit, in a wagon, in a camp...), historical essays about the war, journalism with accusations against the Soviet government...

In essence, in one book Solzhenitsyn connected the incompatible. And I would not call it a plus. Genre hodgepodge in a book of this size led to a sharp heterogeneity of the narrative. Magnificent chapters (Solovki, about thieves, the White Sea Canal - although it is somewhat lengthy, about "traitors to the Motherland" and a number of others) are replaced by not very successful ones (why was it necessary to analyze the case of the "Industrial Party" in such detail?), unpleasant (Chapter 11 of part 2) and simply disgusting when Solzhenitsyn goes out of his way to prove the unprovable (chapter 1 of part 3). Sometimes it seems that the book combines the work of different people - as if Vadim Rogovin was combined with Dmitry Volkogonov of his "Lenin period".

Thirdly. This book is the first historical work in the USSR (Russia) devoted to the theme of Stalinist repressions and the history of the Main Directorate of Camps (GULAG), which is not so much a virtue of the book as a drawback. For a full-fledged historical work, Solzhenitsyn simply did not have the necessary information - the archives were closed to him, and official statistics on repressions were not published. How many people passed through the Gulag? How many died? How many people were shot or died under torture? - Go find out! Even the exposure of the crimes of Stalin and his henchmen at the 20th Congress of the CPSU was classified even then! Solzhenitsyn was forced to rely more on the human memory of the victims of the Gulag and his own. Hence the "experience of artistic research" - this is how the author himself defined the genre of his work. The book seems to be about history, but the main thing in it is the author's reflections on the Catastrophe that happened.

The author's assessments in the work clearly prevail over the facts, which makes one doubt other statements of the writer. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes in the chapter on the White Sea Canal what a horror happened during its construction: according to the author's estimates, up to 300 thousand people could die during the construction of the canal! But after this assumption, he begins to use the figure of 250 thousand dead during construction (for some reason he reduced it by 50 thousand) not as an approximation, but as true! Instead of "thousands dead" or "many dead".

But the main problem of "Archipelago" is not that the work contains unreliable information or is too voluminous. What hurt the book the most was its purpose to be the author's weapon in his fight against Soviet power. Solzhenitsyn accuses and accuses. A large part of The Archipelago looks like an indictment, and the history in its pages is often sacrificed to politics.

Of course, a number of the author's reproaches addressed to the Soviet government are absolutely legitimate. Why is almost no one in the USSR punished for serious crimes called "Stalinist repressions"? Stalin died, but tens of thousands of executioners by the time the Gulag Archipelago was written were alive and well, and many continued to "work in their specialty":

"And now in West Germany, by 1966, EIGHTY-SIX THOUSAND criminal Nazis were convicted - and we are choking, we do not spare pages of newspaper and radio hours for this, we even after work stay at the rally and vote: LITTLE! And 86 thousand - not enough! ... And we were convicted (according to the stories of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court) - about 10 PEOPLE. The fact that beyond the Oder, beyond the Rhine bakes us. ... And the fact that the killers of our husbands and fathers drive along our streets, and we make way for them - this it doesn’t bake us, doesn’t touch us, it’s “to stir up the old”.

Strongly said - and what can you object to? ...

One cannot but agree with Solzhenitsyn in the case when he makes claims against all Soviet citizens who, in unison with the Kremlin highlander, wrote down as traitors not only all the “Vlasovites”, but also captured Soviet soldiers, as well as those who lived and worked in the occupied territories. Taught children under the Germans? - Traitor of the motherland! And if she slept with a German officer ... - Execution on the spot!

And more about the "traitors": as soon as the native Soviet power did not mock people, completely not considering them as such, but how trouble came: die for it! Yes, why on earth people had to die for this power? Solzhenitsyn asks. And he's right. Dying a slave for a slave owner is stupidity, not valor. And the real traitors to the Motherland are in the Kremlin. Who made the pact with Hitler? Who is not prepared for war? Who gave Hitler a third of Russia and 60 million people? A. Solzhenitsyn: "This war in general revealed to us that the worst thing on earth is to be Russian."

When Solzhenitsyn acts as the collective conscience of the people, there is nothing to argue with him. But in those cases when he tries on the prosecutor's uniform and begins to castigate the Bolshevik government with or without reason, completely ignoring the popular character of the revolution of 1917, one cannot agree with this. His main idea is that the Soviet government from the very first steps began to destroy the Russian people, and it had no other occupation. And this idea really spoils the book.

When Solzhenitsyn has nothing to oppose to the facts, and, as luck would have it, they do not correspond to his concept of the crime of Soviet power since October 1917, he uses such a technique as sarcasm. Here is how he comments on the procedures established for prisoners in the Soviet Republic in 1918: “The working day was set at 8 hours. In the heat of the moment, according to a novelty, it was decided to pay for any work of prisoners, except for household chores in the camp ... (monstrous, the pen cannot withdraw)". The writer cannot refute this fact, so a mockery is used. It turns out that the Soviet government is guilty in any case - no matter what measures it takes against the prisoners. For everything she deserves only condemnation.

Against the Bolsheviks, all means are good, and Solzhenitsyn is not limited to sarcasm. The author writes about the first years of Soviet power, that the prisoners formed brigades to repair water supply, heating and sewerage in Moscow: "And if there were no such specialists in custody? We can assume that they were planted." Blimey! Not having a single fact, the author accuses the Bolsheviks of very specific crimes - allegedly they imprisoned innocent citizens so that there would be someone to repair the water supply! And how do these invented accusations against the Bolsheviks essentially differ from those false accusations that Stalin's prosecutors made against millions of illegally repressed people?...

And here is what Solzhenitsyn writes about the trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Moscow in 1922: "And - remember, remember, reader: All the other courts of the Republic look at the Supreme Trubunal, it gives them guidance," Verkhtrib's sentence is used "as an indication directives. "How many more will be rolled up in the provinces - it's up to you to be savvy." The author has no information about what was happening in the province, but this does not stop him. It is clear that these criminal Bolsheviks carried out such trials all over the country! - that's what the author claims.

In one of the chapters, Solzhenitsyn analyzes the court cases of the early 1920s, trying to prove that the "Stalin trials" (since 1928) are almost no different from the "Lenin" trials. But the court cases "under Lenin" are clearly not analogous to the "case of the Industrial Party" and even more so the three Moscow trials of 1936-1938! Some of them are so small that the difference between "Stalinist" and "Leninist" processes becomes obvious. The loudest of them were carried out not on random people, but on obvious opponents of the Bolsheviks - for example, the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Of course, there was no smell of legality in these processes, but these actions of the ruling party against their political enemies were quite understandable. Actually, the Bolsheviks fought with these enemies for more than three years! They did not appear in the inflamed imagination of the leader, but actually existed.

The very idea of the author that the Gulag was born in 1918 is extremely doubtful. Solzhenitsyn assures that the "archipelago" appeared when prisoners were forced to work. But what is the know-how of the Bolsheviks here? Indeed, in pre-revolutionary Russia there was hard labor, which the author himself does not deny. And the work of the serfs assigned to the factories under Peter I is, in its purest form, a natural Gulag. So, forced hard labor has existed in Russia since at least the beginning of the 18th century. In addition, in 1918, by definition, there could be no "archipelago" - in the form of hundreds and thousands of islands of "extermination labor camps". Only a few colonies where prisoners worked - this is not an archipelago!

This year is not suitable for the birth of the Gulag also for the reason that it was the year 1918 that became the beginning of the civil war in Russia. In that year, the Soviet government had no prison-camp policy at all: it was not up to that - just to survive. By the end of the summer of that year, the Bolsheviks controlled literally a piece of the former Russia. The new state was in the ring of fronts, and all decisions were conditioned by one goal: to stand for the day, but to hold out at night!

The author himself, by the way, in the "Archipelago" cites facts that refute his concept, but tries not to attach importance to them. He writes that the regime in places of detention in the early 1920s was completely different from that in the 1930s, and only from 1923 did it gradually begin to strengthen. "In the 1920s, the food in political isolators was very decent: dinners were always meat, cooked from fresh vegetables ... ". And there were much fewer prisoners in the camps: “If in 1923 no more than 3 thousand people were imprisoned in Solovki, then by 1930 there were already about 50 thousand, and even 30 thousand in Kem. Since 1928, Solovetsky cancer began to spread - first across Karelia - for laying roads, for export felling. Here! Since 1928! A very accurate date. In 1927, the Stalinist organized criminal group cracked down on the Bolshevik party, expelled from the CPSU (b) those who did not agree to build a new Russian empire according to the patterns of Ivan the Terrible - and immediately began to curtail the NEP, destroy the peasants and build the Gulag.

Solzhenitsyn did not seem to notice that in the 20s there was a change of regime: the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party (which was a truly people's party!) By the end of the 20s, it degenerated into a totalitarian regime of the personal power of ONE person, who relied not on the party, but on his close associates, ready for anything. By the beginning of the 1930s, almost nothing remained of the Leninist party (the party had turned into a medieval order). This regime, which, largely due to the personal characteristics of the master of the communist order Joseph, acquired completely senile features, pretended to be socialist, but in reality was a typical Asian despotism. Solzhenitsyn described the second in detail, but completely ignored the mimicry of one regime under another. Didn't want to notice - so I would say.

So, is it necessary to read this book at the beginning of the 21st century, given its shortcomings? Necessary! Those who want to understand what happened in Russia in the 20th century should definitely read it. But one should read thoughtfully, and not just follow the author, who throughout the book diligently led the reader to the wrong conclusion. Solzhenitsyn himself considered the "Gulag Archipelago" as a verdict on Soviet power, completely unaware that in fact it became a verdict not to the state (whatever you call it), not to the communist ideology and its bearers, but to the people themselves! And, above all, to the Russian people - as a backbone in the Russian Empire, and in its successor - the USSR. The "Gulag Archipelago" simply debunked the myth that this people ever existed at all. No more, no less.

After all, what is most striking in the book, and what did the author devote the lion's share of the pages of his work to? "Archipelago" is simply oversaturated with torture, bullying, atrocities and mockery of a person. And all this happened on such a scale that it is simply impossible to imagine if this did not actually happen. The most amazing thing is that it was not the invaders with the population of the occupied territories who did this, not one ethnic group destroyed another, not the fanatics of one religion cracked down on the infidels, and not even the ruling class - with representatives of hostile classes. This has happened many times in history. Here, the neighbors exterminated and mocked their neighbors - just like them! And all this happened "friendly" and with genuine enthusiasm, to the accompaniment of life-affirming songs ("My dear country is wide..."), only with a little squealing from the Kremlin. And can such a collection of people who, for absolutely far-fetched reasons, kill each other, be called a people (nation)? Of course no.

Solzhenitsyn's book, in contrast to purely historical works on the subject of repression, gives a clear idea of what was going on in the Soviet Union in those years. The numbers of those repressed in the 1930s and 50s are horrific, but they do not bring us closer to understanding what happened at that time. It is quite different when the reader is faced with an avalanche of concrete facts of inhuman sadism and cruelty: convicts are transported in winter in wagons without heating; "in the cell, instead of the prescribed twenty people, there were three hundred and twenty-three"; water gives half a cup a day; people are not given buckets in the cells and are not taken to the lavatory; prisoners are brought in and unloaded from the train in the winter on a bare plain (build a camp!); they pour gruel into the same buckets in which they carried coal; transported in winter in the North on open platforms; "in December 1928, on Krasnaya Gorka (Karelia), prisoners were left to spend the night in the forest as a punishment - and 150 people froze to death"; "..on the same Vorkuta-Vom in 1937 there was a punishment cell for refuseniks - a log house without a roof, and there was also a simple pit (to escape the rain, they pulled on some kind of rag)"; "in the Mariinsky camp (as in many others, of course) there was snow on the walls of the punishment cell - and they were not allowed into such and such a punishment cell in camp clothes, but were stripped to underwear" ... When reading such a work, like it or not, but you will think What kind of people are doing this?...

Most of the historical literature on Stalin's repressions tells us about the actions of Stalin and his associates in the party and the NKVD, who staged an unprecedented massacre in history of their own population. The "Gulag Archipelago", on the contrary, is mostly devoted to what was happening at the lowest level of the repressive apparatus: how small bosses, investigators, jailers and other "ordinary Gulag" (soldiers-guards, civilians, doctors ...) "worked on the ground" .

When it comes to such full-scale repressions, one must understand that such important "details" as the total number of repressed, the fate of specific victims (execution, camp, penal servitude, term of imprisonment), the conditions of detention of prisoners and many other aspects of life in the Gulag did not depend on from the Kremlin celestials, not from high-ranking Chekists and regional leaders of the NKVD, but from our neighbors - people in low ranks and ranks. If there had been at least some resistance from below to orders from above, then we would not have remembered any full-scale repressions now. But there was no resistance! There was complete and unconditional support from below for ANY senile orders from the Kremlin.

Support was expressed in the unprecedented "creativity of the masses", examples of which in the "Gulag Archipelago" are simply numerous. Ordinary performers not only carried out orders from above with rare enthusiasm, but for the most part they did evil without any orders and prodding from their superiors. Out of love for violence, innate sadism or self-interest. These are the misdemeanors that people were imprisoned for during the war, when plans for enemies of the people had long since sunk into oblivion: "The tailor, putting down the needle, stuck it into the newspaper on the wall so as not to get lost and hit Kaganovich in the eye. The client saw it. 58th, 10 years (terror)"; "The saleswoman, accepting the goods from the forwarder, wrote it down on a newspaper sheet, there was no other paper. The number of bars of soap fell on Comrade Stalin's forehead. 58th, 10 years"; "The shepherd in his hearts scolded the cow for disobeying the "collective farm b ....." - 58th, term"; "Girichevsky. The father of two front-line officers, during the labor mobilization war he got into peat extraction and there he condemned thin naked soup ... he got 58-10, 10 years for this"; "Nesterovsky, an English teacher. At home, at the tea table, he told his wife and her best friend how poor and hungry the Volga rear, from where he had just returned. Yep, both are 10 years old. And here is a post-war case: an 87-year-old Greek woman was exiled, secretly returned home to her son who returned from the front and received 20 years of hard labor!

And who is to blame for these specific crimes, which clearly smack of Kafka? Stalin and his assistant bandits from the Central Committee and the NKVD? "The Gulag Archipelago" just shows that this is not the case at all. Yes, the then leadership of the Land of Soviets created the conditions for bloodsucking individuals to prove themselves, but they did nothing with the population - they used those who were available. Stalin's comrades didn't even have a TV to put something into these empty heads! There were newspapers, but how many people actually read them - especially among the executioners? Those who could read were most likely to be shot. How "very smart".

Stalin and Co. were very lucky with the population. This was also noted by Alexander Zinoviev, who in his "Yawning Heights" wrote about Stalin's repressions: "I am afraid that recognition and repentance will not come. Why? Because the events of the recent past are not an accident for the Iban people. They are rooted in its essence, in its fundamental nature."

In less than 2 years (1937-1938), more than 680 thousand people were not just killed, but passed before their death through the procedure of formal criminal conviction on falsified political charges - extremely costly for the state and painful for the victims (and after all, about the same number of innocent people were convicted to imprisonment!). Only a few thousand killers would be enough to shoot such a mass of people, but for the operation that was carried out in reality, it took many tens of thousands of born executioners - enthusiasts (investigators, operas, prosecutors, judges, jailers), as well as a considerable number of their assistants. Fortunately, the country had an inexhaustible reserve of executioners.

That is why the apparatus for the extermination of the population worked surprisingly efficiently, and without any failures, despite the cardinal change of leading performers. The "purges" of 1937-1939 affected all layers of the state apparatus of coercion: state security, the prosecutor's office, the camp and the judiciary. Chekists were "cleaned out" twice in three years - by the Chekists themselves. And nothing! The mechanism of grinding human destinies did not even stall! The executioners (in the broad sense of the word) immediately found an adequate replacement.

Comrade Stalin gave the beneficiary population the opportunity to reach their full potential - and this was his main achievement as the leader of Russia. All the abomination that had been accumulated in the country surfaced under Joseph and unfolded in all its might.

And if we estimate the scale of the "Stalinist repressions", which cover the period from approximately 1927 to February 1953, then we will inevitably come to the conclusion that the people who took an active part in them "at the call of the heart" are many millions. After all, only some informers were several million people! And most of them denounced voluntarily, and not under pressure from the KGB curators. A denunciation since 1937 is an almost automatic term or execution. So the scammers were not much different from the real executioners from the NKVD.

Solzhenitsyn paid special attention to scammers, and the phenomenon of total denunciation really deserves this: “... at least in every third, let the fifth case, there is someone’s denunciation, and someone testified! They are all among us today, these ink killers. they imprisoned their neighbors out of fear - and this is still the first step, others out of self-interest, and still others - the youngest then, and now on the verge of retirement - betrayed with inspiration, betrayed ideologically, sometimes even openly: after all, it was considered class valor to expose the enemy! All these people are among us, and most often - prosper, and we still admire that these are "our simple Soviet people."

Millions denounced their neighbors and colleagues, hundreds of thousands (maybe millions?) exterminated peasants during the years of the "Great Turn", took away grain and did not allow starving people to enter the cities, hundreds of thousands called for reprisals against "enemies of the people", expelled them from parties, were arrested, tortured, "tried" and kept in inhuman conditions. At the same time, knowing full well that they are not cracking down on enemies, but on obviously innocent people!

The list of crimes initiated by the Stalinist organized criminal group is so long that it is difficult to even list them. But, despite this, there have never been problems with the perpetrators of these crimes. And this is where I would like to pay special attention. Everything that zealous performers did was considered crimes according to the Criminal Code of 1926 in force at that time. But this did not bother anyone at all! They let down a directive from above (a decision of the Politburo, an order from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs or another piece of paper) - and that's enough! You can forget about the Constitution and laws! And why?

Everything is simpler than simple: the country did not live according to formal state laws, but according to unwritten gangster concepts! At the head of the country was a natural gang. Not mythical Bolsheviks, but purely concrete guys. What the leader of their gang said or hinted at was the law for members of a very large and multi-level gang. And most of the population understood all this very well and did not consider it unnatural for themselves to live by these criminal rules of conduct. Does this by chance remind you of anything from more recent times? ... Not at all? ...

Solzhenitsyn, of course, could not ignore the question, which simply begs itself: who are these executioners? He approached him this way and that, but did not give a clear answer. In the chapter on the NKVD, he wrote: "This is a wolf tribe - where did it come from among our people? Is it not our root? Not our blood?" And he gives the answer that anyone could have been in the place of the Chekists - if he had been fastened with shoulder straps. And blamed everything on ideology. According to your concept. But no! Not any! The writer spent ten in the camp, but he did not figure out his fellow citizens.

It is strange that Solzhenitsyn did not notice that there is no fundamental difference between the thieves, to whom he devoted many lines, and the bandits acting on behalf of the "state of workers and peasants".

Here is how Solzhenitsyn writes about thieves: “Pushing into Stolypin’s compartment, you expect to meet only comrades in misfortune here. All your enemies and oppressors have remained on the other side of the bars, you do not expect them from this one. middle shelf, to this single sky above you - and you see there three or four - no, not faces! no, not monkey muzzles ... - you see cruel nasty hari with an expression of greed and mockery. Everyone looks at you like a spider hanging over a fly Their web is this lattice, and you've been caught!"

These "cruel nasty hari" rob, beat and exploit the rest of the prisoners, who are not considered human. People for them are thieves. And… the guards. With these they successfully cooperate. And the state authorities treated thieves in a completely different way than they treated "counter-revolutionaries": "From the 20s, a helpful term was born: socially close. In this plane, Makarenko: THESE can be corrected. ... After many years of favor, the convoy From the mid-30s to the mid-40s, in this decade of the greatest revelry of the blatars and the lowest oppression of the political, no one will remember the case when the convoy stopped the robbery of the political in the cell, in in a car, in a funnel. But they will tell you many cases of how the convoy accepted the stolen things from the thieves and in return brought them vodka and food.

Solzhenitsyn accurately noticed the similarity of thieves and representatives of the state. Man is nobody for them! Robbing or killing him is easy for them! But they are not socially close. Thieves have nasty mugs - what does "sociality" have to do with it? The muzzle is from birth. Rather, they are genetically close! How many leaders of the USSR had human faces? Hari, muzzles, faces and, at best, physiognomies. Their faces were sometimes in retouched portraits, which had little resemblance to reality.

But Solzhenitsyn did not even look in the direction of common genes. His mind was caught on the simplest thing - an ideology, which, if you think a little, in principle, cannot be the cause of any social upheavals. She is able to dangle between cause and effect, able to justify what happened or be a way to gather people into crowds, but not able to cause any events.

Ideology is the product of a rather weak human brain and cannot compete with the powerful forces that have generated and govern life on this planet.

The problem of a country called Russia is that there are a lot of individuals "with nasty mugs". Too much. When the state is able to restrain them, it is still possible to live in this territory. As soon as these "haris" begin to manage the state apparatus, or the state simply disappears, we get another all-Russian massacre. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. This happened twice in the 20th century.

In 1917, the state collapsed, and a significant part of the population enthusiastically took up their favorite business (rob and kill). By 1921, a new state apparatus had been strengthened, which managed to stop the all-Russian slaughter. But in the late 1920s, a natural gang reigned at the head of the state, which rather quickly rebuilt the entire state apparatus of coercion to suit their own needs. Under the leadership of this gang, one part of the population turned the other into slaves, with whom it was possible to do whatever came to mind.

Of course, my interpretation of the cause of the catastrophe that befell one-sixth of the land is not the only one. There is also a very popular "Jewish" version. And who thinks so? I won't even name names - you know them yourself. Recently, a number of these individuals opened a monument to Ivan the Terrible in Orel. All as a selection - with "inspired faces"! There was an idea to blame everything on the Jews and Solzhenitsyn, but he still restrained himself - although the careful listing in the chapter on the Belomorkanal of the heads of this construction site of Jewish origin is simply striking (about the heads of other units of the Gulag, where non-Jewish surnames prevailed, Solzhenitsyn did not mention became).

Natives of the Jewish environment really took an active part in the revolution and many of them took leadership positions in the new state. By the 1930s, in a number of institutions and people's commissariats, a high percentage of people of Jewish origin was simply striking. Especially many people from the Jewish environment were in the central apparatus of the OGPU / NKVD, which allows anti-Semites to develop their theories about the "true culprits" of the repressions. As of October 1936, 39% of the leading cadres headed by People's Commissar G. Yagoda (43 people in total) were of Jewish origin, 33% were Russians. But none of the "theorists" prefers to ignore the fact that this imbalance was quickly eliminated during the Great Terror. Under Beria, only 6 Chekists-Jews remained among the leadership of the People's Commissariat, and the number of Russians increased to 102 people (67%).

And some more statistics. From 1930 to 1960, the leaders of the camp and prison units of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB were 125 people. Of these Jews - 20 (Solzhenitsyn in the "Archipelago" mentioned the lion's share of them). After 1938, there were no Jews at all among the heads of camps and prisons - the writer did not mention this.

But most importantly: the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which in fact was the highest body not only in the party, but also in the state, since 1928 was predominantly Russian in its national composition: out of 16 members and candidate members of the Politburo, there were 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, one Georgian, an Armenian, a Latvian and a Jew (Lazar Kaganovich). It already happened that it was after the expulsion of the Jews Lev Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev from the Politburo that the period of sharp intensification of repressions began. Yes, and Yagoda - what a ghoul-ghoul he was, but he lost his place as people's commissar, not least because he was ill-suited for organizing an all-Russian massacre! And the "pedigreed" Russian Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov fit perfectly.
So, there is no need to hang other people's sins on representatives of a small intelligent people - they have enough of their own.

According to the All-Union population census in the USSR in 1926, 147 million people lived. Of these, 77.7 million are Russians (52.8%), 31 million are Ukrainians (21%), 4.7 million are Belarusians, 3.9 million Uzbeks, 3.9 million Kazakhs, 2, 9 million Tatars, 2.5 million Jews, etc. Thus, Russians and Ukrainians together made up almost 74 percent of the population.
But all these numbers are complete nonsense. The truth is that although Russians (Great Russians) and Ukrainians (Little Russians) were considered the backbone peoples of the Russian Empire, such peoples never existed in nature. A heterogeneous population, even speaking the same language, cannot be considered a single people. Russians, Ukrainians or Belarusians are purely armchair concepts, popularized by literature and the press.

If we turn to the history of Kievan Rus, then many different ethnic groups lived on its territory for a long time, among which there were neither Russians, nor Ukrainians, nor Belarusians. There were various Slavic, Finnish and many other populations (we know almost nothing about some of them, including their names).

It must be borne in mind that even the Slavs, mentioned in The Tale of Bygone Years, were too different in their way of life and anthropological remains to be a single people. In later times, various nomadic tribes of very different origins arrived in waves on the territory of the Russian principalities (where there were no Russians at that time at all!) A little later, the state centered in Moscow extended its power over vast territories, which were also inhabited by many diverse ethnic groups and populations.

Some of them have retained their language and culture, and are now considered small peoples of Russia: the Mari, Udmurts, Komi... The smaller the "small people" - the more homogeneous it is and the more likely it is really a real ethnic group, and not an abstract category.
And all the rest - who spoke Russian and professed Orthodoxy, in the 19th century officially turned into Great Russians (in the 20th century the term "Great Russians" was replaced by another - "Russians"). By that time, the need for the birth of this people was realized at the very top, when they surveyed their territory from inaccessible power peaks. - Who are all these people? one of our Olympians thought. Yes, they are my subjects, yes, they are Orthodox... But there are Tatars, there are Mordovians, all kinds of Chukhons. And how to call these? ... Slavs? So the Poles - Slavs ... The authorities of Great Russia needed a great people - so the Great Russians appeared from the Orthodox subjects of the tsar-father. The Little Russians (who later changed their name to "Ukrainians") were born in a similar way - Christian subjects of the Moscow tsars, speaking a different Slavic dialect (language) and living in what was then Little Russia (a significant part of modern Ukraine).

And so we would live in happy ignorance, thinking what a big and close-knit people we are (or two fraternal peoples - Russians and Ukrainians), if what Solzhenitsyn described in his "Archipelago" had not happened. It turned out that they were all phantoms! There are no Russians, no Ukrainians! There is a Russian-speaking population, but there are millions of people whose native language is Ukrainian! And that's it. And behind these screens are the descendants of the Slavs, Sarmatians, Finns, the unknown agricultural population of the East European Plain, the descendants of Rus (it was from this nomadic tribe that Kievan Rus received its name, which became Kievan much later - in the writings of historians), unknown ancient hunters of the Don, Scythians, Polovtsy, Bulgars, Huns, Pechenegs, Avars, Tatars, Germans, Saami, Ants, Hungarians, Mari, Bashkirs, Komi... And these descendants do not differ much from their ancestors. If the great-great-great-grandfathers of some of them were only engaged in robberies and murders, then why shouldn’t their descendants trade in a similar way? ...

"The Gulag Archipelago" is a book about absolute Evil. And the source of this Evil is exclusively in people! It is pointless to look for the cause in leaders and ideology. The essence of what happened is simple, but it should not be completely simplified (Stalin is to blame for everything) and it should not be complicated (blaming everything on ideas).

In short, the mechanism of the Catastrophe is approximately the following. The revolution produced a change of elites. The ruling layer of the Russian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries were typical slave owners, but they were subject to centuries-old traditions. They squeezed all the juice out of the population, but the old elite did not carry out any policy of destroying the "cattle". This was contrary to the established order. Many centuries ago, this happened repeatedly, but by the 19th century, the ruling elite was pretty saturated with Western values, which did not include the massacre of one's own population (there were slightly different values in Europe in the Middle Ages). And borrowing Western ideas about civilized behavior is not surprising, since, starting with Peter III, all Russian rulers were of German origin (they were only nominally Romanovs).

There was a second aspect, to a certain extent limiting state arbitrariness. By the beginning of the 20th century, a thin layer of cultured people appeared in Russia, who began to form public opinion, influencing not only society, but also the authorities.

A. Pushkin in a letter to P. Chaadaev was not far from the truth when he wrote that the government is the only European in Russia. But that was in the early 19th century. A hundred years later, the situation has changed dramatically. If some ghouls from the ruling elite wanted to arrange bloodletting out of the blue, this conflicted not only with traditions, but was also condemned by public opinion.

That is why the execution of people on January 9, 1905 led to such an acute political crisis. Thanks to those people who could influence the mindset of society (primarily through the press), the ruling elite found itself, in fact, without public support. And if not for the army, then tsarism would have collapsed even then.

The first Russian revolution did not teach anything to the imperial family, which continued its policy without regard to public opinion (Nikolai was a rare blockhead!), which led to February 1917, when it turned out that absolutely everyone had turned their backs on the ruling dynasty!

The revolution went according to the worst-case scenario - one of the most radical political groups (Bolsheviks) came to power, which managed to stay in power. According to its social and national composition, it was a very motley bunch. If we speak in a simple and familiar language, then the people came to power. The opportunity to enter the ruling stratum of the new state appeared for almost everyone - people of very different origins and social status. But this new elite was not held back by tradition (which it did not have), nor by public opinion, nor by any political force. The state rested solely on the personal characteristics of the leaders.

While the Bolshevik Party was headed by Lenin, the party adhered to some kind of inner-party democracy. Under Stalin, the party turned into a medieval order, and he became its master and at the same time the God-son of this order (Lenin's mummy was turned into God-father). There were no restraining factors for the arbitrariness of power in this state. And as soon as the master of the order called for a crusade against the infidels, an unprecedented massacre of the population unfolded.

All those predators whose instincts were restrained by the state during the Russian Empire, and who were able to turn around during the Civil War, again received complete freedom of action. It was enough to swear allegiance to the two Gods in public, and then do what you want. Recently, a popular TV character gifted us with his amazing saying: "freedom is better than lack of freedom." And what is strange, but the liberal public fully agreed with him. I believe that any of the Stalinist executioners would also agree with this formula: the freedom to do whatever you want is really much better for them than various restrictions.

It's time to turn around. What is the main lesson we should learn from the Holocaust and its description by Alexander Solzhenitsyn? - State power should not belong to the people (otherwise it will quickly transform into a bandit state), but to the elite. The problem is not in realizing this simple truth, but in two practical points. Where will this elite come from now in Russia?.. And who, in principle, should look after the elite and mix it up in time so that it does not stagnate? ... These are questions of questions!

And finally. Solzhenitsyn is a master of catchy expressions. Here is one of them: "How to describe Russian history in one phrase? - A country of stifled opportunities." It sounds very nice - one would like to agree without thinking, but, unfortunately, this is not true. There were no opportunities, there are not now, and it seems that there will not be.

The appearance of the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago", which he himself called "the experience of artistic research", became an event not only in Soviet, but also in world literature. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. And in the native country of the writer during this period, persecution, arrest and exile awaited, which lasted almost two decades.

Autobiographical basis of the work

A. Solzhenitsyn came from the Cossacks. His parents were highly educated people and became for the young man (his father died shortly before the birth of his son) the embodiment of the image of the Russian people, free and adamant.

The successful fate of the future writer - studying at Rostov University and MIFLI, being promoted to lieutenant and being awarded two orders for military merit at the front - changed dramatically in 1944, when he was arrested for criticizing the policies of Lenin and Stalin. The thoughts expressed in one of the letters turned into eight years of camps and three exiles. All this time, Solzhenitsyn worked, memorizing almost everything by heart. And even after returning from the Kazakh steppes in the 50s, he was afraid to write down poems, plays and prose, he believed that it was necessary "to keep them secret, and himself with them."

The author's first publication, which appeared in the journal Novy Mir in 1962, announced the emergence of a new "master of the word" who did not have "a drop of falsehood" (A. Tvardovsky). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich evoked numerous responses from those who, like the author, had gone through the horrors of the Stalinist camps and were ready to tell their compatriots about them. So the creative plan of Solzhenitsyn began to be realized.

The history of the creation of the work

The basis of the book was the personal experience of the writer and 227 (later the list increased to 257) prisoners like him, as well as surviving documentary evidence.

The publication of volume 1 of the book The Gulag Archipelago appeared in December 1973 in Paris. Then, at intervals of a year, the same YMCA-PRESS publishing house releases volumes 2 and 3 of the work. Five years later, in 1980, a twenty-volume collection of works by A. Solzhenitsyn appeared in Vermont. It also includes the work "The Gulag Archipelago" with additions by the author.

In the homeland of the writer began to publish only since 1989. And 1990 was declared the year of Solzhenitsyn in the then USSR, which emphasizes the significance of his personality and creative heritage for the country.

Genre of the work

Artistic and historical research. The definition itself indicates the realism of the events depicted. At the same time, this is the creation of a writer (not a historian, but a good connoisseur of it!), which allows for a subjective assessment of the events described. Solzhenitsyn was sometimes blamed for this, noting a certain grotesqueness of the narrative.

What is the Gulag Archipelago

The abbreviation originated from the abbreviated name of the Main Directorate of Camps that existed in the Soviet Union (it changed several times in the 20-40s), which is known today to almost every inhabitant of Russia. It was, in fact, an artificially created country, a kind of closed space. Like a huge monster, it grew and occupied more and more new territories. And the main labor force in it were political prisoners.

The Gulag Archipelago is a generalized story of the emergence, development and existence of a huge system of concentration camps created by the Soviet regime. Consistently, in one chapter after another, the author, relying on experiences, eyewitness accounts and documents, talks about who became a victim of Article 58, famous in Stalin's time.

In prisons and behind the barbed wire of the camps, there were no moral and aesthetic norms at all. Camp inmates (meaning the 58th, because against their background the life of "thieves" and real criminals was a paradise) in an instant turned into outcasts of society: murderers and bandits. Tormented by overwork from 12 hours a day, always cold and hungry, constantly humiliated and not fully understanding why they were “taken”, they tried not to lose their human appearance, thought and dreamed about something.

He also describes the endless reforms in the judicial and correctional system: either the abolition or return of torture and the death penalty, the constant increase in the terms and conditions of repeated arrests, the expansion of the circle of “traitors” to the motherland, which included even teenagers aged 12 years and older ... the entire USSR projects, such as the White Sea Canal, built on millions of bones from the victims of the existing system called the Gulag Archipelago.

It is impossible to list everything that falls into the field of view of the writer. This is the case when, in order to understand all the horrors that millions of people went through (according to the author, the victims of the Second World War - 20 million people, the number of peasants killed in camps or starved to death by 1932 - 21 million) you need to read and feel what what Solzhenitsyn writes about.

"Gulag Archipelago": reviews

It is clear that the reaction to the work was ambiguous and rather contradictory. So G.P. Yakunin, a well-known human rights activist and public figure, believed that with this work Solzhenitsyn was able to dispel "faith in a communist utopia" in Western countries. And V. Shalamov, who also passed through Solovki and initially had an interest in the writer's work, later called him a businessman, focused only on "personal successes."

Be that as it may, A. Solzhenitsyn (“The Gulag Archipelago” is not the only work of the author, but must be the most famous) made a significant contribution to debunking the myth of prosperity and a happy life in the Soviet Union.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Gulag Archipelago

Artistic research experience

Parts I–II

I dedicate

to all those who did not have enough life

tell about it.

and may they forgive me

that I didn't see everything

I didn't remember everything

didn't think of everything.

In the year 1949, my friends and I attacked a remarkable article in the journal Nature of the Academy of Sciences. It was written there in small letters that during excavations an underground lens of ice was somehow discovered on the Kolyma River - a frozen ancient stream, and in it - frozen representatives of the fossil (several tens of millennia ago) fauna. Whether fishes, whether these newts were kept so fresh, the learned correspondent testified, that those present, having split the ice, immediately ate them willingly.

The magazine must have surprised a few of its readers by how long fish meat can be preserved in ice. But few of them could heed the true heroic meaning of a careless note.

We understood right away. We saw the whole scene vividly to the smallest detail: how those present with fierce haste were breaking the ice; how, trampling on the high interests of ichthyology and pushing each other with their elbows, they beat off pieces of thousand-year-old meat, dragged it to the fire, thawed and sated.

We understood because we ourselves were one of those present, from that only mighty tribe on earth prisoners, which could only willingly eat a newt.

And Kolyma was - the largest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of this amazing country of the Gulag, geography torn into an archipelago, but mentally bound into a continent - an almost invisible, almost impalpable country, which was inhabited by the people of the prisoners.

This archipelago cut through and dotted with a patchwork of another, including, country, it crashed into its cities, hung over its streets - and yet others did not guess at all, very many heard something vaguely, only those who visited knew everything.

But, as if speechless on the islands of the Archipelago, they remained silent.

By an unexpected turn in our history, something, negligible, about this Archipelago came to light. But the same hands that screwed our handcuffs are now holding out their palms conciliatoryly: “No need! .. No need to stir up the past! However, the proverb finishes: “And whoever forgets, two!”

Decades go by - and irrevocably lick the scars and ulcers of the past. Other islands during this time trembled, spread, the polar sea of oblivion splashes over them. And sometime in the next century, this archipelago, its air and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen into a lens of ice, will appear as an implausible newt.

I do not dare to write the history of the Archipelago: I did not get to read the documents. But will anyone ever get it? .. Those who do not want recall, it has already been (and will still be) enough time to destroy all documents clean.

My eleven years spent there, having learned not as a shame, not as a cursed dream, but almost loving that ugly world, and now, by a happy turn, having become the confidant of many later stories and letters - maybe I will be able to convey something bones and meat? - more, however, live meat, still, however, a live newt.

There are no fictitious persons or fictional events in this book.

People and places are called by their proper names.

If they are named by initials, then for personal reasons.

If they are not named at all, it is only because the human memory has not preserved the names - and everything was exactly like that.

This book would be too much for one person to write. In addition to everything that I took out of the Archipelago - my skin, memory, ear and eye, the material for this book was given to me in stories, memoirs and letters -

[list of 227 names].

I do not express my personal gratitude to them here: this is our common friendly monument to all those who were tortured and killed.

From this list, I would like to single out those who put a lot of effort into helping me, so that this thing was provided with bibliographic reference points from books of today's library collections or long removed and destroyed, so finding a preserved copy required great perseverance; even more - those who helped hide this manuscript in a harsh moment, and then multiply it.

But the time has not come when I dare to name them.

The old Solovite Dmitri Petrovich Vitkovsky was supposed to be the editor of this book. However, the half-life spent there(his camp memoirs are called “Half a Life”), gave him premature paralysis. Already with the speech taken away, he was able to read only a few completed chapters and make sure that everything will be told .

And if freedom is not enlightened for a long time in our country, then the very reading and transmission of this book will be a great danger - so that I must also bow with gratitude to future readers - from those from the dead.

When I started this book in 1958, I was not aware of anyone's memoirs or works of fiction about the camps. Over the years of work until 1967, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and the memoirs of D. Vitkovsky, E. Ginzburg, O. Adamova-Sliozberg gradually became known to me, which I refer to in the course of the presentation as literary facts known to everyone (and so it will be or in the end).

Contrary to their intentions, contrary to their will, they gave invaluable material for this book, preserved many important facts, and even figures, and the very air that they breathed: Chekist M. I. Latsis (Ya. F. Sudrabs); N. V. Krylenko - the chief public prosecutor for many years; his heir A. Ya. Vyshinsky with his lawyers-accomplices, of which I. L. Averbakh cannot be overlooked.

Material for this book was also provided by thirty-six Soviet writers, headed by Maxim Gorky, the authors of the infamous book about the White Sea Canal, which for the first time in Russian literature glorified slave labor.

Witnesses of the archipelago

whose stories, letters, memoirs and corrections are used in the creation of this book

Alexandrova Maria Borisovna

Alekseev Ivan A.

Alekseev Ivan Nikolaevich

Anichkova Natalia Milievna

Babich Alexander Pavlovich

Bakst Mikhail Abramovich

Baranov Alexander Ivanovich

Baranovich Marina Kazimirovna

Bezrodny Vyacheslav

Belinkov Arkady Viktorovich