‘The Gulag Archipelago’ Is More Than Just Harrowing 

VOC Academic Council member F. Flagg Taylor writes for The Dispatch on the the 50th anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” a monumental work of history, politics, and literature. Read Taylor’s piece below:

Can there be a duty to read a work of literature? 

Most people I’ve met who are at least aware of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork The Gulag Archipelago know that they should read the book. They know of the book’s historical importance and of Solzhenitsyn’s stature as one of the great Soviet dissidents and writers of the 20th century. They know the book is a kind of prison memoir, full of suffering but worth the difficult journey. 

But this knowledge does not prepare them for the book as it is. Indeed, it may even prevent them from encountering The Gulag Archipelago in its proper shape. Yes, the book is often harrowing in its portrayal of the reality of the Gulag system. And it is a central work in the story of the Soviet Union—and perhaps in hastening its decline. But it’s also much more and perhaps something wholly other than that. 

This has been a problem since the work’s initial publication in English 50 years ago. In an early review, no less a figure than George Kennan—the diplomat and advocate of containment against the Soviet Union—characterized Gulag as “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.” This is probably correct, yet Kennan himself goes on to explain that the book is also something more than a political indictment. Solzhenitsyn cautions readers in the fourth chapter of Part 1: “So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.”

Solzhenitsyn undertook the work out of a kind of duty—duty to the truth and duty to his fellow zeks (a slang term for prisoners). Although he started working on it in 1958 by collecting relevant materials, the pace would pick up significantly in 1962 after the official publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn was flooded with letters from former zeks thanking him for his work and sharing their experiences. Up to this point he had had doubts about his capacity to undertake such a work. As he remarks in the Afterword to Gulag, “But when, in addition to what I had collected, prisoners’ letters converged on me from all over the country, I realized that since all this had been given to me, I had a duty.” 

Given his post-Ivan Denisovich prominence and the Soviet regime’s realization that it had made an enormous mistake in permitting its publication, Solzhenitsyn was closely monitored and hounded by the KGB until his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974. He would require the assistance of more than 100 “invisible allies”(the title of his book about most of these intriguing figures) in order to bring Gulag into being while drawing on the direct accounts of 257 former zeks. That the book even exists is a kind of miracle. In the middle of Part 3 of Gulag, he notes, “I do not expect to see it in print anywhere with my own eyes; and I have little hope that those who managed to drag their bones out of the Archipelago will ever read it; and I do not believe that it will explain the truth of our history in time for anything to be corrected.” 

Read the full article in The Dispatch.

F. Flagg Taylor is a member of the VOC Academic Council.