Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: Part Two

The second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago has now appeared. Where the first volume consisted in a detailed investigation of everything that preceded the arrival of millions of Soviet people in Stalin’s concentration camps—the system of arrests, the various forms of confinement, interrogation with torture, judicial and extrajudicial persecution, prisoner transports and transit prisons—the second volume gets down to the study of the primary and fundamental part of the Gulag empire, the corrective or, as Solzhenitsyn rightly calls them, the “destructive” labor camps. Here nothing escapes the author’s attention: the origin and history of the camps, the economics of forced labor, the administrative structure, the categories of prisoners and everyday life of the inmates, the position of women and juveniles, the relations between ordinary zeks and the trusties, between criminals and politicals, the camp guards, the convoy guards, the “information” service and the recruiting of stool pigeons, the system of punishments and “incentives,” the functioning of the hospitals and medical stations, the way prisoners died and were killed, and the unceremonious way they were buried—all these things find their place in Solzhenitsyn’s book. The author describes the various types of hard labor and the starvation diet imposed on the zeks; he studies not only the world of the camps but also the world immediately surrounding them, the world of “campside”; and he surveys the peculiarities of psychology and behavior found among the prisoners and their jail keepers (or “camp keepers,” in Solzhenitsyn’s terminology).

...