Line #27 Literature/TheGulagArchipelago


1	''The Gulag Archipelago'' is a book by Creator/AleksandrSolzhenitsyn. It was written between 1958 and 1968 and first published in 1973.
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3	An account of life in TheGulag, required reading in Russian high schools as of 2009. Multiple editions exist, most of which have been abridged because of the sheer length. This book tells the story of the Gulag from Solzhenitsyn's perspective as a former inmate, in stark contrast to the Soviet Union's account of the Gulag once it was shut down upon Stalin's death. Solzhenitsyn considered their account to have been written with rose-coloured goggles. ''Literature/TheFirstCircle'' can be considered the more fictionally-inclined sequel.
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6	!!This book contains the following tropes:
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8	* TheApocalypseBringsOutTheBestInPeople: There is a chapter called ''The Ascent'' that explores how people could actually become ''better'' while living in the slavery and poverty of the work camp.
9	* BadBoss: Too many Gulag camp managers to count. In many cases they were responsible to no one and had total control over the ''zek''s' lives, with predictable results.
10	* BenevolentBoss: ...But there were a few managers and guards who kept their human decency.
11	* BigBrotherIsWatching:
12	** Everywhere. And that means ''everywhere''. One common tactic of the authorities was to plant a so-called "stool pigeon" in the cells to spy on the prisoners. Solzhenitsyn alludes to numerous cases of inmates being slapped with ''another'' prison sentence for having been loose-tongued in the presence of a spy.
13	** One of the earlier chapters describes in detail the ubiquity of the archipelago, and reminds the readers that in Stalin's time, every train station and post office would have a cell.
14	* BlackComedy: The combination of endless misinformation, impossible tasks and no concern whatsoever for the lives of the prisoners mostly results in tragedy, but also in a few moments that would not be out of place in a comedy skit. One of the most farcical instances concerns building inspectors being shown a newly-completed apartment block where several of the bathtubs had "gone missing" at various points of the process due to corrupt officials. The solution was for several prisoners and one experienced sealant applier to rip out the tubs in the first rooms the inspectors had checked, rush them up the back stairs and install them in the last rooms on the inspectors' schedule before they could get there. It worked.
15	** See also the example under HiddenInPlainSight
16	* CardCarryingVillain: Solzhenitsyn discusses the trope and says the people like that only exist in fiction; real human beings need to justify themselves and present their evil acts as good.
17	* ChildrenAreInnocent: Not in the view of the state, they're not; they can get shipped off to the gulag like any adult. Once there, Solzhenitsyn notes that their very innocence makes them extremely dangerous, as they adapt to their new environment far faster than an adult with more deeply entrenched moral convictions. See KidsAreCruel below.
18	* ColdBloodedTorture: Some sections read like a manual on how to become a TortureTechnician or ShadowDictator. You'll never look at [[NoodleImplements office chairs or baggy pants]] the same way again.
19	* DeadlyEuphemism: Chapter title "History Of Our Sewage Disposal System."
20	* DeadpanSnarker: The narration of the arbitrariness of the regime is full of dry humor and sometimes the absurdism borders on BlackComedy (see above).
21	* {{Dedication}}: The book is dedicated "to all those who did not live to tell it."
22	* DoomedMoralVictor: There are a fair number of these, as you might expect, but there are also surprising instances where staying true to one's principles bought an inexplicable reprieve. Solzhenitsyn gives a few examples of cases where the officials were so surprised by defiance that they didn't know what to do, backed down, and tried to ignore the prisoner rather than risk drawing attention to themselves, and cases where moral conviction seems to have had a massive positive impact on the prisoner's resistance to disease and starvation.
23	* {{Doorstopper}}: It is a very large book, normally published in three heavy volumes.
24	* GoodCopBadCop: One of the many, many techniques used by the gulag interrogators. Rather effectively, too.
25	-->"Two interrogators would take turns. One would shout and bully. The other would be friendly, almost gentle. Each time the accused entered the office he would tremble — which would it be? He wanted to do everything to please the gentle one because of his different manner, even to the point of signing and confessing to things that had never happened."
26	* HiddenInPlainSight: At one point when news of the atrocities leaked and caused enough pressure that a respected writer was invited to the camps to inspect the conditions, the guards successfully prevented the obviously starving and abused prisoners from catching his eye and prompting closer inspection by... threatening them into sitting still and silently on the ground in a large group and throwing large tarpaulin sheets over the lot of them. The writer, rather than seeing inmates who he might want to take a closer look at and talk to, simply saw the sheets and didn't think to wonder what they were doing there. It seems like the guards themselves could hardly believe they got away with that.
27	* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: By the regime of itself, its predecessors, and ironically many of the people they threw behind bars who were safely dead. On the author's part, Solzhenitsyn's high opinion of UsefulNotes/TsaristRussia is... [[YMMV.HomePage controversial.]]
28	* HoistByHisOwnPetard: Nobody was completely safe from purges, even those who had orchestrated previous purges from the highest echelons of Soviet society e.g. the 1938 show trial of Yagoda (former head of the [[SecretPolice NKVD]], who had supervised the Moscow Show Trials of 1936 and '37), Bukharin, Rykov, and other high-ranking officials. His successor Beria got hit with this himself after Stalin's death.
29	* HolierThanThou: Many of the Communist prisoners being purged still think themselves loyal to Stalin's regime, convinced that it was all a mistake that they were arrested, whereas everybody around them are of course scum and deserve every moment of their sentence.
30	* TheInformant: ''Stoolies'', as they were called, were universally despised by prisoners and the security services alike. In many cases they didn't have a choice when they were recruited; Solzhenitsyn himself was forced to become an informant. He considered himself very fortunate to have been transferred out to a ''sharashka'' (science lab in the gulag system) before internal security could really pressure him into snitching on overheard conversations.
31	* InherentInTheSystem: Solzhenitsyn makes it very clear that the gulags were no abberration of Stalin: from the very beginning, communism only survives through the terror and oppression of the people.
32	* InsaneTrollLogic: Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which was so broadly written that it could easily cover any sort of unapproved behavior.
33	* InterrogatedForNothing: Frequently followed by a Tenner For Nothing.
34	* KidsAreCruel: Once they adapt to their new environment (far faster and more thoroughly than an adult) they certainly are. Solzhenitsyn describes one event when children (about 12 years old) lured a nurse into a cell with dozens of them by lying about one of them being sick, and then pinned her down and barricaded the doors, doing everything to her from biting and beating to gang rape. Unlike some of the terrible things they did for food (stealing a weaker adult's clothes and then selling them, leaving the adult to starve and freeze) this particular atrocity had no discernible motive beyond ForTheEvulz, and if asked about it the savage children would probably not have had the moral vocabulary to explain it.
35	* KnowNothingKnowItAll: The infamous propagator of pseudoscience, Trofim Lysenko, pops up. When his "ideas" on science and agriculture [[{{Pun}} go to seed]], he insists that [[NeverMyFault it was the fault of the agronomists]] who followed his orders.
36	* AMillionIsAStatistic: The author laments that the numbers he's dealing with are simply too immense to leave an emotional impact. To give you some perspective, Solzhenitsyn's estimates of the total death toll under Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev combined have ''margins of error'' numbering in the tens of millions.
37	* MoralMyopia: Stalin's regime never misses a chance to rant about the (admittedly dreadful) purges of the Tsars, even with the even more massive purges they themselves stage.
38	* NeverSpeakIllOfTheDead: One of the objections to the original publication of the book was that Solzhenitsyn was disgracing the memory of the dead. He was even accused of pointlessly [[InsaneTrollLogic opening the old wounds of the camp survivors]], by former camp guards, no less.
39	* NoHonorAmongThieves:
40	** The "58s", as the political prisoners are called, have to share their camps with the "socially friendly" elements, the thieves and career criminals, and Solzhenitsyn makes it very clear that the romanticization of the thieves has no basis at all in reality, particularly as the camp administration could trust the thieves to keep the 58s under strict control.
41	** {{Averted}} during the Kengir Revolt, much to everyone's surprise.
42	* NotSoDifferentRemark: Solzhenitsyn recalls how he started to become haughty and cruel as an officer and concludes that under the right circumstances, most people could become brutal interrogators.
43	-->"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
44	* PlaceWorseThanDeath: The eponymous Gulags.
45	* RefugeInAudacity: The book contains a few examples both of people standing up to the guards and inexplicably not being punished, and examples of total farce that should have exposed the whole hideous affair but the guards successfully bluffed their way through.
46	* RussianGuySuffersMost: Hell yes, they all do. Also the Ukrainian guy, Belarusian guy, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian guys...
47	* SecretPolice:
48	** The NKVD, or "Blue Caps" as they are more commonly referred to in the book. They are described as men who are totally obedient to the Party and feel little to no empathy towards others, endowed with what essentially amounts to unlimited power. Nobody was out of their reach, from the lowest farmer, to ranking government or military officials.
49	** So long as they didn't go against their fellow Blue Caps or the state, they could do pretty much anything they wanted; which they did. A school professor is giving a lecture on something you don't like? You can forbid him from saying anything else. You saw an apartment that you would like to live in? You could have it, and if it happens to already be occupied, just throw the tenant into a cell on whatever charge comes to mind. A woman catches your eye? She's yours, so go ahead and rape her.
50	* TakeThat: Aimed at communist officials and policies, mostly Soviet but a few in the West too, b(at least three to Bertrand Russell, for instance) sympathetic with the Soviet Union (though Russell criticized the USSR and Marxism, so he may have been misinformed about that).
51	* ThisIsAWorkOfFiction: {{Inverted}}. The book has a disclaimer at the beginning, saying that while many names have been changed, everything in it really happened exactly like it's described. How true that actually is is subject to dispute.
52	* WouldHurtAChild:
53	** Children were not exempt from being shipped to the gulag, and they suffered no less than the adult inmates.
54	** Due to essentially growing up in an environment where survival required doing practically anything, by any means, plenty of adolescents took advantage of older, weaker adults by stealing their allotted rations and beating them into helplessness in order to take whatever they might possess, all without a shred of remorse. This, in turn, caused the adults to have such a profound and corrosive hatred for them that, given half a chance, they would kill any kid they could lay hands on. One particular inmate's preferred method was to pin them to the ground and kneel on their chests until the ribs cracked, but didn't fully break. This way, they suffered for days before dying, and nobody would know why.

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