The novel “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn: summary

“The Gulag Archipelago” is a documentary-fiction novel by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, which tells about prison-type camps, on the territory of which the author had to spend 11 years of his life.

Rehabilitated, accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers, approved by Khrushchev himself, Solzhenitsyn did not renounce his plan - to create a truthful chronicle about the Gulag, based on letters, memoirs, stories of camp inhabitants and his own sad experience of prisoner number Shch-854.

Wonderful country GULAG

The Gulag, or the Main Directorate of Camps and Prisons, was notorious in the Soviet Union in the 30-50s of the twentieth century. His bloody glory still echoes like iron shackles in the ears of his descendants and is a dark stain in the history of our fatherland.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn knew about the Gulag firsthand. He spent 11 long years in the camps of this “marvelous” country, as the writer called it with bitter irony. “I learned my eleven years spent there not as a shame, not as a damned dream, but almost falling in love with that ugly world, and now, by a happy turn, becoming a confidant of many of his stories and letters...”

There are no fictitious persons in this book, made up of letters, memories, and stories. All people and places are named by their proper names, some are indicated only by initials.

Solzhenitsyn calls the famous island of Kolyma the “pole of cruelty” of the Gulag. Most know nothing about the miracle Archipelago, some have only a vague idea of ​​it, those who have been there know everything, but they are silent, as if being in the camps has forever deprived them of the power of speech. Only decades later did these cripples speak. They came out of their shelters, sailed across the ocean, climbed out of prison cells, rose from their graves to tell a terrible story called the Gulag.

Volume One: Arrest, Cell and Extrajudicial Killing

How do you get to the Archipelago? You can’t buy a ticket there either at Sovturist or Intourist. If you want to manage the Archipelago, you can get a ticket to it after graduating from the NKVD school. If you want to protect the Archipelago, the domestic military registration and enlistment office offers last-minute tours. If you want to die on the Archipelago, do nothing. Wait. They will come for you.

All Gulag prisoners went through a mandatory procedure - arrest. The traditional type of arrest is at night. A rough knock on the door, half-asleep household members and a confused accused who had not yet reached his trousers. Everything happens quickly: “Neither the neighboring houses nor the city streets see how many were taken away overnight. Having frightened the closest neighbors, they are not an event for distant ones. It’s as if they didn’t exist.” And in the morning, along the very asphalt along which the doomed were led at night, an unsuspecting young Soviet tribe will pass with slogans and songs.”

Close acquaintance with his homeland, Solzhenitsyn did not recognize the paralyzing attraction of a night arrest; he was detained while serving at the front. In the morning he was a company captain, and in the evening he lay in a stuffy, spit-stained cell, in which three people could hardly fit. Solzhenitsyn was fourth.

The punishment cell became the first refuge of the convicted Solzhenitsyn. Over the course of 11 years, he spent time in many cells. Here, for example, is a lice-infested prison in a bullpen with no bunks, no ventilation, no heating. And here is a solitary cell in the Arkhangelsk prison, where the windows are smeared with red lead so that only bloody light enters the cell. Here's a nice little retreat in Choibalsan - fourteen adults in six square spaces, sitting on a dirty floor for months at a time, switching legs on command, with a 20-watt light bulb hanging from the ceiling that never goes out.

• Analysis of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” (A. I. Solzhenitsyn)

Each cell was followed by a new one, and there was no end to them, and there was no hope of liberation. People were sent to the Gulag under the famous Article 58, which consisted of only four points, each of which sentenced a person to 10, 15, 20 or 25 years. At the end of the term, exile or release occurred. The latter was practiced extremely rarely - as a rule, the convicted person became a “repeater”. And again the cameras and sentences began, lasting decades.

Appeal? Court? Please! All cases fell under the so-called “extrajudicial execution” - a very convenient term coined by the Cheka. The courts were not abolished. They still punished and executed, but extrajudicial executions took place separately. According to statistics compiled much later, in only twenty provinces of Russia the Cheka shot 8,389 people, uncovered 412 counter-revolutionary organizations (ed.: “a fantastic figure, knowing our constant inability to organize”), arrested 87 thousand people (ed.: this figure , from the modesty of the compiler of statistics, is considerably underestimated). And this does not include the number of those officially executed, declassified and convicted!

Among the inhabitants of the Gulag there was a legend about “paradise islands”, where rivers of milk flow, they feed you enough, they lay your clothes softly, and the work there is only mental. Prisoners of “special” professions are sent there. Alexander Isaevich was lucky enough to intuitively lie that he was a nuclear physicist. This unconfirmed legend saved his life and opened the way to Sharashki.

Volume two: history of the camps and their inhabitants

When did the camps appear? In the dark 30s? In the wartime 40s? The BBC informed humanity of the terrible truth - the camps existed already in 1921! “Is it really that early?” – the public was amazed. Why, of course not! In 1921, the camps were already in full swing. Comrades Marx and Lenin argued that the old system, including the existing coercive machine, must be broken down and a new one erected in its place. An integral part of this machine is the prison. So the camps existed since the first months after the glorious October Revolution.

Why did the camps arise? In this matter, everything is also simple to the point of banality. There is a huge young state that needs to strengthen in a short time without outside help. He needs: a) cheap labor (even better free); b) unpretentious labor (forced, easily transported, controlled and permanent). Where to get the source of such power? - Among his people.

What did they do in the camps? We worked, worked, worked... From dawn to dusk and every day. There was work for everyone. Even the armless were forced to trample down the snow. Mines, brickwork, clearing peat bogs, but all prisoners know that the worst thing is logging. It’s not for nothing that it was nicknamed “dry shooting.” First, the prison lumberjack needs to cut down the trunk, then chop off the branches, then drag out the branches and burn them, then saw the trunk and lay the beams in stacks. And all this in chest-deep snow, in thin camp clothes (“at least they sewed on the collars!”). A summer working day is 13 hours, a winter one is a little less, excluding the road: 5 kilometers there and five kilometers back. The lumberjack has a short life - three weeks and you are gone.

Who was in the camps? The Gulag prison cells were welcomingly open to people of all ages, genders and nationalities. Children (“youngsters”), women, and old people were accepted here without prejudice; fascists, Jews, and spies were rounded up in hundreds, and dispossessed peasants were brought in entire villages. Some were even born in the camps. The mother was taken out of prison during childbirth and breastfeeding. When the baby grew a little older (as a rule, it was limited to a month or two), the woman was sent back to the camp, and the child to an orphanage.

We bring to your attention the biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which, due to its richness and sharp turns of fate, is very reminiscent of an exciting novel or story.

In his novel “Cancer Ward,” Solzhenitsyn depicted the life of patients in the Tashkent hospital, namely Cancer Ward No. 13, the very name of which inspired despair and trepidation in many people.

Each prisoner has his own story, worthy of an entire book. Solzhenitsyn cites some of them on the last pages of the second volume of Gulag. Here are the stories of 25-year-old teacher Anna Petrovna Skripnikova, simple hard worker Stepan Vasilyevich Loschilin, priest Father Pavel Florensky. There were hundreds of them, thousands, I can’t remember them all...

Volume three: what is the Gulag and why are they silent about it?

During the heyday of the camps, people did not kill in them; the death penalty, executions and other methods of instant death were abolished as obviously unprofitable. The country needed slaves! The Gulag was a gallows, only extended in the best camp traditions, so that before death the victim had time to suffer and work for the good of the fatherland.

• One day of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Is it possible to escape from the camp? - Theoretically it is possible. Grates, barbed wire and blank walls are not a barrier for humans. Is it possible to escape from the camp forever? - No. The fugitives were always returned. Sometimes they were stopped by a convoy, sometimes by the taiga, sometimes by kind people who received generous rewards for the capture of especially dangerous criminals. But there were, Solzhenitsyn recalls, so-called “convinced fugitives” who decided on a risky escape again and again. This is how Georgy Pavlovich Tenno was remembered, for example. After his next return, they asked him, “Why are you running?” “Because of freedom,” Tenno answered inspiredly, “A night in the taiga without shackles and guards is already freedom.”

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn is one of the lucky few who managed to escape from the death camp. The first step towards salvation was “sharashka”, then exile, which seemed like a real paradise and allowed Solzhenitsyn to finally take up writing. After the exile came an unexpected release with further rehabilitation.

But as soon as the former inhabitant of the Gulag spoke, as soon as “The Archipelago” was in print, the good motherland immediately disowned its son, loudly lowered the iron curtain and put him outside the threshold of the hospitable Land of the Soviets, where there were and are no political prisoners, where peace and justice, where thousands of doomed people do not howl behind barbed wire.

GULAG Archipelago audiobook. 21 h 30 min. Read by Sergei Garmash. Free excerpt: Sergey Garmash21 h 30 min

Summary of “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn A.I.

Arrest. For what? For all!

Kolyma was the largest and most famous island, the pole of cruelty of this amazing country of the Gulag, geography torn into an archipelago, but psychology shackled into a continent that was inhabited by a people of prisoners. The author spent eleven years in prison there. There are no fictitious people or fictitious events in this book. Some people end up in the Archipelago because of duty or military conscription (to guard), while others come because they were arrested. Arrest. There is no need to ask: “Why?” You shouldn’t hope that it’s a mistake and that they’ll figure it out. “The political arrests of several decades were different in our country precisely in that they captured people who were innocent of anything, and therefore not prepared for any resistance. A general feeling of doom was created, the idea that it was impossible to escape from the GPU-NKVD.” The arrest is accompanied by a search. “When the locomotive driver Inoshin was arrested, there was a coffin in the room with his just deceased child. ...They threw the child out of the coffin and searched there too.” Arrests of the 29th - 30th years, “a stream from the good Ob”: dispossessed men (the most economical, earthly support). “The flow of 44-46, from the good Yenisei”: those who were captured in Germany and returned. “The flow of '37 also grabbed and carried to the Archipelago people with position, people with a party background, people with education... Thirty-seventh! Volga of people's grief! And also Crimean Tatars, Balts, Chechens... And also priests, in general - believers. And also “former nobles”, the intelligentsia, professors... All “saboteurs”, everyone! Everything - and everywhere. The all-encompassing Article 58 is for counter-revolutionary actions. Almost everyone was suspected of espionage, sabotage and sabotage. They were obliged to inform on everything and against everyone (and for everything); failure to inform was severely punished. Suspicion would be like a joke if the consequences were not so dire. After the party meeting, everyone stands up and begins to applaud in honor of Comrade Stalin. Five, seven, eight, eleven minutes of meaningless applause. And whoever stopped and sat down first was sentenced to ten years. There was a plan for the prisoners - and they mowed down everyone.

Investigation and torture

Why did people, thrown into prison and sent to camps and execution, admit their guilt and sign false accusations? During the investigation, they were subjected to terrible torture: they were fed salty food and were not allowed to drink; they were not allowed to sleep for several days; they threatened to imprison everyone they value; they extinguished a cigarette on the skin of the person under investigation; They beat me and knocked out my teeth. “The chamber was heated until blood came out of the pores of the body; Having seen this through the peephole, they put the prisoner on a stretcher and carried him to sign the protocol.” "My brother! Don’t judge those who got into trouble like this, who turned out to be weak and signed too much... Don’t throw a stone at them.” Signing a document against yourself in order to get rid of torture is a less terrible ordeal than being forced by terrible torture to slander acquaintances, colleagues, relatives, friends. Investigators demanded that the accomplices be handed over. “There were, there were those in ’37 who chose death, but did not sign for anyone.”

Incredible rapture of one's omnipotence! Is it worth doubting, searching for the truth, if you are lucky enough to be a blue cap! Any thing you see is yours! Any apartment you see is yours! Any woman is yours! Any enemy - out of the way! The ground under your feet is yours! The sky above you is yours, blue! During searches they stole and took whatever they liked. They imprisoned each other. They framed me out of fear and for a career. They sacrificed their wives just to survive. NKVD schools promised rations and double or triple salaries. The author recalls with shame how in the army the same contempt for people was cultivated, the same conviction of one’s chosenness. “Pride grows in the heart like lard in a pig. I gave my subordinates unquestionable orders, convinced that there could be no better orders than those. Even at the front, where we all seemed to face death, my authority quickly convinced me that I was a man of the highest class. I ate my officer’s butter with cookies, without wondering why I was entitled to it, but not the soldier.” The author dreams of a fair trial. That the very idea of ​​reprisal of some people against others should be condemned. At least for each of the guilty to admit: “Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.”

Prison cell

The author of the book went to prison straight from the front. After serving in solitary confinement and ninety-six hours of investigation, he was “still out of prison!” They began to eagerly question him about the progress of the fighting, but the defendants were not supposed to learn anything about the outside world. In every cell there must be a mother hen: an informant, an informer. Many knew how to identify traitors - and did not trust them. A two-hundred-watt light bulb is burning in the ceiling. At night, they somehow cover their eyes with handkerchiefs. You need to go to the toilet (morning and evening) strictly according to the schedule. Then the “parasha” (vessel with excrement) is taken out. This is a shameful additional torture. Food: gruel, black bread, boiling water - “tea”. There are also joys: chess, a twenty-minute walk and books from the Lubyanka library. Wonderful books! Taken from those who were shot and killed... If there is a window in the cell, then there is a “muzzle” on the window: a device that does not allow the prisoner to look out of the window, to see at least something other than a piece of the sky... Cell neighbors: each is a destiny and character. The old revolutionary, who was still in tsarist prisons, is hardy and persistent. A large engineer from the peasantry, accustomed to living in grand style: he rushes about, does not find a place for himself - his whole luxurious life has gone downhill. An exhausted officer who was captured by the Nazis. The USSR did not recognize its former soldiers and did not support them in captivity. The Norwegians and British received rich rations from their governments - and threw some of the food over the fence to the Russians. And this is the USSR - “the fairest country in the world”, the Motherland. “And what is the right thing to do if our mother sold us to the gypsies, no, worse4—threw us to the dogs? Is she still our mother? “On May 9th they brought lunch along with dinner, as was done at Lubyanka only on May 1st and November 7th. Because of this, we only guessed about the end of the war. That Victory was not for us. That spring is not for us.”

"That Spring"

“That languid prison spring accompanied by Victory marches became the reckoning spring of my generation. They sang to us over the cradle: “All power to the Soviets!” It was we who, with a tanned child’s hand, reached out to the handle of the pioneer bugle and the cry “Be ready!” saluted “Always ready!” It was we who brought weapons to Buchenwald and joined the Communist Party there. And now we find ourselves in the blacks for the mere fact that we still stayed alive.” Not only prisoners of war ended up in prisons and camps, but also many liberation officers who saw Europe and could compare. The author speaks bitterly and passionately about the Motherland, which betrayed its soldiers three times. The first time when the government did everything to lose the war: it destroyed the fortification lines, set up the air force for defeat, dismantled tanks and artillery, deprived it of intelligent generals and forbade the armies to resist. The prisoners of war were precisely those whose bodies took the blow and stopped the Wehrmacht. For the second time, their homeland heartlessly betrayed them, leaving them to die in captivity. And now for the third time she shamelessly betrayed them, luring them with maternal love (“The Motherland has forgiven! The Motherland is calling!”) and throwing a noose already at the border. The author draws historical parallels: “Even our old proverb justified captivity: “A man who is captured will cry out, but he will never be killed.” Under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, complete patience was given nobility! to exchange their prisoners, to caress them and warm them up was the task of society in ALL subsequent wars.”

There will be no amnesty!

In prisons after the Victory they were waiting for an amnesty, but they were also sent to camps. The terms were set without trial or evidence by the so-called “special troikas,” or OSOs. For what? It was possible to “attach” any of these charges: - ASA - Anti-Soviet Agitation - KRD - Counter-Revolutionary Activities - KRTD - Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyist Activities (this letter “t” made life very difficult for a prisoner in the camp) - PS - Suspicion of Espionage (espionage that goes beyond suspicion, was transferred to the tribunal) - SVPSh - Connections Leading (!) to Suspicion of Espionage - KRM - Counter-Revolutionary Thinking - YOU - Nurturing Anti-Soviet Sentiments - SOE - Socially Dangerous Element - SVE - Socially Harmful Element - Emergency - Family Member (convicted of one of the previous letters). “At the Novosibirsk transfer in 1945, the convoy receives prisoners with a roll call on business. “So-and-so!” - “58-1-a, twenty-five years old.” The head of the convoy became interested: “What did you give it for?” - “No way.” - “You’re lying. No way - they’ll give you ten!”

"To the highest degree"

“The death penalty in Russia has a checkered history. In the Code of Alexei Mikhailovich, punishment reached the death penalty in 50 cases, in the military regulations of Peter there are already 200 such articles. And Elizabeth, without abolishing the death laws, however, did not apply them even once: they say that when she ascended the throne, she vowed not to execute anyone - and during the entire 20 years of her reign she did not execute anyone. Catherine II saved for the protection of herself, the throne and the system, that is, in political cases (the Moscow plague riot, Pugachev) she recognized execution as quite appropriate. Under Paul, the abolition of the death penalty was confirmed... The blood of five Decembrists awakened the nostrils of our state. Since then, execution for state crimes was not abolished and was not forgotten until the February Revolution... And how many people were executed in Russia during this time? 486 people were executed, that is, 17 people a year!” The death penalty was restored in full force from June 1918 - no, not “restored”, but established as a “new era of executions”. And, for example, in 1939-1940, HALF A MILLION “political” and 480 thousand thugs (criminals) were shot throughout the Union. “In our prosperous and blind existence, suicide bombers are portrayed to us as fatal and few loners. We are instinctively sure that we could never end up in the death chamber, that this requires, if not grave guilt, then at least an outstanding life. We still need to shake up a lot in our heads in order to imagine: the darkness of the grayest people spent time in the death cells for the most ordinary actions, and - whoever is lucky - very often they received not a pardon, but a punishment cell” (this is what prisoners call the “capital punishment”). “...If someday the relatives of those executed would submit photographs of their executed to one publishing house, and an album of these photographs, several volumes of the album, would be published, then by leafing through them and taking a last look into the darkened eyes, we would learn a lot for the rest of our lives. Such a reading, almost without letters, would lie on our hearts as an eternal layer. In one house I know, where there are former prisoners, there is such a ritual: on March 5, the day of the death of the Chief Murderer, photographs of those shot and died in the camp are displayed on the tables - several dozen who were lied to. Funeral music. Friends come, look at the photographs, remain silent, listen, talk quietly; leaving without saying goodbye. It would be like this everywhere... We would get at least some scar on our hearts from these deaths.”

Ships of the Archipelago

How are prisoners transported from prisons to camps? “Vagon-zak—what a disgusting abbreviation! As, indeed, are all the cuts made by the executioners. They want to say that this is a carriage for prisoners. But nowhere, except in the prison papers, was this word kept. The prisoners learned to call such a carriage Stolypin or simply Stolypin. This is very reminiscent of a menagerie: behind solid bars, on the floor and on the shelves, some pitiful creatures, similar to humans, are huddled and look at you pitifully, asking you to drink and eat. But the animals in the menagerie are never so crowded together. N.V. Timofeev-Ressovsky was traveling from Petropavlovsk to Moscow in a compartment containing THIRTY-SIX PEOPLE! For several days he HANGED in the compartment between people, his feet not touching the floor. Then they began to die - they were taken out from under their feet...” They were fed bread and herring - there was no one to cook porridge on the train. They try not to give pods - otherwise the convoy will have to be taken to the “mandrel” once again. It’s disgusting on this train to communicate with “thieves” who rob “political” people and are ready to kill, trample, and humiliate. Thieves and bandits are “socially close” to the Soviet regime, “political” ones are alien. It is impossible to resist a thieves' gang: if you swing, they will thrust a knife between your ribs. The convoy also steals, does not give rations of sugar, and gives the prisoners allotted bread according to orders in exchange for their own things.

Transit prisons

The prison was not heated - and not only were they not freezing, but they were lying naked on the upper bunks. They squeezed out all the glass in the windows so as not to suffocate. Because in the cell, instead of the required twenty people, there were THREE HUNDRED TWENTY THREE! The food norm was not given to people, but to the tenth. If one of the dozen dies, they hide him under a bunk and receive an allowance for him. “There were no dishes! Take the gruel wherever you want - on the floor, in the palm of your hand! They brought water in tanks, but there is nothing to pour it into, so they pour it in a stream, whoever turns his mouth is yours.” Money, food and things are taken away from the “political” by thieves. According to stories, sometimes “58th” beats criminals, but security with firearms comes to the defense of “socially close ones.” “But even a beginner, who is peeling and peeling during shipping, needs them, needs them! She gives him a gradual transition to the camp. The human heart could not withstand one step of such a transition. His consciousness could not have sorted out this confusion so quickly. We have to do it gradually." During the transfer, the managers of construction sites or industries where workers were needed bought healthy and able-bodied prisoners as slaves. The goods “demanded to be driven out in front of them alive and naked.” Officers chose concubines for themselves and their entourage. Experienced camp workers taught newcomers: “From the first step in the camp, everyone will try to deceive and rob you. Don't trust anyone but yourself!" For example, they unloaded the prisoners from the train, and the convoy prepared to lead them ten kilometers to the camp through loose, deep snow. The sleigh arrived, the coachman offered to give him his things, took him away, and was never seen again. But what kind of people you meet during shipping! Real intelligentsia! And they try to hold on and not lose the habit of mental work. So, one of the prisoners introduced himself to the author: “Professor Timofeev-Ressovsky, president of the scientific and technical society of the 75th cell.” Our society gathers every day after morning rations near the left window. Could you give us some scientific information?

Solovki - Belomor - Kolyma...

Solovets, Pechora, Vorkuta - the entire northern part of the Archipelago was born from Solovki. But also in the Middle and Southern Urals, Transcaucasia, Central Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East. The White Sea Canal is one of the most famous gas chambers. It was glorified as a means of “reforging” and re-education. Maxim Gorky came to the construction site, where people were being killed by hunger, overcrowding and hard work. They were waiting for him to tell the truth. It is a known fact that they came out to greet Gorky with newspapers turned upside down: a sign that everything they say about the enthusiasm of the “reforging” is a lie. There was a young man who dared to tell the writers! about all the abuses of prisoners. After the guest left, the young man was shot.

And the great lover of truth wrote an admiring article about the construction of the canal. This channel was not needed. It was impossible to transport goods, people, or float timber along this shallow riverbed. Kolyma: the prisoners were so hungry that on the Zaroshy spring they ate the corpse of a horse, which had lain for more than a week in July, stank, and was crawling with flies and worms. At the Utiny mine, the prisoners ate half a barrel of grease brought to lubricate the wheelbarrows. No weekends, no holidays, no home, no property, no family. There are also loyal Stalinists in the camps. Here is one of them: “she wears a red scarf and only a red scarf in the camp, although she is already over forty (not a single camp girl or free Komsomol member wears such a scarf at the factory). She does not feel any resentment for the shooting of her husband or for her own eight years of imprisonment: “the long period of exclusion did not break my will in the struggle for Soviet power.”

Native life

“Roll a wheelbarrow (“OSO car, two handles, one wheel”). Squeeze the stretcher. Unload the bricks with bare hands (the skin is quickly removed from the fingers). Carry bricks on yourself with a “goat” (back stretcher). Break stone and coal from quarries, take clay and sand. Gum six cubes of gold-bearing rock and take it to the butara. Yes, just dig the earth, just gnaw the earth (siliceous soil and in winter). Chop coal underground. You can soak your sleepers (and your whole body) with creosote. ...But the oldest work in the Archipelago is logging. During the war years (with military food) the camp prisoners were called for three weeks of logging - dry execution. You will hate this forest, this beauty of the earth, sung in poetry and prose! You will enter under the pine and birch vaults with a shiver of disgust!” “Shalamov notes that the Decembrists in Nerchinsk had a lesson in extracting and loading three pounds of ore per person per day (forty-eight kilograms! - you can lift it at one time!), Shalamov in Kolyma - eight hundred pounds.” It’s a great success to get hired by the “morons”: kitchen workers, hairdressers, accountants (in a word, easy, but simply non-lethal work). In order to get rid of murderous work, some decide to make a “break” for themselves: to deliberately damage their health (scald, break a leg, eat some nasty thing). However, having suspected that the prisoner harmed himself on purpose, they would not treat him, and his fate would not be alleviated. Why were you imprisoned? For smiling while reading the Pravda newspaper. For reading Yesenin (it was believed that he was a counter-revolutionary poet). Because there are icons hanging on the wall. For telling a joke. For the fact that at peat mining he “blamed” the thin and tasteless soup, and therefore the Soviet regime. They also imprisoned “true” communists, who even in the camps believed that the “tiger” Stalin was right. Fight? Examples of resistance are rare. Thus, the Trotskyists went on a hunger strike for almost five months. But the “opportunists” were force-fed (through a hose). And the demands of the starving people were not met. There is no word in the Russian language worse than “sexots” (secret employees), or simply put: informers, informers. They recruit to become “informers”: if you are a Soviet person, you are obliged to inform. And if it’s non-Soviet, then “serve a second term” in inhumane conditions. Cases of incredible escapes were passed down from mouth to mouth. And even at that terrible time it happened that the fugitives were helped or at least not extradited. But those fugitives who were caught, returned to the zone and given a new sentence, were thrown into a punishment cell. Often the punishment cell was simply a wet pit where bread and fish were thrown from above into clay soaked by the rains. The “blatants” are losing their clothes and lives at cards—no, not their own, the “political ones.” The one who lost is attacked and beaten - everyone else sits silently, as if they don’t see anything, resistance is useless. Lessons are not Robin Hoods! “The thieves’ “romance” is false. When you need to steal from goons, they steal from goons! When it is necessary to remove the last foot wraps from someone who is freezing, they do not disdain them. Their great slogan is “you die today, and I die tomorrow!” They have their own laws of seniority, according to which their bosses are not elected at all, but upon entering a cell or zone, they are immediately recognized as the leader. These godmen also have a strong intellect, but always with a clear understanding of the thieves’ worldview and with a satisfied number of murders and robberies behind them. Juveniles are minors serving time. Children from the age of twelve could be tried for theft, violence, mutilation and murder (Article 58 was also implied). And for cutting ears of corn (for food) little children were not given less than 8 years of age! “And for a pocket of potatoes - one pocket of potatoes in children's trousers! - also eight! The zone quickly “re-educates” youngsters - they turn into small, arrogant predators. “In their minds there is no control flag between what is permitted and what is not permitted... For them, everything is good, what they want, and then everything is bad, what bothers them... It is simply impossible to penetrate youngsters with words, human speech was not developed for them, their ears are not they let in nothing they don’t need.”

The attempt to educate prisoners is essentially mocking: the loudspeakers on every post and in every barracks do not stop talking. They denounce the laggards and moderately praise the leaders. Political conversations are being held. Everyone laughs at them, but privately they are afraid of informers. Prominent scientists died in the camps. The father of Soviet space navigation, Korolev, was, however, taken to the “sharashka” (camp scientific laboratory), but as an aviation engineer. The leadership of the sharashka did not allow him to work on rockets, and he worked on them at night. A major Russian aerodynamicist and an extremely versatile scientific mind, Konstantin Ivanovich Strakhovich, after being transferred from a Leningrad prison, was in the camp as an auxiliary worker in a bathhouse. Artists with famous names passed through the Archipelago: Vadim Kozin, Tatyana Okunevskaya, Zoya Fedorova, Lidiya Ruslanova. The camp corrupts: “the more you do nasty things to people, the more they will respect you.” All the more precious are the examples of people who do not know how to bend spiritually - (those are deeply religious people or rare examples of extraordinary perseverance and honesty. “It was safer under Alexander II to store dynamite than under Stalin to shelter an orphan of an enemy of the people - however, how many children like this were Myali, "They saved us (let the children tell it for themselves). And there was secret help for families... But someone went to the Archipelago to protect their inconspicuous, unknown colleagues."

Stalin's hard labor and exile. Liberation

We stayed in a tent - in the terrible Norilsk frosts. Two hundred people were crammed into the tent at the Moscow Region. This is such “reasonable saving”: a hundred were at work, and a hundred were in the barracks. At work, the line was cordoned off by a convoy with dogs, they were beaten by all sorts of people and encouraged with rifle butts. On the way to the zone, they could, at a whim, be slashed with machine gun fire - and no one asked the soldiers for the dead. Twelve working hours chiseled rubble stone under the polar Norilsk blizzards. In half a day - 10 minutes of heating. At the expense of twelve hours of rest, they were led from zone to zone, built, searched. The barracks had no windows and was never ventilated. Prisoners were never allowed into the restroom, the dining room, or the medical unit. There was either a bucket or a feeding trough for everything. From twelve hours of chamber “leisure” there were barely four quiet hours left for sleep. Many different people rotted in hard labor - in particular, teachers who taught in schools during the occupation. Was it really necessary to leave the children—little children! - without a diploma? About 17 million peasants were ruined, sent for extermination, scattered throughout the country without the right to remember and name their parents. What about the believers? For twenty years in a row they persecuted the faith and closed churches.

Faith—pure, ardent—helped me endure. “On the entire planet and in all of history there was no regime more evil, bloody and at the same time more crafty and resourceful than the Bolshevik, self-called “Soviet.” “Why are we so irritated by Ukrainian nationalism, the desire of our brothers to speak and raise children, and write signs in their own language? Why are we so annoyed by their desire to separate? ... It pains me to write about this: Ukrainian and Russian are united in my blood, in my heart, and in my thoughts.” “These are Chechens too. They are difficult for the surrounding residents, speaking from Kazakhstan, they are rude, impudent, and they openly do not like Russians. But as soon as one showed independence and courage, the favor of the Chechens was immediately won! When it seems to us that we are little respected, we need to check whether we live like this.” The Chechens in exile lived by their own laws, everyone was afraid of them. Crimean Tatars were exiled. “Slender monotony! - this is the advantage of exiling nations at once! No special cases! No exceptions, no personal protests! Everyone goes obediently, because: you, and he, and me. Not only all ages and both sexes are going: those who are in the womb are also going - and they have already been exiled by the same Decree! “Was the Generalissimo preparing to exile anyone in 1953? Are they Jews? Who else besides them? Or all of Right Bank Ukraine? We will never know this great plan.” And now - it’s done! Stalin died! After the camp, the author was sent into exile in the settlement, and this was happiness for him: his own low dugout, the opportunity to write a play and work as a teacher of mathematics and physics at school. After the 20th Party Congress, Solzhenitsyn wrote a petition to reconsider his case. In the spring they began to remove the exile from the entire fifty-eighth. However, those released were not registered in big cities, and it was difficult for people with mental work to find work in their specialty, and not only in their specialty. This means it was impossible to get food cards. Where to live? What to live on? At least go back to camp. Those rehabilitated are still viewed with suspicion and contempt. “Liberation into this world was not envisioned this way. We pictured it according to Pushkin’s version: “And the brothers will give you the sword.” But such happiness is destined for rare generations of prisoners.” “Everything is left behind, but not everything. Rehabilitated, but no peace. It’s a rare week when sleep goes peacefully, otherwise the whole zone is dreaming. You jump up in tears or they wake you up in fright” (from the memoirs of a former prisoner). The atrocity of those who tortured and interrogated, who wrote false denunciations, has not been punished. Khrushchev's "thaw" was short-lived. The magazine “New World” published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (about the life of a prisoner), and not everyone accepted the truth that was in it. And soon an order was issued to remove the work from libraries.

“On the anniversary of my arrest, I arrange a “prisoner’s day” for myself: in the morning I cut off 650 pieces of bread, add two lumps of sugar, and pour unbrewed boiling water. And for lunch, please cook me gruel and a scoop of thin gruel. And how quickly I get into my old form: by the end of the day I collect crumbs in my mouth and lick the bowl.” “And the former prisoners will also have meetings when they are released. Fathers - with sons. Husbands - with wives. And good things rarely come from these meetings. For ten, fifteen years without us, our sons could not grow up in harmony with us: sometimes they were just strangers, sometimes they were enemies. And only a few women are rewarded for faithfully waiting for their husbands: they have lived so much apart, everything has changed in a person, only the last name is the same. He and she have too different life experiences - and it is no longer possible for them to get back together. Here - for films and novels for someone, but this book does not fit.” No, the judgment did not become righteous. “There was an archipelago. The archipelago remains. The archipelago will happen!”

Retelling of the first chapters

The famous Russian writer, public and political figure, relying on his own experience and the memories of eyewitnesses, talks about the so-called Gulag - a system of camps for citizens disliked by the Soviet regime, which consisted of several colony settlements and high-security prisons. According to Solzhenitsyn, there are no fictional characters in the work, and all the events he describes took place in reality.

The bulk of prisoners (“aboriginals”) in the camps were:

• dissidents;
• the thieves;
• the killers;
• traitors to the motherland.

There were often cases when innocent residents of the Soviet Union were sent to correctional labor without trial or investigation, taken from their beds in the dark so that their neighbors remained in the dark about the work of the punitive authorities. Entire families disappeared this way.

• “Matryonin’s Dvor”, a summary of the chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s story

The history of these truly creepy places dates back to 1917, when the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror in the country. Initially, the camps were conceived as facilities where dissidents, Trotskyists, White Guards and other persons who did not welcome the policies pursued by the state apparatus would be sent.

After Stalin came to power, representatives of the intelligentsia, as well as former party workers, became frequent guests of such prisons. Among those arrested were many dispossessed peasants and residents of the Asian regions of the country. A direct route to the camp was provided to those escaping from German captivity, policemen, spies, and even harmless rumor mongers.

The basis for arrest was most often Article 58 , which implied criminal liability for counter-revolutionary activities. It could lead to imprisonment for a term of 10 to 25 years.

According to eyewitnesses, the dictatorship of the Soviet government primarily pursued the goal of suppressing the will of a person, and proof of guilt faded into the background. To achieve this, the investigators did not disdain all kinds of torture. The investigative protocols were drawn up in such a way that the person who came to the attention of the NKVD officers, unwittingly, pulled others along with him.

In order not to frame anyone, Solzhenitsyn signed an indictment, because of which he, in fact, ended up in the Gulag.

The writer was very lucky, because until 1947, someone accused under Article 58 could have been sentenced to capital punishment - execution, but he got off with only eight years in prison and eternal exile.

Description of the life of the “aboriginals”

The forced labor law came into force in 1918. Since then, prison residents have been used as free labor. The situation of prisoners became even more unenviable after the country launched five-year plans designed to quickly increase the economic indicators of the USSR. Before 1930, approximately 40% of the inmates were engaged in socially useful work .

Deprived of normal food and proper sleep, the prisoners worked 12-14 hours a day. A large number of people died every day at construction sites. Separately, it is necessary to mention the camp medical unit. If before 1932 there were still doctors working there, after that there were only gravediggers.

Only a few made it out of the camp alive . It was almost impossible to escape from there. Residents of the surrounding settlements did not doubt the guilt of the prisoners, therefore, when they saw the fugitive, they immediately reported to the authorities, rather than trying to hide him. In addition, there was a good reward for the capture of such an adventurer.

The ever-hungry “natives” were influenced by the “kettle” - the distribution of rations in accordance with the fulfilled norm . When this technique ceased to produce results, teams were formed. The brigadier who failed the plan was sent to the punishment cell. The author experienced all this firsthand in the New Jerusalem camp, where he was transported in 1945.

It is worth noting that female prisoners endured prison conditions more easily than men, and in the camps they were quickly sent to the next world. Pregnant women were sent to special camps. As soon as the mother stopped breastfeeding, she was taken back to the camp, and the child ended up in an orphanage.

Of course, snitching was common in prisons. The one who made a deal with the prison administration regularly informed on his comrades.

In the zone they called “morons” those who managed to get a good job and were always well-fed and clean. Among these lucky ones were cooks, hairdressers, paramedics, and storekeepers.

"Gulag Archipelago"

The Gulag Archipelago is a system of camps spread throughout the country. The “natives” of this archipelago were people who had been arrested and had an unfair trial. People were arrested, mostly at night, and half-naked, 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 people. At first, only non-Party members were imprisoned, but with Stalin’s rise to power, high-profile trials broke out: the case of doctors, engineers, food industry pests, clergy, and those responsible for Kirov’s death. Behind the high-profile processes were hidden many secret affairs that filled the Archipelago. In addition, many “enemies of the people” were arrested, entire nationalities were exiled, and dispossessed peasants were exiled to villages. The war did not stop these flows; on the contrary, they intensified due to the Russified Germans, rumor mongers and people who had been in captivity or behind the lines. After the war, they were joined by emigrants and real traitors - Vlasovites and Krasnov Cossacks. Those who filled it also became “natives” of the Archipelago - the top of the party and the NKVD were periodically thinned out.

The basis for 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 under Section 58 was not to prove guilt, but to break a person’s will. For this purpose, torture was widely used, which was limited only by the imagination of the investigator. The investigation protocols were drawn up in such a way that the arrested person unwittingly pulled others along with him. Alexander Solzhenitsyn also went through a similar investigation. In order not to harm others, he signed an indictment condemning him to ten years of imprisonment and eternal exile.

The very first punitive body was the Revolutionary Tribunal, created 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 executions did not last long. The death penalty was abolished in 1927 and left only for the 58th. In 1947, Stalin replaced the “capital punishment” 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 TONS appeared - special purpose prisons and stages. People got to the Archipelago in different ways: in wagons, on barges, ships and on foot. Those arrested were transported to prisons in “funnels”—black vans. The role of the ports of the Archipelago was played by transfers, temporary camps consisting of tents, dugouts, barracks or plots of land in the open air. During all transfers, specially selected urks, or “socially close” ones, helped keep the “political” in check. Solzhenitsyn visited the Krasnaya Presnya transit station in 1945.

Emigrants, peasants and “small nations” were transported in red trains. Most often, such trains stopped in an empty place, in the middle of the steppe or taiga, and the convicts themselves built a camp. Particularly important prisoners, mainly scientists, were transported by special convoy. This is how Solzhenitsyn was transported. He called himself a nuclear physicist, and after Krasnaya Presnya he was transported to Butyrki.

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

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

There was no escape, but it was almost impossible to run “into the void” without 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 “political” ones were actually guilty. In addition, they paid well for capturing those who escaped from the camp.

By 1937, the Archipelago had expanded to cover the entire country. Camps for the 38th appeared in Siberia, the Far East and Central Asia. Each camp was run by two bosses: one in charge of production, the other in charge of labor. The main way of influencing the “aboriginals” was “cauldron” - distribution of rations according to the fulfilled norm. When the “pot” stopped helping, brigades were created. For failure to carry out the plan, the brigadier was put in a punishment cell. Solzhenitsyn fully experienced all this in the New Jerusalem camp, where he ended up on August 14, 1945.

The life of an “aboriginal” consisted of hunger, cold and endless work. The main job for prisoners was logging, which during the war was called “dry execution”. The prisoners lived in tents or dugouts, where it was impossible to dry wet clothes. These homes were often searched, and people were suddenly transferred to other jobs. In such conditions, prisoners very quickly turned into “goons”. The camp medical unit practically did not participate in the lives of prisoners. So, in the Burepolomsky camp in February, 12 people died every night, and their things were used again.

Women prisoners endured prison more easily than men, and died faster in the camps. The most beautiful ones 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, having 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. “Youngsters”, children under 12 years old, also stayed in the camps. There were separate colonies for them too. Another “character” of the camps was the camp “moron,” a person 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 on the Archipelago staged strikes, unfortunately, without results - they were not supported by public opinion. The Soviet people knew nothing at all, and that was the essence of the Gulag. Some prisoners, however, remained loyal to the party and Stalin to the last. It was from such orthodox people that informers or sex workers turned out - the eyes and ears of the Cheka-KGB. They tried to recruit Solzhenitsyn as well. He signed an undertaking, but did not engage in denunciation.

A person who lived to the end of his sentence was rarely released. More often than not, he became a repeater. The prisoners could only escape. Caught fugitives were punished. The Correctional Labor Code of 1933, which was in force until the early 60s, prohibited isolation wards. By this time, other types of intra-camp punishments had been invented: RURs (High Security Companies), BURs (High Security Brigades), ZURs (High Security Zones) and ShIZOs (Penal Insulators).

Each camp zone was certainly surrounded by a village. Many villages over time turned into large cities, such as Magadan or Norilsk. The camp world was inhabited by families of officers and guards, vohras, and many different adventurers and rogues. Despite the free labor, the camps were very expensive for the state. In 1931, the Archipelago was transferred to self-sufficiency, 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. Convict 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 litter”, but before they were also Soviet people. The difference between a 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 entire 58th was sitting in them. The prisoners were called by numbers and given the hardest work. Solzhenitsyn got the special camp Stepnoy, then Ekibastuz.

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

Every “native” of the Archipelago faced exile after the end of his term. Until 1930, this was a “minus”: the liberated person could choose his place of residence, with the exception of some cities. After 1930, exile became a separate type of isolation, and from 1948 it became a layer between the zone and the rest of the world. Each exile could end up back in the camp at any moment. 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 survive. The 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. Retold by Yulia Peskovaya

Expansion of the network of camps

Each camp zone was certainly surrounded by a village. Some settlements grew over time, turning into large cities such as Norilsk or Magadan. Not far from the camps lived officers and guards with their families. Despite the free labor, the maintenance of such zones was a very significant expense item.

In 1931, the archipelago was transferred to self-sufficiency, but this did not fundamentally change the financial situation, since the guards needed a salary, and the bosses needed the opportunity to steal excess.

Since 1943, criminals and enemies of the people, in addition to the camp, could now face hard labor or the gallows. The convict camps were located near the mines, and being there was like death. The most terrible work you can think of was mainly done by:

• policemen;
• burgomasters;
• "German bedding."

Since 1948, prisoners have been feared by a peculiar symbiosis of the camp zone and hard labor - Special Camps.

Those convicted under Article 58 were sent there. Solzhenitsyn had the opportunity to spend time first in a special camp in Stepnoy, and then in Ekibastuz.

Contents of the final part

Few of the prisoners had the strength or desire to delve into philosophical reasoning and think about lofty things, not to mention writing on a piece of paper what was troubling his soul. All thoughts were occupied with where to get a crust of bread. Spiritual decay did not affect only those who managed to receive appropriate upbringing and education before entering the camp.

Mental work helped prisoners not to pay attention to what metamorphoses were happening to the body. Nevertheless, keeping your manuscripts, if they were not laudatory odes to the “leader of the peoples,” was extremely dangerous - you had to learn the texts by heart.

All those who served time and managed to survive in the archipelago faced indefinite exile, which for many prisoners was tantamount to salvation, since relatives and friends often refused to accept former prisoners, they had to lie about their past, and it was almost impossible to get a decent job.

Free people were also in constant tension . Fear for oneself and loved ones, lack of civil rights and infringement of freedom contributed to the spread of such a concept in society as snitching. In short, lies and betrayal have become faithful companions that guarantee security.

Many hoped that after Stalin’s death the camps, which crippled a huge number of human destinies, would disappear forever, but this did not happen. After the amnesty, Solzhenitsyn began receiving letters from former prisoners who convinced him that the Gulag would remain as long as the system that gave birth to it existed.

The novel, which the writer worked on while already being released, is replete with a huge amount of shocking information about the victims of Stalin’s camps. However, an analysis of archival documents shows that the figures given by the writer, including the total number of those repressed, are greatly exaggerated, and some historical facts are distorted.

Before you start reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, you should familiarize yourself with the table of contents of the book to find out which pages you should especially focus on.

Summary

Part 1. Prison industry

Chapter 1. Arrest

“Planes fly hourly, ships sail, trains rumble” towards the Archipelago. People get here in different ways, depending on what role is destined for them. The managers of the Archipelago come directly “through the schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the guards come by conscription through the military registration and enlistment offices, and those who are destined to die “must certainly and only go through arrest.”

Chapter 2. History of our sewer system

During the Stalin era, the prison sewer system burst to its limit three times. These were three huge streams of arrests - in the 29-30s, in the 37-38s and in the 44-46s.

However, the filling of this stinking sewer began much earlier. The first blow came to the cadets in 1917, when Lenin proclaimed the idea of ​​“cleansing the Russian land of all harmful insects.” Soon the cadets who were arrested and executed without trial or investigation were joined by the Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and representatives of the intelligentsia.

The surplus appropriation system of 1919 met with “everywhere village resistance,” and for two years the flow of arrested peasants did not dry up.

Beginning in 1922, the church was targeted, and in the course of the work against the counter-revolution, many clergy were arrested, from metropolitans to deacons.

In the 20s, there was an active search and arrest of white officers and their families, former officials, dispossessed people, and “agricultural pests.”

In 1937, a powerful blow was dealt to the leadership of the party, the military command and the top of the NKVD itself. The universal measure for determining guilt was Article 58, which contained 14 points under which any person could be arrested.

During the Great Patriotic War, the flow of those arrested increased due to the organizers of the panic, Germans who lived in the USSR, prisoners and those who visited the occupied territories.

In the post-war years, “children of enemies of the people” were arrested, as well as “repeaters” - unfortunate people who had already survived 10 years of the Gulag

Chapter 3. Investigation

The investigation under Article 58 has always pursued a single goal - to irrevocably break a person, suppress his will and release him “already a ready-made native of the Archipelago.” For this purpose, the most cruel, most sophisticated tortures were used, which would have been more appropriate during the time of the Holy Inquisition than in the enlightened 20th century.

Chapter 4. Blue edgings

The investigators of the Blue Establishment were required to “only strictly comply with directives and be callous to suffering.” One of the favorite sayings of the Blue Edges was this: “If there were a person, we would create a business!” But even the inviolable Bodies were periodically purged, and their leaders ended their lives as sadly as thousands of prisoners.

Chapter 5. First camera - first love

Among those arrested, the first cell is always of special importance, “in which you met your own kind, doomed to the same fate.” It is a powerful separator of human life BEFORE and AFTER.

Chapter 6. That spring

1945 became the year of Russian captives, whom the calculating Motherland betrayed, “and THREE TIMES.” The first time betrayal took place on the battlefield, when the country's leadership “did everything they could to lose the war.” For the second time, the Motherland betrayed, “leaving to die in captivity.” And the third, most vile betrayal took place after the war. The Motherland lured the prisoners into its arms, “throwing a noose already at the border.” Such meanness has never yet had examples in the history of the country - “to betray your soldiers and declare them traitors.”

Chapter 7. In the engine room

OSO - Special Meeting - “turned out to be the most convenient cutlet machine.” It did not give a person a judicial sentence, but freely deprived him of property, titles and awards, and the right of correspondence. The man seemed to disappear from the face of the earth, and there was nowhere and no one to complain to. The OSO obeyed “only the Minister of Internal Affairs, Stalin and Satan.”

Chapter 8. Law-child

Despite the fact that there were courts in the country, “parallel to them and independently of them, extrajudicial killings occurred on their own.” This official term first appeared in 1918, and has remained popular for a long time since then. Extrajudicial reprisals were carried out by workers' and peasants' Revolutionary Tribunals, which were created for immediate reprisals against agitators and deserters.

Chapter 9. The law matures

In the early 20s, the most high-profile trials were the following: the Glavtop trial, which concerned engineers, the Moscow church trial, the Petrograd church trial, the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.

Chapter 10. The law has matured

Lenin saw a serious problem in the rotten bourgeois intelligentsia. To eliminate it, “deportation abroad instead of execution” was used, and at the end of 1922, “about three hundred of the most prominent Russian humanitarians” were sent to Europe. Until 1931, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was directly involved in many high-profile cases. However, open trials were too troublesome and costly, and Stalin abandoned them, and in 1938 Bukharin was shot.

Chapter 11. To the highest degree

In Russia, the death penalty “has a jagged history.” In 1917, it was abolished, but a year later it was restored “as a new era of executions.” It was not always the case that death row was carried out by people who had committed a serious crime - “the darkness of the grayest people sat out in the death chambers for the most ordinary actions.” The death chambers of the 1937 model were a terrible sight. Up to twenty-eight death row prisoners were crammed into solitary confinement, standing closely together, unable to even simply raise their hands - “and so they were squeezed for weeks and MONTHS,” suffering from hunger, cold, terrible stuffiness and lack of medical care.

Chapter 12. Turzak

By 1938, new terms were officially confirmed: turzak (imprisonment) and TON (special purpose prison).

After the revolution, the attitude towards prisoner hunger strikes changed dramatically - if earlier prisoners could demand certain benefits by refusing food, then “since the 30s they stopped accepting legal statements about hunger strikes.”

Until 1931-33, food in prisons was still relatively decent, but after that it deteriorated sharply. Since 1947, constant hunger has become a common condition for prisoners. Lack of sunlight, cold, lack of fresh air, ban on visits with relatives - this is an incomplete list of the “charms” of the Turzak. However, staying in TONs was a real resort, because after them the stages began.

Part 2. Perpetual motion

Chapter 1. Ships of the Archipelago

“From the Bering Strait and almost to the Bosphorus” the islands of the Archipelago are scattered. For the transportation of invisible slaves, there are “large ports - transit prisons”, smaller ports - camp transit points. To transport prisoners, special “closed steel wagon-zaki ships” have been created, which run on a schedule. This system has been created for decades.

A zak car is an ordinary carriage in which the compartments for prisoners are separated from the corridor by bars. Each compartment holds 22 people - and this is far from the limit. During the entire journey, which takes up to three weeks, the prisoners are fed “only herring or dry roach” and are not given water.

But the most terrible thing is the mixing of political prisoners with thieves, who make the gesture “I’ll gouge out your eyes, you bastard!” - their whole philosophy and faith."

Chapter 2. Ports of the Archipelago

Old-timers of the Gulag can recall several dozen such transfers. They all have in common a long wait in the rain or in the sun, a humiliating strip search, fetid latrines, cold baths, dark and damp cells, raw, almost liquid bread and inedible gruel. People can remain in transit for months. It’s hard, but newcomers really need the transfer - it “peeles and peels” and helps them adapt to life in the camp.

Chapter 3. Slave caravans

In the 30s, when there were especially many arrested, they were brought to the Archipelago in red trains that went into the void - where they stop, immediately “a new island of the Archipelago rises from the sea, steppe or taiga.”

The boat stages had their own specifics - “people were thrown into the trough of the barge, and there they lay in bulk and moved like crayfish in a basket.” Sentinels guarded them from above. Having been thrown into the tundra, such prisoners were no longer fed, leaving them to “die alone with nature.”

There were also stages on foot - prisoners had to cover a distance of up to 25 kilometers per day.

Chapter 4. From island to island

Occasionally, prisoners are transported alone, in a so-called special convoy. This most comfortable type of transportation is available “by appointment to high-ranking persons.”

In the Archipelago there are “tiny paradise islands” where it is always warm, satisfying, and “the work is mental and a hundred times secret.” A prisoner could hope for a miracle and survive in the conditions of the Archipelago only if he served his sentence on one of these islands.

Part 3. Destructive labor

Chapter 1. Fingers of Aurora

“The archipelago was born under the gunfire of Aurora,” when the new leadership of the country decided to change the army, police, courts and prisons. On July 6, 1918, after the successful suppression of the revolt of the left Socialist Revolutionaries, the foundation of the future Archipelago was laid. It was necessary to provide protection for the young republic, and the most suitable option was the creation of concentration camps.

After the end of the civil war, all places of detention were united into the Main Directorate of Places of Detention - GUMSAK. Then it was renamed GUITU - Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Institutions, and only then - Gulag.

Chapter 2. The archipelago emerges from the sea

In 1923, the monks were expelled from the Solovetsky Monastery, and the Administration of Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps - USLON - was founded in the empty building. As punishment in SLON they used improvised means. In the summer, prisoners were tied to trees to be eaten by mosquitoes. In the punishment cells you had to sit all day on poles as thick as your arm. Work without rest in severe frost, when your clothes are a bag with holes for your head and arms.

Chapter 3. The archipelago metastasizes

Beginning in 1928, SLON camps began to confidently conquer new territories, moving across the Russian North. New communication routes began to appear and railway lines were built. Historically, the White Sea Canal was chosen “for the first great construction of the Archipelago.” Stalin needed a great, and certainly urgent, construction project, and he got it. 20 months and “not a penny of foreign currency” were allotted for the construction of the canal. There was no basic technology, and everything was done by the hands of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.

Chapter 4. The archipelago turns to stone

By 1937, the Archipelago had become even stronger. Work collectives, meetings with relatives, vocational courses for prisoners were prohibited, and even corpses were not released for funerals. Any connection with the outside world was cut off. Representatives of thieves and punks who abused the prisoners under Article 58 with impunity became the internal camp police.

“From the first days of the war, the liberation of Article 58 was stopped, second terms began to be imposed, food became prohibitively scarce.

Chapter 5. What the Archipelago stands on

The archipelago was born out of economic need. The new state, which sought to “strengthen itself in a short time,” needed an unpretentious and free labor force that did not need families, education, or medical care. Such power could only be obtained by “swallowing one’s sons.” The theoretical justification was simple and logical - daily hard work for 12-14 hours a day is humane and “leads to his correction.”

Chapter 6. The Nazis were brought

For the prisoners under Article 58, a nickname was invented, “very approved by the authorities” - “fascists”. Sometimes they were transferred to camps where the barracks contained only bare clapboards, without mattresses, pillows or linen. You had to carry all your modest belongings on yourself, otherwise they would certainly be stolen. Wake up at the beginning of five in the morning, breakfast - nettle gruel without a drop of fat or even salt.

Chapter 7. Native life

The whole life of every native of the Archipelago boils down to endless work, cold, hunger and cunning. The camp medical unit also deserves special attention. If before 1932 doctors still worked there, then after that they were exclusively gravediggers. Medical care was not provided to self-harmers, and even seriously ill people were not released from work. There is “no linen or medicine” in the medical unit. Liberation from this horror is only death.

Chapter 8. Woman in the camp

Surprisingly, women endured the investigation more easily than men. They did not suffer as much from hunger - it turned out that “equal prison rations for everyone and prison trials turn out to be easier on average for women.” But camp life became a real test for them. Immediately upon arrival at the camp, local aristocrats “look at undressed women as a commodity,” but for many of them, especially under Article 58, “this step is more unbearable than death.”

The birth of a child gave the woman some relief from work during the feeding period. Then the child was taken to an orphanage, and the mother was sent to the stage. Work was never divided into women's and men's work - women's hard work in logging was a common occurrence.

Chapter 9. Assholes

On the Archipelago they called those who “managed not to share the common doomed fate” as idiots. Such lucky people were cooks, storekeepers, hairdressers, paramedics, doctors, engineers, and accountants. They were always well-fed, cleanly dressed and shod.

Chapter 10. Instead of political

Article 58 ceased to be “political”, becoming an article of counter-revolutionaries, that is, “enemies of the people.” Ordinary people were imprisoned for the slightest offense. Denunciations have become commonplace.

Chapter 11. Well-Intentioned

Among the political prisoners were those for whom “the communist faith was internal, sometimes the only meaning of the rest of their lives.” As a rule, such people did not hold high positions in the wild, and did not boast of their political views.

But there were also those who showed their ideological convictions in every possible way. Before their arrest, they held high positions, and they had the hardest time in the camp.

Chapter 12. Knock - knock - knock

The ears and eyes of the Cheka-KGB were informers, but at first “they were called in a businesslike way: secret employees.” Very quickly their official name was shortened - this is how the Seksots appeared. The Archipelago had its own distinctions: in prison such people were called mother hens, and in the camp they were called informers. It was as easy as shelling pears to become one - all you had to do was apply a little pressure, threaten or promise, and the person, already broken, would agree to anything.

Chapter 13. After handing over the skin, hand over the second!

The streams of prisoners who have already found themselves in the power of the Archipelago do not find peace. They often go through the reinvestigation process again. Second terms were especially popular in 1937-1938, as well as during the war. In order not to end up on the front line, the camp bosses “solved” terrible crimes and conspiracies, thereby providing themselves with a warm, and most importantly, a safe place.

Chapter 14. Change your destiny!

It is impossible to survive “in this wild world,” and the only means of salvation was escape. However, few decided on it: some hoped for an amnesty, some simply did not have the strength due to constant hunger, some resigned themselves to their bitter fate. The merciless geography of the Archipelago also became an obstacle.

Chapter 15. Shlitzo, BURs, SAMs

Until the early 60s, the Correctional Labor Code prohibited isolation wards. Other types of punishment in the camp were very popular: BURs (high-security brigades), ZURs (high-security zones) and ShIZOs (punishment cells). BUR was an ordinary barracks, fenced with barbed wire. Guilty prisoners - believers, especially stubborn ones, caught fugitives - were assigned to ZURs, where the hardest work and reduced rations awaited them. But the worst thing was to end up in a punishment cell - cold, dark and damp, where 200-300 grams of inedible food were given out per day.

Chapter 16. Socially close

All this did not apply to murderers, rapists and thieves, whose motto was “You die today, and I will die tomorrow!” At the same time, for state theft, be it “three potatoes from a collective farm,” they gave a sentence of 10 years, and for robbery of an apartment - up to one year. Such a measure of Stalin’s power seemed to make them understand: “Don’t steal from me!” steal from private individuals!

Chapter 17. Youngsters

A considerable part of all the prisoners in the Archipelago were minors. Teenagers were tried “for theft, violence, mutilation and murder” from the age of twelve. In 1935, by decree of Stalin, these children had to be “tried TO THE ENTIRE LENGTH of the code,” up to and including execution. Even if the crime was committed “not intentionally, but through negligence.”

Chapter 18. Muses in the Gulag

Re-education in the camps occurs very actively, but not through “official means through the EHF” - the cultural and educational part. All that remained for its employees was to organize amateur performances and distribute letters. Re-education took place “under the influence of each other and circumstances.”

Chapter 19. Prisoners as a nation

As practice shows, prisoners “are a completely different biological type compared to homo sapiens.” Life on the Archipelago is so different from the usual human life that it “invites a person to either immediately adapt or immediately die.” Those who adapt rarely return to their original state.

Chapter 20. Dog service

It is not for nothing that the chiefs of the Archipelago are compared to dogs - “their service is the same as that of guard dogs, and their service is connected with dogs.” They all share common features: excessive arrogance, tyranny, stupidity, greed, cruelty. If the camp guards occasionally showed human traits, then among the officers - never.

Chapter 21. Camp World

Not a single camp zone can exist on its own - “there must be a free settlement near it.” Some of them quickly disappeared, others grew into large cities (Bratsk, Norilsk, Magadan, Balkhash). The camp zones are the places of residence of camp officers and guards with their families, former prisoners, and stray adventurers.

Chapter 22. We are building

The archipelago was of great importance for the state from a political point of view. However, economically it was completely unprofitable - not only was the Gulag not self-sustaining, but it also required regular investments from the state treasury.

Part 4. Soul and barbed wire

Chapter 1. Ascent

Since ancient times it has been the custom that a criminal needs punishment so that he can repent and cleanse his own soul. However, for the thieves, “their crimes are not a reproach for them, but valor,” while the rest did not have any corpus delicti. Once in the Gulag, everyone strived for one thing - to survive, and everyone followed their own path to this cherished goal.

Chapter 2. Or a plant?

The overwhelming majority of prisoners did not have the strength or desire to think about lofty things - all their thoughts were occupied with bread. Only those who had an appropriate upbringing before their arrest did not deteriorate spiritually.

Chapter 3. Muzzled will

Free people knew no peace either. Constant fear for oneself and loved ones, lack of rights and helplessness became the reason for the development of such a concept in a free society as snitching. Betrayal and lies became faithful companions that ensured safety.

Chapter 4. Several destinies

In this chapter, the author provides biographies of some of the prisoners.

Part 5. Hard labor

Chapter 1. The Doomed

“In April 1943,” 26 years after the abolition of hard labor, Stalin reintroduced it. The first hard labor in Vorkuta was an outright gas chamber, and was intended only for “those doomed to suffer longer and to work some more before death.” There were also women in convict camps.

Chapter 2. Breeze of revolution

In the post-war period, “twenty-five-year sentences created a new quality in the prison world” - people were emasculated, they had nothing to lose, and over time, “free, no longer constrained, unthreatened” became the property of the prisoners. It turned out that you can live in prison and so – “fight? snap? say what you think out loud?”

Chapter 3. Chains, chains...

However, the “wind of change” blew only during transfers. He did not blow over the high fences of special camps. There was tight security, the most severe discipline and punishment in the form of tight handcuffs for the slightest offense. Prisoners were assigned numbers, and they had to respond only to them, forgetting their first and last names.

Chapter 4. Why did you endure?

Of course, in Tsarist Russia those dissatisfied with the authorities were punished, but they did it relatively humanely. And even among the Decembrists, only five officers were hanged, and the rest were sent to hard labor, while the soldiers were forgiven. Was such punishment possible under Stalin?

Chapter 5. Poetry under a slab, truth under a stone

Mental work greatly helped the prisoners under Article 58 not to notice what metamorphoses were happening to the body. However, it was impossible to store your work if it was “not a poem about Stalin” - you had to learn everything by heart.

Chapter 6. Convinced fugitive

A convinced fugitive is “someone who does not doubt for a minute that a person cannot live behind bars.” All his thoughts are occupied only with the upcoming escape, the rules of which are quite simple. It is more difficult to run alone, but more reliably - no one will give you away. It is easier to escape from a facility than from a residential area. To escape successfully, you need to know the geography and people of the surrounding area.

Chapter 7. White kitten

The story of the escape of George Tenno.

Chapter 8. Escapes with morality and escapes with engineering

The guards viewed escapes from the correctional labor camp as “a spontaneous phenomenon, as mismanagement, inevitable in an overly large economy.” Things were different in the Special Camps, where every escape was perceived as “a major spy crossing the state border.” Strengthened, heavily armed guards, kilometers of barbed wire, and dug ditches made escapes from Special Camps much more difficult, but even here they happened.

Chapter 9. Sons with machine guns

At first, the natives of the Archipelago were guarded by Red Army soldiers, then by self-guards and old guards. But then came “young vigorous boys, born in the first five-year plan, who had never seen war.” They were given the right to shoot without warning, and for each prisoner killed they received a month's salary and vacation. Thus began a competition between them - who can kill the most.

Chapter 10. When the ground in the zone is on fire

There were also rebellions on the Archipelago, but all of them have long turned into a myth - they are “carefully cut out of history, stitched and licked, their participants were destroyed, distant witnesses were scared, the reports of the suppressors were burned.” Thousands of dissatisfied people met in special camps, and this began to lead to riots. For the first time in all time, the thieves stopped feeling like a camp force, and it became easier for the political ones to breathe. But there has not yet been a “real shift in consciousness.”

Chapter 11. Breaking chains by touch

The “contagion of freedom” began to spread throughout the Archipelago. Strong unrest began among the prisoners - “in the early 50s, the Stalinist camp system came to a crisis.” However, the 1953 amnesty released only thieves. It became clear that “Stalin’s death does not change anything” and we must continue to fight for our freedom.

Chapter 12. Forty days of Kengir

Hard labor was weakened only after the fall of Beria. After the murder of an innocent evangelist prisoner in Kengir, one of the largest riots in the history of the Gulag began. To the surprise of the camp elite, even the criminals began to respect the political ones, many of whom went over to the side of their former opponents.

Part 6. Link

Chapter 1. Exile of the first years of freedom

The Soviet Republic could not do without exile, where all socially dangerous citizens were poisoned. Soon they began to combine exile with forced labor, relying on the principle of socialism - “He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.”

Chapter 2. Man's plague

A lot has been written about the losses of the Soviet people during the war years, but there are no books about “that silent, treacherous plague that devoured us 15 million men.” In the autumn of 1929, the exterminating peasant plague began - confiscation and further eviction to uninhabited Siberian lands. Whole families of peasants died out.

Chapter 3. The link thickens

The exile became a kind of layer between the Archipelago and the USSR. In some villages it was forbidden to start families, in others they were forced to get married within two weeks in order to tie the exile more tightly to the place. Escape from exile was punishable by up to 20 years of hard labor.

Chapter 4. Link of Nations

The first settlers were Koreans, who in 1937 were “transferred from the Far East to Kazakhstan.” Then it was the turn of the Leningrad Finns and Estonians, sent to the Karelo-Finnish border. The scale of resettlement increased, and soon Volga Germans, Western Ukrainians, Balts, Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Karachais, Kurds, and Balkars were uprooted from their homes. The complete extermination of peoples was carried out “in forty-eight, twenty-four and even one and a half hours.”

Chapter 5

The exile is very difficult, but for the native of the Archipelago “a quiet prisoner’s dream of exile is illuminated,” which helps him withstand all the horror of camp life. Over time, it became clear that even those rare lucky prisoners of Article 58 - upon leaving the gates, found themselves not free, but in exile - “the authorities, by right of the strong, will now trample, crush and strangle” until the last breath of the political prisoner.

Chapter 6. Exiled prosperity

In exile, the former prisoner’s “human needs grow rapidly,” as if he wakes up after a long sleep and remembers that he is still human.

Chapter 7. Prisoners on the loose

After the long-awaited release, the passport was forever spoiled by the 39th passport article, according to which “they are not registered in any town, they are not accepted for any good job.” These were not people liberated in the full sense of the word, but only “deprived of exile.” They found themselves in a vicious circle in which there was no work without registration, and work was not given without registration.

Part 7. There is no Stalin

Chapter 1. How it is now over the shoulder

The natives of the Archipelago did not lose hope that sooner or later the world would learn the truth about them - “after all, sooner or later the truth will be told about everything that happened in history.” Solzhenitsyn, who “considered himself the chronicler of the Archipelago,” was lucky, and he was able to spill a little truth before the iron seals closed again for many years. A breakthrough was made, and people learned about the existence of the Gulag.

Chapter 2. Rulers change, the Archipelago remains

After the fall of Beria, the special camps were doomed, but the system as a whole continued to flourish, despite the change of rulers. The new-style camps differed from Stalin’s only in the composition of the prisoners - there were noticeably fewer Article 58 prisoners, but there were still many victims of injustice.

Chapter 3. The Law Today

There were never political prisoners in the USSR - “all the millions of the Fifty-Eighth were common criminals.” After Stalin’s death, an order was given: ““mass riots” should not be considered politics.” But although there were no more political prisoners, the flow of them did not become less. Just as the judicial system has not changed. Laws, principles and decrees have been updated, “but the country does not live by them, they are not arrested by them, they are not judged by them, they are not exported by them.”

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“Minor” - summary