The first two volumes I read two years ago. The final and third volume however I picked back up last week and just finished.
These books are remarkable. They are an insider account of the Gulag.
If you don’t know, Solzhenitsyn made the mistake of penning a critical remark about Stalin in a private letter to his brother. For that, he was yanked out of the front lines in WWII, where he was an officer in the Red Army, and made to serve 8 years in the Gulag, and more in exile.
The Gulag was a system of death-by-labor. Constructed shortly after the October Revolution, it became a form of slave labor throughout the Soviet Union. People were raked into it for the most innocuous of “crimes”; a denunciation from your neighbor was enough. Millions and millions. Most perished; some during the initial torture of interrogation, but most in the camps themselves, where they were systematically starved, beaten, and most of all, literally worked to death.
It’s impossible to summarize the “book”, since together they weigh in at nearly 2000 pages.
But Solzhenitsyn’s writing is bold, funny, and biting. He wrote it in secret; he never kept the whole manuscript in one place, for fear of it being seized (which portions of it eventually were). It may not all make sense unless you already have read both about the history of the Soviet Union, as well as the history and ideology of Marxism and Marxist movements. But regardless, it’s a masterful work.
I’ll share with you just one quote, one that amazed me two years ago when I first read it, and has stuck with me since. It comes just after he admits his own moral failings shortly after beginning his term in the camps. How could someone who endured such abuse have the capacity for introspection and spiritual growth — for anything other than black-and-white hatred and summary judgements?
So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its cover shut right now.
If only it were so simple! 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 the human heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good.
This is a book that will haunt you. The misery within is beyond imagination. But the wisdom is hard won and sorely needed.