Nazi squads used to exterminate only Jewsand his suspected opponents. But if there was virtually no evidence against a non-Jewish prisoner, he was released. That is, there was no terror on common Germans in Nazi Germany. Non-political people continued to live without fear. This was not the case in the Soviet Union at all. There was no question of releasing the person who was captured. entire soviet systemthe Communist Party was completely demobilized. There was no place in it for any human value.
Legacy of the Gulag Archipelago-3
The first hundreds of pages of ‘Gulag Archipelago’ contain innumerable accounts of someone’s arrest and interrogation. All with names, places, etc. All this was conveyed to Solzhenitsyn after 1962 by hundreds of prisoners and former prisoners, narrating their experiences and eye-witnesses. When Solzhenitsyn became famous after the publication of his first work ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’. He wrote from his own experience and that of other prisoners, “There are as many centers of the world as there are people in the world”. Every person sees the happiness and sorrow of the whole world only by keeping himself at the center. Anything different from this is an exception.
That is why, unless you are arrested, you cannot even dream of what could be the condition of a person who has fallen into the hands of the Soviet ‘blue caps’. The very first chapter of ‘Gulag…’ is: “Arrest”. From where the journey of a prisoner began, which ended like the death of a dog for millions of Russians. For more than four decades. Once a person went missing, that is, he was picked up by the secret police at night, then people in the neighborhood would think that his story was over. His family also became instant untouchables, because showing sympathy meant a direct threat of the same fate. The wives of those arrested often immediately filed divorce petitions with the government to protect themselves and their children. So, in theory, socialism brings people together and closer. In fact, in Soviet socialism every person was completely alone, helpless!
Why was there such widespread repression, unrelenting suspicion, and cruelty? What was the point of spending huge state energy and resources on arbitrariness, wholesale arrests, long sentences, not considering the arrested person innocent under any circumstances, forcing everyone to confess to the crime and sending them towards almost certain death? In the 1930s alone, such a large number of people held top government positions themselves – government ministers, members of the Party’s Supreme Politburo, parliamentarians, military generals, ambassadors, prominent scientists, high-level Party secretaries, editors of Party newspapers, etc. – was shot after confessing to being a ‘foreign agent’ that one can understand that if such a large number of people are involved in a government
It was impossible for such a government to survive if high ranking people were assassins. In fact, it is one of the ironies of communism that most of the big communists who held high positions, while falsely admitting to being ‘foreign agents’, thought that by doing so they were protecting and serving the party and the country! But this madness was also a catastrophic economic waste. The unproductive expenditure of millions of rubles annually on huge arrangements of secret police, interrogation, prisons, transport, security personnel, barbed wire, watch-towers, guards, etc. across the country had no justification other than the fact that without this the communist power would find itself Always felt insecure. Not only from our own people, but also from thousands of members of our own monopoly party! Because soon after seizing power, he realized that he had no method to actually create even a semblance of the bookish imagination with which he had claimed to create a happy society free from exploitation by the proletariat, i.e. the communist dictatorship. . Therefore, they never found any solution other than forcibly and ruthlessly holding on to power.
Here the comparison with Hitler’s Nazis is also interesting. Nazi squads exterminated only Jews, and their suspected opponents. But if there was virtually no evidence against a non-Jewish prisoner, he was released. That is, there was no terror on common Germans in Nazi Germany. Non-political people continued to live without fear. This was not the case in the Soviet Union at all. There was no question of releasing the person who was captured. It was a goal in itself to maintain the terror of power over everyone, throughout the country. Then, every person, Russian or non-Russian, Party member or non-member, high-ranking or lowly laborer, who caught the eye of an equivalent official could be caught and eliminated. No one could feel safe throughout his life, even if he himself was a party secretary and a high official of the ruling class. This was the Soviet regime, at least until 1956. Even later, its heat had definitely reduced, but it had not gone away.
Torturing an innocent prisoner was not merely cruelty. The entire Soviet system, the Communist Party, was completely demobilized. There was no place in it for any human value. There was a strange hierarchical sequence of modernization through socialism, then party, then party leader, till the supreme party leader. That every human, moral, or legal point was unimportant before them. The interest of the Party and socialism, both abstract concepts, were in themselves irrefutable arguments, by putting forward which any officer could arrest anyone in his jurisdiction. Such a system was created that the common people had no feelings except fruitless anger and helplessness. George Orwell understood this, which is expressed in more detail in his famous works ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’. Closed world. This was the common truth of Soviet socialism.
However, through two thousand pages of descriptions of hundreds of people and decades of his own observations, Solzhenitsyn presented that truth authentically to the world with great effort. Which he himself had described as if he could bring forth as much as a drop of a pond. That means just a glimpse. Out of the suffering, torture, murder, untimely deaths of crores of people, the story of only a few dozen or a hundred people can be brought to the fore. Whatever they could get, as much as they themselves could see, enjoy and understand. just as much. Write them all down without any hesitation and without showing any anger or resentment. Just concrete details and feelings. Of other victims and ourselves. In this sequence, the situation of the concerned political system and society is automatically portrayed. This is the theme of ‘Gulag Archipelago…’.
But as American professor Gary Saul Morson has noted, the descriptions of such vast amounts of oppression, persecution, compulsion, despair, and flightlessness in ‘Gulag…’ do not seem repetitive, cumbersome, or boring. A kind hearted reader goes on reading page after page, chapter after chapter like a new story, with constantly different pain and sensitivity. In this sense, despite being a book on history and politics, this book is a ‘literary investigation’ in its form, which Solzhenitsyn had rightly added in the sub-title of the book. The entire text remains interesting as to what happened next to a particular person or in a particular incident. (Courtesy-BBC.com)