Islands of Slavery

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has resumed his unrelenting chronicle of Soviet terror, which provoked the Kremlin into deporting him four months ago. From his home in exile in Zurich, the Russian writer gave the signal for the publication of the oft-postponed second volume of his trilogy, The Gulag Archipelago, by the Russian-language Y.M.C.A. Press in Paris.* An exhaustive, harrowing 657-page account of the forced-labor system under Lenin and Stalin, Gulag II may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning achievement to date.

Composed with the novelist's superb literary skill and his eye for compelling human detail, Gulag II is based on a wealth of solid documentation. This includes official Soviet records and the testimony of hundreds of victims, including that of Solzhenitsyn himself, a prisoner for eight years in the gigantic "archipelago" of Stalinist labor camps run by "Gulag," the Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. Between 1918 and 1959, Solzhenitsyn believes, 66 million men, women and children were shuttled to these islands of slavery under the pious official slogan "Correction through labor." In fact, Solzhenitsyn charges, it amounted to "extermination through labor."

As in Gulag I, Solzhenitsyn puts the blame for the introduction of systematic terror squarely on Lenin. He notes that Lenin was the first Soviet leader to use the designation "concentration camps," thus "launching one of the most important terms of the 20th century." Indeed, he adds, "The Archipelago was born with the first gun salvos of Aurora" --the battle cruiser that signaled Lenin's seizure of power in October 1918. The "alma mater," as Solzhenitsyn calls it, of all subsequent forced-labor camps was established under Lenin in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the Arctic. Later, Stalin made slave labor a dominant factor in the Soviet economy.

Solzhenitsyn's list of major construction projects carried out by prisoners is incomplete but nonetheless staggering: at least nine entire cities (including Magadan and Vorkuta), three sea-to-sea and river-to-river canals, twelve railway lines, two highways, three huge hydroelectric stations and six centers of heavy industry.

No Demands. Among all these projects, Solzhenitsyn singles out the Stalin Canal, built in 1931-33 between the White and Baltic seas, for close examination. It was here, on a 140-mile expanse of frozen wasteland, that Stalin first tested out his grandiose program to industrialize the Soviet Union by using a cheap, mobile and inexhaustible labor force. As Solzhenitsyn explains it: "Slave labor made no demands, could be transferred anywhere at any moment, was free of family ties, had no need for housing, schools or hospitals, and sometimes not even for kitchens or lavatories. The state could obtain such manpower only by swallowing up its sons."

The Stalin Canal (now the White Sea Canal) was intended as a permanent monument to the dictator; Solzhenitsyn likens it to the pyramids constructed by Egyptian slaves for the pharaohs in 2,500 B.C. But while the pyramids were constructed with machinery that was fairly sophisticated for the time, the canal was hacked out by thousands of prisoners using only the most basic tools: shovels, spades and wheelbarrows. The savings in machinery and labor costs were reinforced by withholding food from lagging workers, a practice which was later applied to all Soviet slave laborers. Though the ruble economies were great, the resulting human cost of the canal was the death of some 250,000 prisoners who labored to complete it. In general, Solzhenitsyn concludes the low productivity of forced labor made it thoroughly unprofitable. In a mournful lyrical passage, he recalls visiting the canal in 1966 and finding it virtually unusable. Too shallow for most ships, its wooden locks too primitive for passage, it flows a lonely course through the first mass graveyard of the archipelago.

Gulag II offers an encyclopedic view of every type of forced labor. One particularly chilling chapter details the life of children in the camps. In 1935 Stalin decreed that anyone over twelve was subject to the same punitive measures applied to adults, including the death penalty. Solzhenitsyn writes: "For gathering surplus corn these tots never got less than eight years. For a pocketful of potatoes--also eight years. But cucumbers were not so highly prized. For taking ten cucumbers from the garden of a collective farm, Sasha Blokhin got only five years."

The plight of women stirs Solzhenitsyn's deepest compassion. Female prisoners were far less likely to survive in the hard-labor camps than were men. They were continually the prey of guards and privileged common criminals, such as murderers and thieves. Desperate bands of hungry women would roam the men's barracks, crying "a pound of bread," signifying their price. In other camps, a barbed-wire fence separated the sexes, thus giving rise to the obscene spectacle of lines of naked women crouching with their backs to the wire, while the men took them from behind. For these women, sex was scarcely a pleasure. They hoped to become pregnant in order to gain a respite in the "maternity camps." Since the infants of prisoners were officially regarded as free, nursing mothers could count on decent rations for several months, until their babies were placed in state orphanages. For many women, a pregnancy each year constituted their only chance of survival.

Solzhenitsyn's compendium of how people died in the camps is unrelieved in its horror. Scurvy, pellagra, dysentery and other diseases all took their toll, as did mass executions. One account by a survivor of the gold-mining camps at Kolyma in 1938 tells how every day, for many months, an orchestra composed of common criminals played triumphal marches before and after orders for executions were read to the assembled prisoners. Another eyewitness reported that in February 1929, in the far North, nearly 100 prisoners were placed on a pile of logs and burned alive for failing to fulfill their work norms. Just as harrowing as these firsthand accounts are the small lessons of everyday life in the archipelago--for example, that lice would abandon the body of a man at the moment of his death. Prisoners soon learned a camp maxim recorded by Solzhenitsyn: "When black head lice begin swarming all over the face of your neighbor in the next bunk, then you can be sure he just died."

Profound Change. Although most of the camps described in Gulag II were disbanded after Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn sees no basic alteration in the Communist system that engendered the archipelago of terror. Still, for the epigraph to the final section of his book, he chooses a passage from the first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians: "I will unfold a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed." Solzhenitsyn's own experience in Stalin's prisons and camps wrought a profound change in the writer, and for this he expresses gratitude. "It gradually became clear to me," he recalls, "that the line dividing good and evil does not run between states, classes or parties. It runs through every human heart. . . It is impossible to drive evil out of the world altogether, but it is possible to try to drive it out of every individual." This, clearly, is the message of Gulag: the exposure of evil makes way for the good.

* The English translation of Volume I of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the U.S. this week by Harper & Row in a first printing of 2 million copies.

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