The Gulag Archipelago
| Original Title: | Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG |
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| Written by: | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
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| Genre(s): | Non-fiction |
| First published: | 1973 |
The Gulag Archipelago is a non-fiction novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
An account of life in The Gulag, considered the definitive text. Multiple editions exist, most of which being abridged because of the sheer length. Tells the entire story of the Gulag, its history, the lies told to the public about the nature of the Soviet prison system.
Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle can be considered a fictional sequel.
It was the work that resulted in its author being exiled from his homeland, despite his earlier fictional work that also threw shade on the gulag system. Now, not only has it been proven beyond all doubt, it has become required reading in Russian schools since 2009.
Tropes used in The Gulag Archipelago include:
- The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best In People: There is a chapter called The Ascent that explores how people could actually become better people while living in the slavery and poverty of the work camp.
- Also this trope is Truth in Television for Solzhenitsyn as he discovered in camp just how ruthless he had been in his former life. With several years to mellow out and reflect upon his life, and to listen to the stories of those around him, Solzhenitsyn was able to collect enough truth and human sentiment to be able to publish a book that would help topple a massive and corrupt empire.
- Bad Boss: too many Gulag camp managers to count. In many cases they were responsible to no one and had total control over the zeks' lives, with predictable results.
- Benevolent Boss: ...but there were a few, very few, managers and guards who kept their human decency.
- Cold Blooded Torture: Various forms of this were employed as interrogation techniques, though it was noted with irony the best methods tended to be prolonged sleeplessness, though this took the longest to actually achieve in practice.
- Deal with the Devil: How Solzhenitsyn described how one becomes a stool pigeon. If you make it clear at any point you have any weakness in your conscience, they will do anything to get you to agree, even using I Have Your Wife level threats if need be. Utterly refusing this deal always came with deadly consequences (if not immediately, your life expectancy would be drastically shortened sooner or later), so very few refused.
- Dethroning Moment of Suck: Solzhenitsyn admits his own happened when he was briefly recruited as a stool pigeon, admitting he remembered the pseudonym they gave him in that role with eternal shame.
- Doorstopper: It is very large book, normally published in three heavy volumes.
- Footnote Fever: Some pages have footnotes almost as long as the pages themselves, and a lot of Solzhenitsyn's Deadpan Snarker commentary can be found in them.
- More Communist Than Thou: many of the Communist prisoners being purged still think themselves loyal to Stalin's regime, convinced that it was all a mistake that they were arrested, whereas everybody around them are of course scum and deserve every moment of their sentence. Solzhenitsyn distinguishes between them and the true socialists who carried their beliefs in their hearts and not on their sleeves--and were arrested because of it.
- The Informant: stoolies, as they were called, were universally despised by prisoners and the security services alike. In many cases they didn't have a choice when they were recruited; Solzhenitsyn himself was forced to become an informant. He considered himself very fortunate to have been transferred out to a sharashka before internal security could really pressure him into snitching on overheard conversations.
- Insane Troll Logic: Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Law, which could be--and was--routinely twisted to cover any sort of unapproved behavior.
- Lost in Translation: The English title loses some of the original wordplay intended from the original Russian title.
- No Except Yes: In a rather Insane Troll Logic fashion, this was used to reintroduce executions after Lenin had abolished them when it came time to have a guy shot for treason. When it was pointed out executions were abolished, the response to that was:
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"What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot." |
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- No Honor Among Thieves: the "58s", as the political prisoners are called, have to share their camps with the "socially friendly" elements, the thieves and career criminals, and Solzhenitsyn makes it very clear that the romanticization of the thieves has no basis at all in reality, particularly as the thieves could be trusted by the camp administration to keep the 58s under strict control.
- Place Worse Than Death: the eponymous Gulags.
- Take That: Mostly sarcastic parenthetical asides and footnotes to Soviet officials and policies, but some of those are aimed at Western persons (at least three to Bertrand Russell, for instance) sympathetic with the Soviet Union.