A Terrible Hidden Country

If there were quiz questions about the subtitles of books, this – ‘An Experiment in Literary Investigation’ – might be among the trickier ones, offering as it does no hint of the book’s subject matter. But a taster of what is to follow, and of the reason behind the subtitle, comes at once in the book’s preface.

In 1949 – it begins – the author and some friends came across a noteworthy news item in the Soviet scientific magazine Nature. It reported that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River in Siberia, prehistoric fauna tens of thousands of years old had been discovered in a frozen stream. These fish, or salamander, the report continued, were preserved in so fresh a state that, in the words of the Nature correspondent (but with the author’s italics) ‘those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot’. What was the significance of this incident? The readers of Nature might have struggled to understand why anyone would fall on precious prehistoric fish and gobble them up, but the author and his friends understood instantly:

We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at the event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.

The author is our guide not just to the tribe of zeks but to their country, too:

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent – an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people . . .

So it was that the word Gulag – strictly GULag, the official abbreviation in Russian for the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps – was launched on the English-speaking world. The date was May 1974 and the author of this ‘Experiment in Literary Investigation’, as The Gulag Archipelago was subtitled, was the ex-zek or convict Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The original Russian edition had been published a few months earlier, in Paris. The text, however, had already been in the West for five years, smuggled out of Russia with the help of a Swedish journalist and friends of one of Solzhenitsyn’s collaborators. All that was needed for publication was the author’s word. He had delayed and delayed and for a compelling reason: publication would have jeopardized the safety, even perhaps the lives, of the 227 ‘witnesses’ whose experiences he had drawn on for the book. What forced his hand was the seizure of a copy of the manuscript by the KGB, the Soviet secret police.

The circumstances of the seizure convey the conditions in which Solzhenitsyn and other dissident writers, and their helpers, worked. Unbeknown to the author, who thought all copies of his typescript had been smuggled out of Russia or destroyed, one of his dedicated team of typists had buried a copy in a friend’s garden. In August 1973 that woman, Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya, in her sixties and in poor health, was arrested and subjected to several days of interrogation, during which she divulged the existence and whereabouts of her copy. A few weeks after her release she was found dead in the hallway of her communal apartment, hanging from a rope. It was presumed she had killed herself out of remorse. One neighbour reported, however, that the body had knife wounds and blood on it.

Solzhenitsyn now expected arrest and imprisonment himself. It would be a repeat: in 1945, serving as an army captain, he had been arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend, interrogated in the Lubyanka jail in Moscow and given an eight-year sentence for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. Sent to a special prison to work on government projects, he was later transferred to a forced labour camp for refusing to co-operate on one of the research programmes. His experiences at the camp led to the book that brought him literary fame, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Ivan Denisovich was the only major work of Solzhenitsyn’s to be published in the Soviet Union and it only saw the light of day thanks to a brief easing of cultural controls under Khrushchev. When Khrushchev fell, in 1964, the ‘thaw’ ended and Solzhenitsyn again became an unperson, unable to publish. But the novel had been a publishing sensation in the Soviet Union. Many Russian readers were said to have wept over its pages, while some did more than weep: they wrote to its author about their own experiences, which Solzhenitsyn added to the grim historical tapestry he was stitching together in The Gulag Archipelago. By the time Gulag was completed in 1967 Solzhenitsyn had woven together his own experiences with the testimony of 227 fellow exconvicts – the ‘witnesses’– and quotation from official Soviet publications, employed to devastating effect. A sense of the black humour and caustic irony of the style, and his bravura use of punctuation marks and italics, can be gleaned from this passage, on people’s failure to resist arbitrary arrest:

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act.Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over? A. I. Ladyzhensky was the chief teacher in a school in remote Kologriv. In 1937 a peasant approached him in an open market and passed him a message from a third person: ‘Aleksandr Ivanich, get out of town, you are on the list! ’ But he stayed: After all, the whole school rests on my shoulders, and their own children are pupils here. How can they arrest me? (Several days later he was arrested.) . . . The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep exclaiming to yourself: ‘It’s a mistake! They’ll set things straight and let me out!’ Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: Maybe he was guilty . . . ?’ But as for you, you are obviously innocent!

Here, where Solzhenitsyn is writing of the victims, his irony is gentler, softened by compassion; when he comes to the behaviour of high officials, such as chief public prosecutors Krylenko and Vyshinsky, his pen is dipped in acid: his withering scorn reduces once mighty and revered figures, who had occupied some of the most senior positions in the state, to the status of common criminals, uncommon only in the extent of their crimes. I still remember my sense of shock, reading the book in the 1970s, at some of the quotations:

In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused. (M. I. Latsis, a Chekist official)

Give us the body and we will produce the case. (KGB interrogator)

At the Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945 they greeted prisoners with a roll call based on cases. ‘So and so! Article 58-1a, twenty-five years.’ The chief of the convoy guard was curious: ‘What did you get it for?’ ‘For nothing at all.’ ‘You’re lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.’

Just to marshal and organize the vast amount of material in the book – it stretches in its English edition over three volumes and 1,798 pages – was a forbidding task for any man, let alone one who had to work clandestinely, constantly moving from one friend’s apartment to another, and never able to have the entire work on his desk at one time, fearing the knock on the door and the loss of years of work at one blow. But to force that material into artistic form, to thread together so many strands of individual fates, to sustain the tone of impassioned rage at the injustice and inhumanity of an entire state apparatus towards its own citizens, required the dedication and gifts of a great writer and a tough one at that. At times he was working a sixteen-hour day, in two shifts, sleeping with a pitchfork by his bed ‘for self-defence if needed’.

It is hard to think of parallels in literary history to either the work itself or the circumstances of its composition. Histories combining the personal testimony of witnesses and participants with the historian’s overarching narrative were rare at the time, so even formally The Gulag Archipelago was a revelation. But its author had not even really called it a history: it was ‘An Experiment in Literary Investigation’. This odd description indicated that this was no conventional history – indeed could not be, since its writer had little or no access to any of the documentary evidence – but was an imaginative effort to depict and understand the reality, including the psychological reality, of a catastrophic but almost totally hidden chapter in his country’s history.

Once published, the book made an immediate impact. Within a few weeks, extracts from the Russian version were being read on the BBC’s Russian Service and other stations. When the American translation came out in May 1974, the reaction was dramatic. Earlier accounts of the evils of Stalinism had appeared in the West, but they had only dented the residual belief of many that Soviet communism represented a noble aspiration towards an ideal society – even if ‘regrettable aberrations’ had taken place. After The Gulag Archipelago, it was impossible to cling to that belief. The power of Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of what he clearly regarded, and what the masses of testimony in his book demonstrated, as a criminal regime from its inception, equal or even ‘superior’ in murderous intent and execution to that of the Nazis, seemed to bury for good the hope that any ‘perfect’ society could be built along communist lines. As one commentator wrote, The Gulag Archipelago challenged the very foundation of the Soviet Union. The former US ambassador to Moscow George Kennan described it as ‘the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levelled in modern times’.

Or possibly in any time. Seen from today’s vantage point, the publication of The Gulag Archipelago appears like the first artillery barrage of an assault that within only two decades would bring about the collapse of the world’s second superpower. Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union on 13 February 1974, held on to a belief, seemingly ridiculous at the time, that he would be able to return to his native Russia in his lifetime. Only sixteen years after the publication of his book, the apparently impossible happened: the Berlin Wall fell and the mighty USSR crumbled to dust before our eyes.

L. W. Webb, reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in May 1974, wrote: ‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a part of the consciousness of the age.’ One might think that with the demise of the Soviet system, the end of the forced labour camps and the appearance of fuller histories, written with the aid of newly accessible documents, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work would have lost its relevance and be itself of merely historical interest. This assumption would be mistaken. One only has to pick it up and start reading to be swept back into that bleak and terrible world, carried along by the vivid power of its guide’s literary (and historical) imagination:

Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the Archipelago . . .

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Anthony Wells 2015