Soviet Tyranny Warmed Over Is Still Tyranny

A colleague recommended I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a long and deep look into the abyss of Soviet communist oppression in the first half of the 20th century. In her opinion, "everyone should read this book." I must agree — the world would probably be a better place if the book was required reading in universities, especially in the West. It should also be taught in high schools, at least in excerpts. Sadly, in the age of the tweet, Solzhenitsyn's 700-odd agonized pages are probably doomed to general neglect. More's the pity.

Mark Twain said long ago: "The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." The Gulag Archipelago, though intended by its author as a forlorn memoir to the hundreds he saw ground up by the Soviet state, is also the most powerful of warnings. Communism is still with us. Its central themes have never been extinguished. Its salespeople are still out on the street. The seductive lies of dead ideologues have never lost their power to persuade. They have changed a little, adapted to new cultures, new eras, and new technologies — but in the end, the Devil's siren song still rhymes.

One hardly knows where to begin. Let's start with the political usefulness of the common criminals — people Solzhenitsyn summarizes as "thieves." In Soviet prisons and labor camps, the truly antisocial elements were made the jailers of the rest. They could torture, rape, and sometimes kill their fellow prisoners with near impunity. "Thieves" were officially designated as a victim group, a people wronged by capitalist oppression. They were not to blame for their own actions. They were, in the terminology of communism, "socially friendly elements."

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If...if...if...

We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

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