I've read The Gulag Archipelago, volumes 1 and 2, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These books mainly talk about the plight of political prisoners. I knew that there were people unjustly imprisoned in Soviet camps during Stalin's reign, but I had no idea of the magnitude of the evilness, that sixty million perished in the camps, which started immediately after the revolution with Lenin, not with Stalin as is generally believed. Much is said about The Holocaust, but little is said about other slaughters in the 20th century which were as bad or worse than that one.
Not unexpectedly, the communist concept of a classless society never came to be, that even in the prison camps there were those who had many privileges (didn't have to do general work, got plenty of food, could steal from, assault, and murder the other prisoners, etc.--these were never political prisoners; they were the hardened criminals of society), those who had some privileges (usually those with needed skills or were cooperative), and those who had no privileges. Of course, the amount of food allocated was too little for all the prisoners, so when the privileged got their fill, the others had less food. And the amount of work expected of the prisoners was based on the total number of prisoners, so it's the unprivileged prisoners got to do the extra work.
We've all heard that criticism of the government would put you into prison, but I never imagined how criticism was defined: “The line to buy bread is too long”--that's criticism. Suppose you're in the army during World War 2, and you're being attacked by the Germans. You say, “They have lots of firepower.” That's praising a foreign government. Both of these comments will get you ten years.
What about all the Russian prisoners of war? When they were returned after World War 2, they became prisoners because: a) they certainly had picked up non-Communist ideas while in captivity, and b) If they'd done their job, they would have won the battle and not been prisoners of war. Equally, Russian citizens who ended up in occupied areas who were later returned to Russian control became prisoners. Also the ex-patriots who were forced back into Russia met the same fate.
There were informers everywhere—they were forced to inform to prevent being sent to prison themselves. They needed to provide names so they wouldn't be sent to prison for not supporting the government—they provided names. And there were quotas to meet, and if you didn't meet your quota you'd end up in prison. To meet the quotas, sometimes you just had to round up some number of people and send them to prison. And, no, there were no mistakes—if you were captured, you were guilty and became a political prisoner.
Another source of names was the friends, family, and associates of those captured. If a person was guilty of treason, he had obviously affected those close to him. A third source were names forced from people during torture. The answer, “I don't know of any who oppose the government” didn't work.” The most prevalent tortures were sleep-deprivation, being starved, and being put into freezing cold cells day after day. Other tortures were employed, but these previous ones required the minimal amount of effort, and almost always worked with patience. After a week or two of sleep deprivation, most people will sign anything, agree to anything, or betray anybody to be allowed to sleep.
Everything was based on distrust and lying, and to survive one had to live while someone else died. Thus those who were free and had power at one time, at any time, could be betrayed and go to prison themselves. Solzhenitsyn lived because he was a prisoner for many of the years with partial privileges. Writing his experiences and exposing the great evil was a partial atonement for his surviving. Five out of six prisoners with no privileges died of overwork, starvation, disease or being outright murdered.
There were two reasons that the thieves, i.e. hard core criminals, dominated the prisons and camps: 1) By definition the political prisoners were the enemy of the people, and the guards treated them as such; 2) the political prisoners had been interrogated, tortured, and starved for six months to a year—even though the 80-90% of the prisoners were political prisoners and many came from the army, they had been physically, mentally, and spiritually broken during that first year, and were in no condition to oppose the thieves.
Solzhenitsyn examines why very few of these prisoners committed suicide, and he concludes that deep down these people knew that they had done nothing wrong and their innocence sustained their will to live.
Part of sustaining themselves involved sharing their life stories with other prisoners. They were constantly being moved, and prisoners remembered others' stories and shared them. When a certain person was not heard of again, they knew that he had died.
He also examines why the Russia did not prosper financially even when it had millions and millions of prisoners working for almost nothing—effectively, the camps were rife with corruption and greed and theft, and those in power put the prisoners to work waiting on them, building them furniture, stealing all they could from the government and selling those items for money and privileges, and falsifying their output to look like they were meeting the work quotas. It was ironic that someone who became a political prisoner for stealing a pound of grain from a collective farm to keep his children from starving, would get ten years in a prison camp, and be involved in stealing thousands of dollars of goods from the government to stay alive. Thus one political prisoner, a nun, could so effectively rebuke her captors, “Why are you putting all religious people into the camps? We religious people are honest—we will not steal from the government. You have nothing to fear from us.” But this was about power, absolute power over everyone, and the pursuit of absolute power over others corrupts everyone absolutely because tyrants are cowardly, weak, and paranoid. Thus, Hitler, as he was losing the war, kept filling the trains with people to be sent to the death camps, rather than using those trains to support the war effort. In Hitler's mind, the destruction of the weak was what dominated his thoughts.
There was a chapter about the children in the prison camps. At one point in the twenties almost half of the prisoners were children. The little ditty that our children sing about burning down the school got Russian children ten years in the prison camp. The government was actually kinder, in theory, to children than to most prisoners—they got more food and better food, and clothing and bedding. They also got to go to school for four hours a day and be instructed in the doctrine of Marx. That was the plan, but what actually happened was that any of the extra items that weren't stolen by the jailers, were sold by the children themselves for cigarettes, alcohol, and privileges. Since enemies to the state couldn't be allowed to corrupt children, many of the people available to teach Marx to the children were the hardened criminals, who taught them to be hardened criminals. The children became the most incorrigible, the most violent, the most unrestrained of those in the camp. Because they had no parents to teach them, to restrain them, to care for them, they had no moral compass. The political prisoners suffered much at the hands of the children. When the children were released, they joined the hardened criminals who preyed on society. So much for converting them to be loyal followers of Marx.
There was also a chapter about women in camp. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out how they survived. But he did mention one thing that helped some of the general prisoners survive—as women sewed for a man and cooked him potatoes, they both were empowered to survive. For the general prisoners, anything more than a little sewing and cooking would land them in the punishment cells, which almost always were death cells. If you didn't die in them, you were so weakened from the experience, that death often soon ensued.
Solzhenitsyn infers that the Marxist dream was only an illusion. It was never about equality, never about justice, never about the people; it was about a certain group of people gaining control of a country and glutting themselves on the efforts of the others and ensuring that they weren't overthrown.
When the Soviet empire failed during the 90s, one thing that surprised me was the amount of organized crime in those countries. This also became evident when we went into Iraq, that organized crime was alive and well in those countries.
But there were some who survived the camps, who did not survive by abusing those weaker than them—for example, stealing their food and clothing. There were some who refused to abuse others or to inform on them, or take any leadership role in any manner because to do so would be to become murderers. Most of these died with their honor intact, but there were survivors. For some inexplicable reason, they survived on insufficient rations and were empowered by the work itself, and losing themselves in the work, there was enabling power given them to survive. They didn't die of overwork, cold, and starvation; they didn't die of scurvy and tuberculosis; for some reason they didn't perish in the punishment cells when millions of others did.
Solzhenitsyn talks about the effect of a paranoid government on people. Because people could never share any real feelings with anyone and never knew when they might be betrayed, they couldn't forge meaningful relationships in their lives. The people lived in fear.
