The Gulag Archipelago - Abridged

Everyone in politics should read this, everyone responsible for the education of our children must read it, for to ignore this book and all the lessons therein, would be a crime committed to our future generations.

This book reminds us to pay heed to Socrates when he said ‘question authority' and ‘question everything'. Solzhenitsyn demonstrates how easy it is for a state and society to manipulate its members to its own ends so that they blindly accept the model of life and living presented to them as normal and acceptable. Governments have used obvious oppression by such means as fear, force, indoctrination and the suppression of free speech. However, there are far more subtle means of control used such as advertising, discouraging citizens through politically correct ideology, allowing the power of materialism to rule the people and finally an impoverished and state directed education system that encourages conformity. We are, one realises, not so very far away from the a picture of a state that controls its people and we are now structured in such a way that no citizen can resist should a relatively benign government turn.

This book is not a straight forward autobiography of his life but rather an amalgamation of his, and many Russian citizens' experiences of incarceration and exile from the 1920s to 1950s. Through his recollections and the recollections of others he reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression. Citizens were imprisoned for the smallest and most insignificant of misdemeanours, such that no person was immune and luck ultimately dictated who was imprisoned. The rules of the state kept changing and even thinking something against the motherland was punishable with a standard 10 year sentence. Tiny, unproven transgressions or unavoidable failures in work (when insufficient materials were provided) were punishable and no concrete proof was required. Millions of victims, men, women, children, the sick and infirm were routinely rounded up and sent to state prisons and later to labour camps. The conditions beggar belief and included a range of torture techniques that most of us would be hard pressed to think up. These included heating someone until they oozed blood through their skin, solitary confinement in icy, damp cells with no clothes on, salt drinks to bring on excessive dehydration, sleep deprivations, beatings, stress positions and very often combinations of tortures for days on end. Conditions were often crowded, filthy cells with one toilet trip a day, starvation diets and no light. Everything was designed to depress and break the spirit of the inmates. The labour camps and transit to them are graphically described and compare with Belsen. People were worked to death with not an ounce of humanity shown. The political prisoners were largely supportive to one another but the criminals were thugs and openly stole and controlled the rest. People were imprisoned for years on end with no knowledge of when and if they would ever be released and no means of appealing or defending themselves for to do so would be interpreted as questioning and criticising their motherland which was punishable by imprisonment.

The whole of society was infiltrated with fear and a ‘dog eat dog' mentality soon evolved. Neighbours were forced to spy on one another and as officials needed to meet their quota of people to imprison or send to the labour camps, they picked people fairly arbitrarily. Once imprisoned people were tortured and forced to name others and so the cycle continued.

Labour camps were used to carry out large projects using the imprisoned as slaves with no rights and no regard for their basic comforts or happiness. Years of constant suffering - exhaustion, hunger, thirst, pain without even a moments relief or a crumb of kindness, was the fate of many. It is not comfortable to experience this man-made hell, man's inhumanity to man because it is disconcerting to see how easy it is to justify almost anything if we believe in our cause.

I think what most troubled me is that I know this story does not just belong to the past but is the present for countries like North Korea and that no state is beyond blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.

People will always have the capacity for good or evil. When we are afraid, brain washed, albeit subtlety, denied an education that encourages questioning, it is all too easy to manipulate people to behave as the state wishes. Add to this our need to belong, to have a pack mentality or to dominate others, we have a dangerous mix just ripe for the abuse of citizens.

Since tribal times we have always fought over land and shown cruelty and abused power and strength but it was on a small scale. Now we are a hugely over-populated world with mega states such as Europe and it is naïve to assume that it will always be benign.

Read the book and the caveat emptor is definitely to guard against a state that rules it citizens rather than the citizens ruling the government. People should be able to be free and varied and to have an education divorced from state and commercial interests, so that its citizens can enjoy democracy from an informed, unsullied position.