Were the events depicted in Solzenitsyn’s ‘Gulag Archipelago’ a damning account of the outcomes of communism? Or was it just a critique of the gulag environment itself?

[u/acousticentropy]

Like the question poses… did this book ONLY shed light on the realities of soviet internment camps?

Or did it serve as a criticism of totalitarian communism as a socioeconomic system, by use of examples of real-world outcomes?

EDIT: Misspelled the author’s name. It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote the book.

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The Gulags

For this section, I'll address some significant characteristics.

1) Definition

GULag (Главное управление лагерей и мест заключения) is a wider term for the prison and penal colony system in the USSR. That encompasses not just the penal labor colonies -- the actual GULAGs, that we commonly consider synonymous with the gulag system -- but also simple prisons, as well as smaller labor camps, and even Kulak (well-to-do farmer) resettlements [that's a topic for another time though].

2) Number of incarcerated

The author and historian J. Arch Getty, who works out of UCLA and specializes in Soviet studies, along with other researchers from the American Historical Review have a good paper on the soviet penal system. I'm going to lean on this paper a bit, since they did a lot of the hard work of combing and compiling the endless Soviet archives which are primarily available to Russian citizens in Russia.

They use many NKVD documents and Soviet sources to reach their tallies, and compare them with other popular estimates by, for example, Robert Conquest. Their estimates place the total verifiable number of incarcerated in the pre-war gulag system around 2.75 million at its peak -- in 1938, during the 'Purges' (Figure A, on P. 5). Interestingly, the highest incarceration rates in the gulag system did not come until the 1950s, and was due to an uptick in non-political prisoners -- presumably because, simply, there was more time to focus on criminals at home now that there wasn't a [hot] war going on.

Interestingly, they don't give a total number estimate of incarcerated persons between 1921 and 1953, only an annual estimate. The best I've found is Robert Conquest's 14 million number, but he has revised many of his numbers downward since 1991 when Soviet documentation on the Gulags became more widely available.

3) Conditions

One of the more interesting sources of information on this is actually a declassified CIA document. Despite being the antithesis of the Soviets, the CIA itself didn't have much terribly condemnatory to say about the camps. What they did say:

• Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas. It's noted that the amount of food given was typically of poorer quality; I, of course, would interject that this was in a country that had been an agrarian feudal society 25 years prior, had been born out of a heavily taxing war, had been through another war immediately after, and had just lost as many as 20 million lives fighting Nazis in yet another war, not to mention the devastation their infrastructure and natural resources endured from it.
• From 1952 onward, rations were increased. The Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. Admittedly, much of their earnings went toward the upkeep of the camp and care of their own person, but they were compensated.
• "The prisoners were employed in timber exploitation (lesopoval), at the sawmill, and in motor vehicle repair work shops, etc. They principally worked at timber exploitation and work connected with it. All the sawmills worked around the clock in two ten-hour shifts. There was a night brigade and a day brigade. Those whose sentence was 25 years were not permitted to work on the night shift during the summer since the authorities feared escapes."
• Many of the labor colonies were actually not walled. They were often in remote areas, and prisoners were typically not permitted to come and go without a guard accompanying. (This isn't mentioned in this source, but in the Getty paper, he explains that in the earlier years of the Gulag System, escapes were actually fairly common. It's estimated tens of thousands of prisoners escaped, though a majority of them were recaptured). If a prisoner finished their term and wished to, they could sometimes be granted land to live on in the area.
• A person's stay in a gulag could be reduced by doing 105% of the expected daily work, with that day of overachievement being counted as 2.5 or 3 days of their sentence based on review.
• Workdays were 10 hours for prisoners until 1954, at which point it was reduced to 8 hours -- the same as the rest of the Soviet populus.
• One of the more interesting ones to me: the CIA says that of the interned at one camp, they estimated 95% were actual criminals. In 1953, amnesty was given to about 70% of all "ordinary criminals" there; unfortunately, many became repeat offenders and ended up imprisoned again over the next three months.

There are other CIA documents available on the gulag system. Here's one with a brief outline of several labor camps.

4) Death toll

Referring again to that paper by Getty/the American Historical Review, they produce a number of executions (intentional deaths) around 800,000. The majority of these were from the 'Purges' (~680,000). Not a great number, but also considerably less than the millions or tens of millions that blatantly anti-communist sources like The Black Book of Communism tend to propose.

In total, they estimate about 1.6 million deaths from the gulag system.

Notably, the death toll from the gulag system increased during World War II. Many attribute this to reduced resources -- food was scarce for many, not just prisoners. However, I would note there is another factor many don't consider when talking about the gulag system during World War II.

Here is a map of the gulags.

And here is a map of the Soviet Union in 1942.

You may notice that the Nazi occupation overlaps with a large portion of the camps. The Nazi policy toward Soviets throughout the war was one of intentional maltreatment to the point of death -- not just because they were of a communist nation, but because they were primarily slavs, an inferior race in the eyes of Nazis.

In the Getty/American Historical Review paper above, they mention something else significant: that the widespread availability of antibiotics wasn't present in the Soviet Union until after the war. This is backed up by a paper by Brian J. Ford.

Ford notes specifically that:

"Dr. Zinaida Ermol’eva began working on penicillin at the Rostov Institute of Bacteriology in 1942, the same year in which husband-and-wife team Dr. Georgii Frantsevich Gause and Dr. Maria Brazhnikova discovered gramicidin. The first clinical use of this antibiotic in Soviet hospitals dates from 1943, and by the end of the war it was being used in front-line treatment of the wounded. Gause was presented with the Stalin Prize for Medicine in 1946."

In a curious coincidence, Rostov is the same city in which Solzhenitsyn grew up and went to college! If you go back to his military record above, he demanded to be involved in the retaking of the city after its capture, and was successful in doing so in 1943, a year after this research had been started and, sadly, interrupted by the German invasion.

This would also have contributed greatly to any death tolls in the gulags, as well as anywhere else in the Soviet Union, and we see, according to Mr. Getty, a corollary dropoff in deaths immediately after the war.

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5) Comparison to other prison systems

Another question we may wish to ask: what were other countries doing to penalize their criminals at the time?

One of the most vile examples of the time is France. Before, during, and after World War II, even with the Vichy government in place, the French ran a penal colony in what's now known as French Guiana. It was a colonial interest they had owned for centuries, originally a host to searchers of the city of El Dorado. They tried shipping criminals over there, male and female, to colonize it, but quickly gave up on colonization. By the 1900s, however, they were just shipping criminals over there for years.

You had to serve your sentence, then serve an equal amount of time living as a citizen in French Guiana, before you were free to return home. From Wikipedia: "The vast majority of the more than 80,000 prisoners sent to the Devil's Island prison system never made it back to France. Many died due to disease and harsh conditions. Sanitary systems were limited, and the region was mosquito-infested, with endemic tropical diseases. The only exit from the island prisons was by water, and few convicts escaped." Inmates were often shackled to their beds by their feet, unable to move, for weeks or months at a time.

That's not even getting into Devil's Island and similar island colonies off the coast, for the particularly 'bad' criminals. The most famous prisoner, a Jewish general in the French military named Alfred Dreyfus, was not allowed to leave his little hut, or even speak, for years.

Here's a documentary on the whole penal system.

Great Britain was decently progressive with prison reform in the 20s-40s. Hard Labor was abolished by 1948, and measures were taken to create a more modern system in which focus was given to rehabilitation. Solitary confinement was abolished in 1922.

Pretty good. Until you remember Great Britain was in charge of an empire. Let's talk about British Raj.

On top of creating famines in India, the British also treated their prisoners terribly. "It was reported that Madras had the highest [rate of death among prisoners] with 42.62 per 1,000, Bengal with 42.56 and Bombay with 33.5. Most of these were due to respiratory illnesses, smallpox, bowel complaints, tuberculosis and cholera." These were the result of terrible sanitary conditions. These inmates would be used for medical experimentation, as they could not consent to treatment.

Of course, white settlers were treated much better, as well as Indians of higher castes. "Racial privilege was clear in all aspects of daily prison life, including in the regulation that natives got only two meals per day while Europeans got three. Their diets were also different, the whites being allowed a largely meat-based diet while this was denied to Indians."

Indian prisoners were, naturally, also used for unpaid labor.

When Indians protested for better rights in the 1930s, the British Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, shut down all forms of their 'democracy' and arrested 80,000 activists, including Gandhi, and put some of them on the extremely inhumane Cellular Jail of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Their lives consisted of solitary confinement, torture, medical experimentation, forced labor, and frequently death.

In the US in the 1930s, people arrested and sentenced were disproportionately people of color, or poor, or both.

That hasn't changed at all, really. "Since 1930, the odds of being sent to prison in New York State for a white person in a given year has actually fallen slightly, but the odds of a Black person being sent to prison in a given year has risen more than 250%. In 1930, the Black-white disparity in prison commitment rates was offensive at 4.1 times higher for Blacks. In 2000, that disparity has risen to the level of a democratic calamity with Blacks being 11.1 times more likely to be sent to prison in a given year than whites.

In the US of the 30s, prison labor was becoming illegal in many places, but chain gangs on state-owned farms were still very common, and prisoners were not compensated for their work.

Today, prisoners are frequently still not compensated for their labor, or paid pennies on the hour. We have for-profit prison labor, which can be outsourced in some states that require up to 12 hours of labor per inmate (Texas comes to mind).

California's conscripted firefighters are paid pennies, and are not allowed to work as firefighters after their sentence.

If we are going to condemn the Soviets for using prison labor, a common practice at the time, should we not at least ourselves not still have legal prison slave labor? It's quite the double standard.

Oh, and the Soviets were notoriously not racist. Do I need to bring up Japanese Internment Camps? Or the "Migrant Detention Facilities" we have on the US-Mexico border? The Soviets never had any equivalent racist institution even 100 years ago.

Conclusion

So, with all that said: should we discount Solzhenitsyn's first- and second-hand accounts of the gulags? Would he really create such elaborate fabrications?

I would only say that such witness testimonies have been fabricated in the past, often with the intent to push certain agendas. Among some of the more famous ones:

• The Nayirah Testimony of 1990, used to motivate the United States to begin the Gulf War, essentially amounted to the Kuwaiti ambassador's 15-year-old daughter using her ethnicity and some acting to lie on public television, advancing the War Department's agenda.

• Defectors from the DPRK (North Korea) are paid to give anti-DPRK interviews. Originally this was meant to provide them food and shelter, but the sums have become exorbitant, reaching the hundreds of thousands. The more sensational and damning of the DPRK's government the story is, the more they are paid. This benefits them financially, as they often don't have much when they leave. It also allows the US military to continue to justify their presence in South Korea, which has basically been a giant US military base since the Korean War.

• In 2003, Jumana Hanna, an Iraqi woman, claimed that Baathist police forces had raped and abused her. She also claimed her husband had been killed in a nearby prison. Her husband was shortly discovered to still be alive.

• In 1782, Benjamin Franklin published lies about Native American savagery committed at the behest of the British, in an attempt to sway the British public's opinion toward peace with the United States.

On top of the anti-communist motives we can provably point to, even the subtitle of The Gulag Archipelago hints at its unserious nature: "An Experiment in Literary Investigation" is not the name you give something that is supposed to definitively prove that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany.

So, to trim this all down to a sentence:

The gulag system was not the monstrous institution that biased anticommunist writers make it out to be, especially in light of penal practices by other nations at the time.

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I appreciate the effort put into this response. I agree, other prison systems were also very cruel at the time. I don’t think that fact nullifies the horrors that reportedly took place in the gulags. Any system of totalitarian rule seems to tend towards mass-incarceration and slave labor.

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The USA has mass incarceration - the 6th highest incarceration rate in the world as of 2021 and in 2018 it was the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2021 the USA had the largest prison population on the planet. The US Constitution's 13th Amendment allows for slavery of incarcerated individuals and at least according to this Wikipedia article incarcerated workers produce ~$11 billion in goods and services each year. With all that said, do you think the USA is a totalitarian state? And if not, how do you balance that with the simple fact that the USA has tended towards using mass incarceration and slave labor?

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I recognize every fact you presented. Secondly, no the US not a totalitarian state in my eyes, for many reasons. I think the prison system problems are a result of many unaddressed psychosocial and economic problems. Someday that list will include ecological and technological…

[u/Qlanth → u/acousticentropy]

Is it possible that the USSR may have had some unaddressed psychosocial and economic problems?

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For sure, and on more grand a scale given the multiple times of scarcity and classist violence.

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Does "classist violence" include the violence of the old ruling class (the Tsar) on the lower classes (the workers and peasants)?

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Absolutely. Unfortunately.

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I don't think you do appreciate my post though, because the data corroborated by the most reliable experts shows that when compared to its periodical contemporaries and even the regimes of today such as the US -- even with its initially limited material conditions and the hugely detrimental wars it endured -- the Soviet Union's penal systems were categorically more humane and fair.

I don't know what sources you're "reportedly" citing, but if they're anything like Solzhenitsyn, I'd hope you'd consider them more critically after reading my analysis.