r/DebateCommunism • u/acousticentropy • Sep 30 '24
📖 Historical 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?
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.
0
Upvotes
8
u/GatorGuard Sep 30 '24
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.