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International Socialism, October 1974

 

Dave Hughes

SOLZHENITSYN

The Gulag Archipelago

 

From International Socialism, No.72, October 1974, pp.24-25.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

IT IS no surprise that the bourgeois press and publishing industry has greeted the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago with delight. Firstly, their publicity machine has ensured that Solzhenitsyn is a highly marketable commodity these days. Secondly, the book itself is fundamentally reactionary. In his own way, drawing upon previously unwritten experiences, Solzhenitsyn reproduces a number of the ideas which the opponents of the Russian workers’ revolution of 1917 have been repeating for more than 50 years.

Gulag is the first of a series of volumes which will tell the story of the prison camp system of Stalin’s Russia. It has been estimated [1] that between 15 and 20 million prisoners passed through these camps. It is known that the largest proportion of these perished. During the 1930s and 1940s whole areas of the Russian economy – canal construction, mining and the opening of Siberia – depended heavily on slave labour from these camps.

In attempting to come to terms with these events, Solzhenitsyn is not making a mountain out of a molehill. Nor is he slandering the ‘socialist motherland’ as the orchestrated Russian press and slavish writers’ union would have us believe. The mass murder of millions by Stalin and the bureaucracy has hung over the workers’ movement for more than 30 years.

Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in the camps and his compilation of the accounts of others mean that The Gulag Archipelago vividly brings to life many aspects of the prison regime. No socialist would argue with Solzhenitsyn about the arbitrary nature of arrests, the brutal use of torture or the inhuman treatment of inmates. Nor can one doubt Solzhenitsyn’s own particular ability to reveal the mechanisms whereby people survived or collapsed in the camps. Or the accuracy of his descriptions of the total corruption and cynicism of the camp administrators and their political bosses.

But at this point revolutionary socialists part company with Solzhenitsyn. It is never enough to produce a description of events, one also needs an explanation. Solzhenitsyn’s explanation is simple. We have heard it before. The Stalinist terror and the camps were a continuation of the ideas of the 1917 revolution. In Solzhenitsyn’s own words, Stalin ‘followed where footsteps before him had led’. He would have us believe that the mass purges and deportations of the 1930s and 1940s represented the direct expression of the terror and civil war of 1917 to 1921.

This argument lies at the heart of The Gulag Archipelago. Repeatedly Solzhenitsyn argues that the prison regime of the Tsars was mild and liberal, especially for political prisoners. It was not until the workers’ revolution that terror began to play a significant part in Russian life.

We do not seek to argue that the Russian workers did not use terror to maintain their hold over state power. In fact we argue that only the most ruthless control over those forces that try to overthrow the workers’ state can ensure the consolidation of workers’ power. But there was a crucial difference between the terror exercised in 1917-21 and that of Stalin’s time.

The terror of the Russian workers’ state had one specific aim. The Cheka (extraordinary commission) was created to ensure the surveillance by the workers’ state of all those who sought to overthrow it. This was necessary given the armed attempts of Russian reaction and world imperialism to smash the workers’ state. The civil war showed that those forces would not leave the stage without a bloody fight.

In the first three months of Bolshevik power the death sentence was abolished and most prisoners released. General Kaledin, later to be a leader of the White armies, was released by the Bolsheviks in exchange for a promise that he would cease actively to oppose Soviet power. But as the Bolsheviks faced assassination attempts on party leaders (including Lenin and Volodarsky), as it faced armed opposition from the White armies, so terror became crucial to the survival of the besieged workers’ state.

That terror subsided with the workers’ victory in the civil war. By 1928 there were a mere 30,000 prisoners in the Russian camps and the authorities opposed their use for compulsory labour.

But just as terror was indispensable for the victory of the Russian workers, so for Stalin and the bureaucracy it was indispensable for their war against the working class. Solzhenitsyn fails to understand that the terror of Stalin was not a continuation of the policies of 1917 to 1921. It was the means whereby the bureaucracy smashed all forces in Russia capable of challenging their rule.

If we look quickly at the scale and objects of Stalin’s terror we can see how different it was from the red terror. With the first five-year plan, which abolished the last remaining rights of the Russian working class, terror exploded to an unprecedented degree. Dallin and Nicolaevsky estimate that by 1931 two million people were incarcerated in the prison camps. By 1933 the figure had risen to five million and by 1942 to between eight and fifteen million.

The inmates of these camps were no longer the ranks of counter-revolutionaries. They were anyone capable of challenging the rule of the bureaucracy, as well as by millions of workers arrested in the drive to terrorise every aspect of Russian society. The Stalin terror achieved the mass slaughter of Bolsheviks and revolutionaries between 1935 and 1937. Between 1937 and 1938 it liquidated the majority of each of the national governments of the so-called Soviet Union. In 1934 rights of defence for individuals charged for a number of offences were abolished – although they were nominally guaranteed by the Soviet constitution.

This was no continuation of the red terror. It was the terrorisation of Russian society into a state where no opposition to the bureaucracy would be possible. It was a reversal of the Russian revolution, not its continuation.

In fact Solzhenitsyn recoils in horror from the workers’ power of the early years. Observing the committees of poor peasants executing the landlords who had terrorised their entire lives, and faced with workers working unpaid overtime to maintain their own state, he has only this to say:

‘We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterwards.’ [2]

For him the Russian revolution was the basic mistake.

‘Due to the make-up of its population [Russia] was obviously not suited for any sort of socialism whatsoever. It was totally polluted.’ [3]

For this reason it is the old reactionary Tsarist Russia that Solzhenitsyn seeks to defend, not the workers’ revolution that preceded Stalin’s terror ...

‘Perhaps 1937 was necessary, to prove how worthless was the world outlook which they vaunted, while they tore Russia assunder, destroying her bulwarks and trampling her shrines.’

Gulag does not chronicle the workers and revolutionaries who perished in the camps. (A history of the Trotskyists in the camps is promised for the future.) To Solzhenitsyn they too had a worthless ‘world outlook’. Prime place is given by Solzhenitsyn to the Russian soldiers who fought for the Nazis, religious remnants and technical experts who fell in the purges.

The message is a reactionary one: Russia could only have been saved by a dictatorship of technicians, with the workers guided in humiliation and submission by their religious faith. The Russian revolution challenged that submission in that it upset the established order of things. Solzhenitsyn argues that it must have caused the terror. His explanation is reactionary and wrong. Because of that it has been used to stoke the fires of the bourgeoisie everywhere. A recent publication of Samizdat accounts of the struggle of Trotskyists in the camps received no such acclaim ... it did not serve the same purpose. [4]


Footnotes

1. Dallin and Nicolaevski, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia.

2. Gulag Archipelago, p.13.

3. Ibid.

4. Samizdat – Pathfinder Press.

 
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