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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 4 quotes · 1974, Gulag, Soviet Russia

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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV Quotes

“And the conclusion is: Survive to reach it! Survive! At any price! This is simply a turn of phrase, a sort of habit of speech: "at any price." But then the words swell up with their full meaning, and an awesome vow takes shape: to survive at any price. And whoever takes that vow, whoever does not blink before its crimson burst—allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world. This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.”

SurvivalDilemmaPrison LifeGulag1975The AscentThe Soul And Barbed Wire
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“Oh, without the brigade one could still somehow manage to survive the camp! Without the brigade you are an individual, you yourself choose your own line of conduct. Without the brigade you can at least die proudly, but in the brigade the only way they allow you even to die is in humiliation, on your belly. From the chief, from the camp foreman, from the jailer, from the convoy guard, from all of them you can hide and catch a moment of rest; you can ease up a bit here on hauling, shirk a bit there on lifting. But from the driving belts, from your comrades in the brigade, there is neither a hiding place, nor salvation, nor mercy. You cannot not want to work. You cannot, conscious of being a political [prisoner], prefer death from hunger to work. No! Once you have been marched outside the compound, once you have been registered as going out to work, everything the brigade does today will be divided not by twenty-five but by twenty-six, and because of you the entire brigade's percentage of norm will fall from 123 to 119, which makes the difference between the ration allotted to record breakers and ordinary rations, and everyone will lose a millet cake and three and a half ounces of bread. And that is why your comrades keep watch on you better than any jailers! And the brigade leader's fist will punish you far more effectively than the whole People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Now that is what spontaneous initiative in re-education means! That is psychological enrichment of the personality by the collective!”

CommunismPrison Life19741933Hard LaborThe Archipelago Metastasizes
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“All the values turn upside down with the years, and what was considered a privilege in the Special Purpose Camp of the twenties—to wear government-issue clothing—would become an annoyance in the Special Camp of the forties: there the privilege would be not to wear government-issue clothing, but to wear at least something of one's own, even just a cap. The reason here was not economic only but was a cry of the whole epoch: one decade saw as its ideal how to join in the common lot, and the other how to get away from it.”

CommunismStalinismPrison Life1974
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“We wanted to recreate inside ourselves our former front-line self-assurance. We were pups and we did not understand to what extent the Archipelago was unlike the front, to what degree its war of siege was more difficult than our war of explosives.”

LeadershipWorld War IiPrison Life19451974Front Lines
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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