Quotessence
Home / Books / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 3 quotes · 1977, Soviet Russia, Katorga

Filter quotes by topic

All1977Soviet RussiaKatorga1976CommunismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismGulag19411948195119531961Behind The WireCivil DisobedienceDouble ThinkExileFollowing OrdersForty Days Of KengirFraming

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII Quotes

“It should be said that all these years, in all the Special Camps, orthodox Soviet citizens, without even consulting each other, unanimously condemned the massacre of the stoolies, or any attempt by prisoners to fight for their rights. We need not put this down to sordid motives (though quite a few of the orthodox were compromised by their work for the godfather) since we can fully explain it by their theoretical views. They accepted all forms of repression and extermination, even wholesale, provided they came from above—as a manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even impulsive and uncoordinated actions of the same kind but from below were regarded as banditry, and what is more, in its "Banderist" form (among the loyalists you would never get one to admit the right of the Ukraine to secede, because to do so was bourgeois nationalism). The refusal of the katorzhane to be slave laborers, their indignation about window bars and shootings, depressed and frightened the docile camp Communists.”

CommunismUprisingSoviet Russia19771953KatorgaDouble ThinkPrisoners RightsForty Days Of Kengir
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
Create image

“These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism—no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else.”

CommunismTotalitarianismNazismSoviet Russia19411977
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
Create image

“To those readers who have found the moral strength to overcome the darkness and suffering of the first two volumes, the third volume will disclose a space of freedom and struggle. The secret of this struggle is kept by the Soviet regime even more zealously than that of the torments and annihilation it inflicted upon millions of its victims. More than anything else, the Communist regime fears the revelation of the fight which is conducted against it with a spiritual force unheard of and unknown to many countries in many periods of their history. The fighters' spiritual strength rises to the greatest height and to a supreme degree of tension when their situation is most helpless and the state system most ruthlessly destructive.”

CommunismSoviet UnionPolitical StrugglePreface1977
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
Create image