Afew months ago I read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago, which is three volumes and about 2,000 pages of sordid memoir recounting one of history’s darker examples of man’s inhumanity to man.
Excused by enthusiasts for socialism as the tragic excesses of Stalin’s rule, Solzhenitsyn shows that the Archipelago predated Stalin and continued after his demise.
To read The Gulag Archipelago is terrifying. It is to be immersed in a world turned upside down, a nightmare in which right is left, black is white, freedom is slavery, war is peace, and ignorance is strength. Here are a few things that struck me.
Free speech and free inquiry are among the first things to go. Solzhenitsyn recounts example after example of scenarios in which the free flow of information is suppressed and in which people’s minds are beaten mercilessly with propaganda.
Those who promised socialist heaven created Hobbesian hell. Demands for denunciation and confession were among the archipelago’s most terrifying pathologies. Trust and norms of generalized reciprocity were destroyed as everyone was turned into a spy: “if you see something, say something,” so to speak—or even if you didn’t see anything, say something anyway.
