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"Cancer Ward" gives you a sort of feel for a lot of Solzhenitsyn's writings, and, if you read it closely, makes reading the GULag Archipelago unnecessary. But you have to read it closely, because sometimes important facts about the USSR as of the mid-50s are mentioned briefly. The action occurs in 1955, a year before Khrushchev's speech "exposing" Stalin's crimes, but things were already loosening up; written in the '60s, it's also about the time when Solzhenitsyn, in exile, was sent to a cancer ward to be treated for a rare form of cancer. (Reading book one of Simonov's "The living and the dead"--a WWII novel--last week hard on the heals of finishing Cancer Ward was sort of a shock, but oddly enough, Simonov wrote late enough that they share some of the same questions.)
If you want specifically prison camp literature, Solzhenitsyn was sort of in awe of Shalamov. Shalamov was in Kolyma, which was much, much worse than anything Solzhenitsyn experienced. It's rather like reading John Hersey's _Hiroshima_ in lieu of "The Secret Garden". Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales" ("Kolyma Stories"?) are much shorter than the GULag Archipelago, and you can just read a couple--a much less serious time commitment.
The capitals are proper here (GULag), since it's an abbreviation for Gosudarstvennoe Upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh Lagerei i trudovykh kolonii, i.e., Government Administration for correctional-labor camps and labor colonies. It pays to remember that the idea wasn't mindless torture or confessions--it was punishment with a view to making sure people didn't do it again or were permanently removed from society (for those in "eternal exile). A GULag could be a prison, a camp like what the US put Japanese in during WWII, or a remote place of exile with no guards or fences, but an administrative officer 'in charge' of your case. One commonality: forced labor in the prisons/camps, and since they paid no money in exile, you worked for your living. Like a dog, in all cases. A GULag could be harsh and penal, it could be white collar/political or even scientific/engineering, and where you went depended on how the government felt about you, and how you sucked up to it. It's where you went *after* you were sentenced, either to punish you, or get you out of the way. Typical punishments included a stint in prison/camp (where the real abuses usually occurred) and a stint in exile; "lucky" folk were just exiled. At its height, the GULags held many millions of people, with 2-3 million dying (seldom of old age) per year; at least one economist claims that the GULag increased the USSR's productivity (lots of labor, low cost), and the USSR's economy declined as a result of the GULags' emptying. You weren't usually sent to a GULag for non-serious crimes: burgle an apt., probably not; criticize Him, kill somebody, or steal from a state enterprise ... probably.
Most books on Soviet history from the mid-1990s to the present give a fairly accurate portrayal of the GULags; Robert Conquest's numbers are close to what's usually accepted these days, and Heller and Nekrich in _Utopia in Power_ (1985) discuss the various estimates for the GULag population and death toll, including Solzhenitsyn's. Estimates from before around 1993-4 are subject to a lot of political bias: even having concluded that the USSR was a human rights disaster, there was a reluctance to think it as bad as it was in most ways. It wasn't until the archives were opened up that conservatives' less conservative estimates were shown (in general) to be much closer to the truth than liberals' more conservative estimates. If you want a cute twist: many prisoners to the more exotic locations on Russia's east coast were transported by ship ... all of which were insured by Lloyd's of London.
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