Summary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Arrest is a shattering point in your life, a bolt of lightning that has hit you. It is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake that can cause people to slip into insanity.
#2 The traditional image of an arrest is the sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door. The insolent entrance of the unsleeping State Security operatives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs.
#3 The arrest process is different for each person, and it is up to the arresting officer to decide how much resistance the arrested person will put up. The arresting officer will then determine how much resistance is needed to make the arrest.
#4 Arrests vary in form. They can be made at home, at work, or outside of your regular environment. It is important that the person you are arresting have no chance to destroy, hide, or pass on anything to anyone.

Sujets

• History
• Russia
• URSS
• Histoire
• Former Soviet Union

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669397373
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Arrest is a shattering point in your life, a bolt of lightning that has hit you. It is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake that can cause people to slip into insanity.

#2

The traditional image of an arrest is the sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door. The insolent entrance of the unsleeping State Security operatives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs.

#3

The arrest process is different for each person, and it is up to the arresting officer to decide how much resistance the arrested person will put up. The arresting officer will then determine how much resistance is needed to make the arrest.

#4

Arrests vary in form. They can be made at home, at work, or outside of your regular environment. It is important that the person you are arresting have no chance to destroy, hide, or pass on anything to anyone.

#5

The Organs can be very creative when arresting people. They will take you away from where you were going, and arrest you. They will take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest.

#6

The arrest of tens of thousands of people in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s was a roll call, with people being arrested based on little more than suspicion.

#7

Universal innocence led to the universal failure to act. When arrested, people think their situation is hopeless, and they don’t resist because they don’t believe they will be released.

#8

The principal emotion of those arrested is relief and even happiness. They were glad to be arrested, because they were tired of suffering from the arrests that were happening all around them.

#9

I had spent one day in the counterintelligence prison at army headquarters, and three days in the counterintelligence prison at the headquarters of the front, where my cellmates had educated me in the deceptions practiced by the interrogators, their threats and beatings. I didn’t call out one word on the streets of Bialystok.

#10

I was arrested, but the process was easy for me. It did not tear me away from my kith and kin, nor from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February, it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea.

#11

I was arrested because of a correspondence with a school friend. I was not only not a captain anymore, but I had been exposed as an enemy of the people. I was taken to a prison, and the SMERSH officers gave up their last hope of being able to make out where we were on the map.

#12

The cellmates were three honest, openhearted soldiers. They had been officers, and their tank unit had, unfortunately, arrived in the village where the SMERSH headquarters was located. They had gotten drunk, and when they saw two raunchy broads going to bathe, they broke into a bath where they had noticed two Russian girls. The girls were half-dressed, and one of them was the property of the army Chief of Counterintelligence.

#13

The wave of 1937 and 1938 was not the only one nor the main one, but it was the biggest wave that strained the murky, stinky pipes of our prison system to bursting.

#14

The Soviet Security organs, or Organs, praised and exalted above all living things. They have not died off even to the extent of one single tentacle, but instead have grown new ones and strengthened their muscles.

#15

There is a lot of difficulty in deciding whether we should classify the prison waves of 1918 to 1920 as part of the Civil War, or whether we should consider all those who were done in before they even got to prison cells.

#16

In 1920, the Central Committee decreed that subversive activity in the rear was illegal. This was the outward sign of a new wave of arrests, which occurred in 1921. The arrests of students began in 1921, and all Russia’s political parties were eliminated except the victorious Bolsheviks.

#17

The arrests of Orthodox believers was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, as it would destroy religion in the country. Monks and nuns were intensively rounded up on every hand, and sent into exile.

#18

The GPU continued to arrest people, and the country continued to starve. The Big Solitaire game played with the socialists went on and on uninterruptedly. In 1929, those historians who had not been sent abroad were arrested.

#19

The Soviet Union experienced a wave of dispossessed kulaks in 1929 and 1930. It was immeasurably large, and it could not have been housed in the highly developed network of Soviet interrogation prisons. Instead, it went directly to the transit prisons and camps.

#20

Section 10 of Article 58 was interpreted broadly and with a revolutionary conscience. It defined propaganda or agitation that contains an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet power. It allowed the government to arrest anyone who made such appeals.

#21

The real law underlying the arrests of those years was the assignment of quotas, which were the norms set by the government. Every city, district, and military unit was assigned a specific quota of arrests to be carried out by a specific time. From then on, everything else depended on the ingenuity of the Security operations personnel.

#22

The reverse wave of 1939 was an unprecedented incident in the history of the Organs. It included about 1 to 2 percent of those who had been arrested but not yet convicted, who had not yet been sent away to far-off places and hadn’t yet perished. It was like giving back one kopeck change from a ruble, but it was necessary in order to heap all the blame on Yezhov.

#23

In 1941, the Germans went around Taganrog cutting it off so swiftly that prisoners were left in freight wagons at the railway station. What should be done with them. Set them free or leave them to the Germans. Oil tank trucks were rushed to the station, and the wagons were drenched with oil and set on fire.

#24

After the Battle of Moscow, there was a wave of Muscovites who were guilty of not running away, and they were executed. Those who had seen something of European life were able to talk about it, and they were sentenced as severely as POW’s.

#25

During the last years of the war, when the Soviet Union was fighting Japan, a wave of German war criminals were transferred to the jurisdiction of the Gulag. At the end of 1944, when our army entered the Balkans, and especially 1945, when it reached into Central Europe, a wave of Russian émigrés flowed through the channels of Gulag.

#26

During 1945 and 1946, a big wave of enemies of the Soviet government flowed into the Archipelago. These were the Vlasov men, the Krasnov Cossacks, and Moslems from the national units created under Hitler.

#27

The year 1948 was marked by increased persecution and vigilance in Soviet public life. It was also marked by the tragicomedy of the repeaters, those who had survived ten years in the gulag in 1947, and were arrested again in 1948 without any new charges.

#28

In 1948, after the great European displacement, Stalin had succeeded in tightly barricading himself in and pulling the ceiling down closer to him: he had recreated the tension of 1937. In 1948, 1949, and 1950, there flowed past many alleged spies, believers, and ordinary thinking people who had not been sufficiently scared away from the West.

#29

The Russian intellectuals who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years was told that in forty years, interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia. They would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, and a human being would be lowered into an acid bath.

#30

In the 1920s, interrogations took place at night. The interrogators would shine automobile lights in the prisoner’s face, and there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners.

#31

The connection between charges being brought at any cost and the use of violence and torture to obtain confessions is clear. In 1937, the Organs were authorized to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis, according to the demands of their work quotas and the amount of time they were given.

#32

The conclusions of advanced Soviet jurisprudence, which were based on a spiral, returned to medieval standards. The simple-minded Middle Ages used dramatic and picturesque methods to extract confessions, but in the twentieth century, people realized that the accumulation of such impressive apparatus was unnecessary.

#33

The simplest method of breaking the will of a prisoner is to use night as a form of psychological torture. The Party member is especially susceptible to this method, as they are expected to stand up for the Party and its ideals.

#34

There are many ways to induce confusion in an accused person. You can make them sit in a dark room for hours on end, refusing to speak or move. You can make them undress in front of you, all the while continuing the interrogation as if nothing is happening.

#35

The lie was the fundamental method of intimidation used on the relatives of the arrested person when they were called in to give testimony. Under the harsh laws of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse to testify.

#36

The game of playing on one’s affection for those you loved was very effective on the accused. It was the most effective method of intimidation. The Tatar who could not endure his daughter’s suffering, despite being threatened with arrest, showed that love can be a weakness.

#37

Prison begins with the box, which