| Show The Aaaie RfiVIAliU Aggie Review Page 5 Review by Dayne Goodwin The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn New York: Harper & Row 1974 660 pp ($195 paper- Kaledin who quickly responded by unleashing a wave of terror and assassinations against the new proletarian back) government Not a word about the thousands of revolutionary socialists commissars and soldiers murdered throughout a country put to the torch and drowned in the blood of a civil war aimed at reestablishing the rule of the landlords and capitalists Not a word about the armed attacks on Bolshevik leaders the shotting of Lenin and the assassination of Volodarsky Not a word about the intervention of foreign armies about the invasion of Soviet territory on seven different fronts Solzhenitsyn the "moralist" and "nationalist" is definitively reduced in stature by presenting such a analysis Those who denounce the Bolsheviks today have to look at what real alternatives existed at that time The thousands of victims of Horthy's white terror in Hungary to give one example would have been nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who would have been massacred in Russia had the white terror been victorious In trying to draw a parallel between the "absence 'of law and legality" during the early years of the revolution and a similar absence under Stalin Solzhenitsyn cites a series of court speeches by the Bolshevik Commissar of Justic Krylenko Without realizing it he describes the real difference between an era of revocation and an era of counterrevolution Solzhenitsyn's "evidence" actually shows that under Lenin and Trotsky there were no confessions extracted under torture that the accused were able to defend themselves freely— and not without chance of success— that these trials were hardly witchhunt trials Solzhenitsyn can not show similar "evidence" from the Stalin era to prove that basically it was the same under Lenin and under Stalin Solzhenitsyn is on even weaker ground when he moves from the realm of events to the realm of ideology In seeking an explanation for the Stalinist terror all he manages to come up with is an attack on ideology He denounces Marxism but fails to criticize religion or nationalism two ideologies which are responsible for the deaths of many millions The truth is that Solzhenitsyn advocates these two ideologies Solzhenitsyn likes to "count up" the victims of the Stalinist purges and comp'are the total to the tally rung up by czarist repression But these quantitative comparisons can be extended Franco's "nationalist" crusade to save capitalism in Spain resulted in the murder of more than a million people playing Solzhenitsyn's numbers game this would be the equivalent of nine million dead on the scale of the Soviet The Gulag Archipelago is compelling testimony of a twofold tragedy First the tragedy of the Stalinist purges that struck at millions of Soviet citizens among them the majority of the old cadres of the Bolshevik party who were innocent of the crimes they were charged with Second the tragedy of a present-dageneration of rebel intellectuals in the Soviety Union whose experience with Stalinism has led them to reject Leninism and Marxism and who are thus incapable of understanding the causes of Stalinist repression the present reality of the Soviet Union or the colutions required by the crisis of Soviet society The first subject of The Gulag Archipelago is the world of forced labor camps created by Stalin and the GPU During Stalin's reign the inmates of these camps numbered in the millions the overwhelming majority of them deported if not executed in obvious violation of Soviet legality They were railroaded to the camps by a whole range of monstrous arbitrary procedures including torture Despite obvious personal risk and difficulty Sozhenitsyn's perseverance and a powerful bitterness y one-side- have borne fruit He has assembled a mass of evidence consisting of personal experiences observations and prison stories about the Stalinist purges He especially denounces the direct responsibility of Stalin and his team of bureaucratic dignitaries for thesecrimes Those outside the Soviet Union who have been able to read the works of Leon Trotsky (especially The Revolution Betrayed) or the book on the Soviet labor camps by the Mensheviks Dallin and Nikolayevsky will not learn anything basically new from The Gulag Archipelago But they will appreciate the series of vignettes through which the great novelist Solzhenitsyn sketches the personalities he met in prison and in the camps The message of this important part of the Gulag is a thorough condemnation of institutionalized repression as a system of government for that was the objective character of the Stalinist purges A regime based neither on the political support of the working people nor on the satisfaction of their material needs must resort to terror which becomes the main state institution If there was nothing in the Gulag except denunciation of Stalin's crimes sprinkled with a few observations on the old theme that Bolshevism leads directly to Stalinism it would be enough simply to defend Solzhenitsyn against the Soviet bureaucracy's repression while regretting his ideological confusion However Solzhenitsyn systematically attempts to demonstrate that institutionalized terror began at the time of the October Revolution This is the second central theme of the book and it is scarcely less developed than the first one Presented in the impassioned language of an author whose literary talent need not be demonstrated this theme will have a deep influence on the people of the capitalist countries as well as those of the bureaucratized workers states After all Solzhenitsyn presents himself not only as a victim of contemptible persection but also as an expert on all of Soviety history Solzhenitsyn begins with an enormous fraud In dozens of pages he lays out a detailed description of the red terror But not a word about the white terror that came first and that led to the Bolsheviks' response Not a word about the generosity of the revolutionists in October November and December 1917 when they freed most if not all of their prisoners like General v Union What ideology was it that "fanaticized" the semiin Chile who in the space of a few literate days killed 20000 people and imprisoned 40000 others? These are figures that on the scale of the USSR would amount to 600000 murdered and 12 million deported In the space of a few days! Stalin would be green with book-burne- -- mvtii:! d rs envy See page 10 Dayne Goodwin takes a Socialist look at one of the monumental works of our time IHI |
