Remembering the Gulag

Those considered “especially dangerous state criminals” were not murderers or rapists, but people who had dared speak the truth about the Soviet Regime. They were writers, poets, journalists, philosophers, lawyers, psychologists… Of those that survived, many wrote eloquently about life in the Gulag.

“…A camp is a negative school of life, completely and absolutely. No one brings away anything useful, necessary from there, neither the prisoner himself, nor his leader, nor his guard, nor the involuntary witnesses – engineers, geologists, doctors – neither the superiors nor the subordinates. Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.

There is much there that a person should not know, should not see, and if he has seen it – it would be better for him to die. A prisoner is trained there to hate work – he learns nothing else and can not learn anything else there.

There he is taught flattery, lying, petty and major acts of vileness, he becomes an egoist. Moral barriers were shoved aside somewhere. It turns out that you can do something vile and live, all the same… You can lie – and live. It turns out that a person who has committed a vile act doesn’t die.”

Varlam Shalamov

“Gradually, it became clear to me that the line dividing good and evil passes not between states, not between classes, not between parties – it passes through each heart – and through all human hearts…”

A. I. Solzhenitsyn

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Remembering the Gulag