Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is a tough read. Published in 1973, the three-volume masterpiece is a harrowing account of arrests, convictions and incarceration in the brutal and degrading system of Soviet labour camps during and after the Stalin years. Based on his own experience and other first-hand accounts, Solzhenitsyn relays stories of spurious arrests of innocent people and convictions to fulfil quotas for convicts to satisfy the Soviet states insatiable appetite for labour and describes in detail the unfathomable depravity of the system and the people who inhabited it. In many ways, it was the lucky ones who were summarily executed after torturous and abusive interrogation processes and sham trials. A worse fate awaited those who survived. It leaves you speechless. In the 20th century, only the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust can match the brutality and inhumanity of the Soviet penal regime, though the Nazi body count pales in comparison – the number of people killed in the Soviet camp system is estimated to be at least 16 million and could be as high as 60 million. But while the Holocaust rightly is commemorated in countless movies, books and monuments and has its own memorial day, this other most shameful chapter of human history is virtually unknown. There are few if any monuments outside eastern Europe and a handful of obscure movies and books for those who care. In fact, even the word Gulag strikes few cords with the average Westerner. In most countries, that part of history is left out of the school curriculum.
Why is it so? The history of the Second World War holds some answers. The Holocaust was kept a secret during the war but the horror was exposed when Allied troops entered the concentration camps. There was no liberation of the Gulags and therefore no first-hand accounts from liberators. Prisoners would have to make their way out of the camps alive and then out of the country to relay the story – no mean feat. Most prisoners were exiled to remote regions of the Soviet Union upon release. Solzhenitsyn himself bemoans the lack of testimonies, though the great achievement of his work is the collating of stories that makes up much of the books.
But the suppression of the history of the Gulag may be deliberate. The USSR was a key ally of the west during the second World War and in the aftermath of the war it may have been politically expedient to play down the brutality of the regime. Also, academia is notoriously left wing and many intellectuals have had an unhealthy fascination with and grossly misplaced sympathy for various communist regimes. Those in a position to influence the curriculum may have chosen to wilfully ignore the unsavoury aspects of the history of communism for ideological reasons. In fact, this is almost certainly the case.
Whatever the reason, the lack of knowledge of the Gulag is not only a glaring gap in general knowledge, it is a shameful blemish on the moral fabric of our society. Along with the Ukrainian Holodomor – the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian countryside started under Lenin and continued under Stalin – the Gulag stands as testament to the savagery and depravity of the Soviet regime and should be taught alongside the Holocaust as the great crimes of the 20th century. Of course it was not just the Soviets who, under the banner of communism, carried out horrendous crimes. From Cuba to North Korea, communism has gone hand-in-hand with brutality, violence and repression. The left is notoriously quick to denounce their opponents as Nazis, a political ideology purely defined by its horrendous crimes against humanity. To be called a communist should carry equal connotations of moral depravity.