Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Stalin told the Yugoslav leader, Djilas, that the Soviet government had restricted the publication of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s works because, though a great writer, he was also a great reactionary. Reading this, I thought of his beautiful works from the Poor People to Crime and Punishment, Karamazov, Idiot. Did any government, even one as powerful as the Soviet one, have the power to deny these gems of world literature to mankind? I would use the same adjectives for Soljhenitsyn. He was a great writer and a great reactionary. But I am certain the Russian government will not withhold his works from the people.

Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead and Soljhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are both about penal colonies, wherein they recount their own experiences in those houses of torment. And one can say on that basis that the Czarist penal colonies were less brutal and inhumane than Stalin’s. Their aim was to punish and perhaps reform the prisoners. That of Stalin’s camps was simply to destroy them, to work them to death.

Lenin had maintained the distinction between political prisoners and common criminals, treating the former as they were treated under the Czarist penal system. But Stalin treated all political dissidents, including the Bolshevik ones, as criminals.

Even more striking is the degree of deliberate, considered sadism of the guards and the camp management towards the inmates in the Soviet system. It appears that where ideological element enters a political relationship, the opponent becomes more than a simple law-breaker. He is an apostate, a renegade, an enemy of all that is the best in life. Therefore, the minimum demands of decency, due to any human being, disappear. That is the reason the religious and civil wars are more brutal and sanguinary than others.