Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: Part Two

The second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago has now appeared. Where the first volume consisted in a detailed investigation of everything that preceded the arrival of millions of Soviet people in Stalin’s concentration camps—the system of arrests, the various forms of confinement, interrogation with torture, judicial and extrajudicial persecution, prisoner transports and transit prisons—the second volume gets down to the study of the primary and fundamental part of the Gulag empire, the corrective or, as Solzhenitsyn rightly calls them, the “destructive” labor camps. Here nothing escapes the author’s attention: the origin and history of the camps, the economics of forced labor, the administrative structure, the categories of prisoners and everyday life of the inmates, the position of women and juveniles, the relations between ordinary zeks and the trusties, between criminals and politicals, the camp guards, the convoy guards, the &...