Full transcript
0:12So,
0:13I want to tell you about a book today.
0:15The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago."
0:19(to the camera crew) You ready?
0:21(to the students) The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago," and it's by a
0:26a Russian author... a Soviet author named
0:28Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
0:30who
0:31was in the Gulag Archipelago
0:35concentration camp system for a very long time. He had a very hard life.
0:40He was on the
0:43Russian front when the Germans
0:45invaded the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II. Now,
0:52Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact
1:01and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union anyway.
1:04And from what I've been able to understand,
1:07the Soviets had prepared
1:09an invasion force for Europe at that point but were
1:12not concerned with having to defend their territory,
1:15and so they were caught completely unawares by Hitler's move.
1:18And the conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful,
1:21and Solzhenitsyn was soldier on Russian front.
1:30He wrote some letters to one of his friends,
1:33which were intercepted, complaining about the
1:37lack of preparation, and using bitter dark humor to describe
1:43the situation, and
1:45the consequences of that was that
1:47he was thrown into work camp.
1:50The Soviet system relied on work camps,
1:54and so those were large labor camps
1:56of people who were essentially enslaved,
1:58many of whom were worked to death — often froze to death — working
2:02in conditions that were so dreadful, that they're virtually unimaginable.
2:07Solzhenitsyn spent a very large number of years in these camps,
2:12sometimes in a more privileged camp, because he was an educated man,
2:16and sometimes in worse camps.
2:18He also
2:21developed cancer
2:25later, and wrote a
2:26book about that called "Cancer Ward," which
2:29is a brilliant book.
2:32So, he had a very hard life.
2:33There's just no way around that.
2:35To be on the front, and then to be in a
2:37concentration camp, and then to have cancer,
2:38That's... that's pretty rough.
2:40Now, he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago."
2:45He wrote a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" first,
2:49that was published in the early 1960s,
2:51when there was a brief thaw. Stalin was pretty much out of the picture by the end of the 1950s.
2:57There’s some indication that he was murdered,
2:59by Khrushchev, and Khrushchev became
3:02a premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin.
3:08And there’s some indication, perhaps, that Stalin was either murdered by Khrushchev and a set of his cronies,
3:14or, when he was very ill, just before he died, was not helped, at least by…
3:21wasn’t provided with any medical attention because of the
3:24intervention of Khrushchev and his cronies. Now, there's some indication as well, at that point, that
3:29Stalin, who was an absolute— absolutely barbaric in every possible way you could imagine,
3:34was planning to start a third World War.
3:38And he was certainly capable of doing such things, because he had already
3:43imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people.
3:45Now...
3:47just after Stalin died, there was a bit of a thaw in the Soviet Union with regards to internal repression.
3:54In the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn published a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,"
4:00which was a story about one day in the life — his life, really — inside one of these so-called "gulag archipelago" camps.
4:07Now, he called it the "gulag archipelago" because
4:09an "archipelago" is a chain of islands, and so Solzhenitsyn likened the
4:15work-camp system in the Soviet Union, which is made of isolated camps distributed across the entire state...
4:20He likened that to a series of islands, and hence the metaphor.
4:26And "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was one of the first publications released in the Soviet Union that dared make public
4:34what had happened inside these camps, at least initially.
4:37Now, that thought didn't last very long, but that book had a tremendous effect.
4:42It's a short book; it's worth reading.
4:45After that, he spent— he wrote a number of other books which were also—
4:49He's a great literary figure; in the same category, I would say, as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which is,
4:54like, really saying something, you know. Those two are perhaps the greatest literary figures who ever lived,
4:59with the possible exception of Shakespeare.
5:01He wrote this book called "The Gulag Archipelago," which is published in three volumes, each of which is about 700 pages long.
5:09The first one details the origin of the oppressive Soviet system, at least in part under Lenin, and then its full-fledged implementation
5:20under Stalin and the deaths of...
5:22Well, Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at
5:27something approximating sixty million, between 1919 and 1959.
5:31Now, that doesn't count the death toll in the second World War, by the way.
5:35Now, people have disputed those figures, but they're certainly in the tens of millions, and the low-end bounds are probably
5:41twenty million, and the high-end bounds are near what Solzhenitsyn estimated... He also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China
5:50cost a hundred million lives, and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures, again, are subject to dispute,
5:58but somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. And one of the things that's really surprising to me
6:03and that I think is absolutely reprehensible — absolutely reprehensible — is the fact that
6:09this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West.any of these
6:12it's because your education -
6:14your historical education
15:17Establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor.
15:26One of the things that's quite interesting about the gulag camps, and this is something that's very relevant to understanding modern Russia is that
15:33so, ordinary criminals were put into the camps, and so were political prisoners.
15:39but the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let's say, as well as thieves
15:40who were engaged in theft as an occupation.
15:43Those were regarded by the Soviets as "socially friendly" elements.
15:47And the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime was because of the oppressive nature
15:53of the previous Czarist/Capitalist system. And that the only reason that these criminals existed
16:00was because they had been oppressed -- they were oppressed victims of that system
16:04and so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine
16:09was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps.
16:14And these were very, very seriously bad people, and so,
16:17you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners
16:20who were regarded as socially hostile elements,
16:23sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts, but more often
16:27merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity,
16:31or the fact that they were related by birth to, say, people who had been succcessful
16:35under the previous systems, so who had any
16:38any association with nobility or any association with were known as the Kulaks,
16:43who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union.
16:48Because they were regarded as "privileged."
16:51You may have heard that word more recently.
16:53They were regarded as "privileged" and therefore as enemies of the state. And it didn't matter if it was your father, or your grandfather, or your great-grandfather
16:59who happened to be "privileged,"
17:02but the mere fact that you were a member of that group was sufficient reason to put you into a camp.