The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You wouldn’t fly a swastika.

Every youthful generation breeds it’s own counter-culture; from the sexual revolution and hippies in the 60s to the punk rockers of the 90s. The counter-culture provides a corrective feedback loop to the popular culture enabling it to grow and shift and be motile. The current counter-culture I see in Universities is the growing tide of socialism and communism acceptance.

The rise of communism in the 20th century was a response to the poor working conditions and pay seen by the workers in the factories in the face of the industrialisation revolution. From that lens it is extremely easy to draw similarities between that and the current “cost of living” crisis that many developed nations are experiencing after the economic crash caused by COVID-19. The wage of workers has stayed consistent although institutions and multi-national corporations are reporting record profits. Additionally, there are news stories about the failing of the private sector to provide for the needs of families. The specific example I’m thinking of is the privatisation of the mining sector in Australia. With comparative mining sectors to Norway, it was released that the states of NSW and QLD were missing out on billions of tax dollars when compared to the more publicised mining sectors of Norway (1).

From these lenses, the allure of communism, especially for younger people at universities who are in the affected workforces: hospitality and retail, is completely understandable.

However, it is incredibly difficult to read Solzhenitsyn and agree with these ideals. The foreword by Jordan Peterson is incredibly impactful and pulls into question the purity of Marks’ original writings. One of Peterson’s main take-aways is that “the prisoners run the camps”. This is made clear by the stoolies commonly talked about by Solzhenitsyn. Another takeaway from Peterson’s analysis is the entire country lying to one another, continuing the problem. This is completely evident: Solzhenitsyn constantly draws comparisons between the Russian peoples originating as slavic in name and in the slave temperament they seem to have. I agree with the above analysis wholeheartedly, however, I will go one further.

Solzhenitsyn writes about how the Stalin regime was built on the backs of the prison labour camps. The entire point of his regime was to use the prison system as free slave labor for the Russian peoples. This raises two follow-up questions:

Who exactly are the “Russian People”?
How do we continue to get free labour?

Ironically enough, Solzhenitsyn outlines a calculation where the cost of the labour camps is larger than the product gained from the labour camps: ironic in two ways.

Revolutions of any kind will take lives: The jewish holocaust of WW2 was estimated to take 8 million lives, Stalin’s prison system cost approximately 9-16 million lives (2) and Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” cost 15-55 million lives in famine alone. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in his book “Sapiens”: Just as with the agricultural revolution, we may have no other path than to simply accept the presence of capitalism as an axiom of modern life.

As enticing as the trails of communism are for those who perceive themselves as exploited, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, perhaps even educates us, about the horrors of middle 20th century Soviet Russia. This topic isn’t much talked about in western schools, and this book reminds us that it should be. This book is an instant classic and one of the most influential books of all time. This is a must read for everyone, 10/10.