--- Kevin Walsh, EASPF Editor

I generally don't like to review a book until I've read the whole thing, but sometimes a book is so stupid it can be discerned almost immediately. This is the case of "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I read only the preface, glossary, and the first chapter "Arrest" late this morning, and I concluded there wasn't even any point checking the book out of the library. I returned it to the shelf.

Many of my right wing acquaintances had advised me to read it as an expose of how horrible the Stalin administration supposedly was. I resisted wasting my time on it, because, as these people admitted, it was not a scholarly work about objective statistics, merely one person's anecdotal evidence, which is notoriously unreliable. Still, curiosity finally got the better of me, and I decided to have a look while I was at the library.

The author waxed poetic about the horror of arrests by the GPU and even anticipation of arrest, but his actual descriptions of the arrests seemed quite mild to me. Certainly none of the arrests he described was as violent as my own, or even as harsh as most American arrests. He wrote of GPU officers knocking on the door in the middle of the night (rather than knocking down the door in the middle of the night as is done by American police). He wrote of GPU officers making arrests with their pistols in their holsters (not drawn and pointed at the person arrested, as is often done in the USA). He wrote of persons being arrested being urged by the GPU officers to hurry when packing their suitcases to leave. It's unheard of for American police to allow anyone arrested to pack a suitcase before going to jail or allow them to take any personal property into jail with them, even their street clothes. If he wanted to make GPU officers sound like mean people, he didn't succeed. They seem to have been much nicer than American police officers. He even talks of prisoners accompanying the GPU without handcuffs, something also unheard of in an American arrest.

He does express wonder that no one organized any violent resistance, using such improvised weapons as shovels, pokers, and bottles against GPU agents at night and compares the Soviet population to sheep willingly led to slaugher. Of course one obvious explanation that never seems to occur to him is that maybe it was because most of the Soviet people trusted and supported the GPU. Of course that possibility is heresy to the Cold Warriors promoting the book.

Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army captain fighting in east Prussia, was arrested by SMERSH in February 1945. He is a bit cagey about the reason for his arrest, referring only to a correspondence with another soldier on the Ukrainian front.

Perhaps he gets into it more later in the book, but it seems suspicious to me that he was reluctant to talk about the charges against him. He did describe his first three cellmates, whom he described as "honest soldiers." Two of them frankly admitted that they were arrested while breaking into a bathhouse and trying to rape two German women. The third frankly admitted he was a German spy. Well if Solzhenitsyn wants to convince people that most of the people interned in the Gulags were innocent, he's not off to a good start.

It is ironic that many of the same right wing elements who promote this author also make exaggerated claims about the number of German women who were raped by Russian soldiers. Well, if they believe Solzhenitsyn, at least two of them were punished for it. Solzhenitsyn defends the rapists, by claiming that rape of German women was tolerated but that those two soldiers made the mistake of going after a woman who was the concubine of a senior Soviet officer. Even if such an improbable claim were true, it would not make those two soldiers "innocent."

Solzhenitsyn's open sympathy with admitted spies and rapists makes him incredible and morally bankrupt in the eyes of reasonable people. At that point it was clear to me that there was no point wasting time by reading further. I'm surprised any thinking person takes him or his books seriously.