Gulag

but it can also mean to experience emotional pain or be extremely displeased of a current situation. To suffer is to be discontent, and one must do anything to prevent an enduring unhappiness. As a result, growth and success are achieved. In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn identified a link between suffering and learning; suffering being the cause and learning being the effect. In The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich…

It is always astounding to me how much a person can go through, still persevere, and survive. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel is a great example of this. Throughout the novel, Ivan Denisovich, a Russian Solder that has been wrongly accused of treason, is a prisoner of a Siberian labor camp. He must not only learn to survive on limited food, hard labor, and negative forty-degree weather, but he must learn to keep his identity in a place where the guards refer to him as a serial number, Shcha-854.…

To survive one must adapt to the harsh conditions. As Buna (Buchenwald concentration camp) was taking place in Ettersberg near Weimar, Germany. The prisoners had to endure weathers of 30 degrees an under (Line 19 “At night we slept almost naked, and it was below thirty degrees.”). While receiving a lack of clothing and blankets(Line 18 “There was no water, no blankets, less soup and bread.”). The body must quickly adapt, as they receive a lack of nutrition, leaving the person with low energy.…

Upon completing Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, a book detailing Solzhenitsyn’s account of the terrors of the Soviet Gulag, I picked up my copy of Krauthammer’s article At Last Zion and read through its seven pages. I am uncertain which text is more terrifying. Grandiose fatalistic vaticinations abound in Krauthammer’s piece. American Jewry, we are told, will decline and ultimately disappear. Later on we read that Israel, the renascent Jewish homeland, is “the last hope.” Though we are afforded…

The post card arrived, from the Siberian Gulag, two days ago. On the front of it was a picture of several men chopping down trees in the snow. The backside read: “Hello from the Gulag! The past week has been an interesting and cold one at this camp. The activities here are rather physically grueling but I don’t mind. In this one game, we chop down trees and carry it to a cart that another group brings to a station for some other game. We also play a game that involves digging holes in the frozen…

revision in our understanding of the Gulag since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago of the 1970s. Barnes, while noting that Solzhenitsyn – who lacked archival records and relied only on first-hand testimony and his own personal experience – was remarkably correct about many aspects of the Gulag’s history, nevertheless challenges Solzhenitsyn’s contention that we should understand the Gulag only as a place of destruction. Instead, Barnes argues that the Gulag was a space of both death and…

during the same time. While the labor camps, called Gulags, were not meant to exterminate a race of people, the camps did cause a significant number of deaths. While the death total of the Gulags was not as high as those of concentration camps, it is important to remember these camps as well. Gulags, just like concentration camps, used propaganda, killed millions, and were enforced because of a harsh dictator. The propaganda used for the Gulags was very different from the propaganda used for…

At the Second Congress of the Russian Democratic Labor Party, it was agreed upon that Russia was in need of a revolution as the workers and peasants of the country were becoming dissatisfied with the Czar and the government. The end goal of the revolution was to be socialism. However, Congress split into two parties: the Bolsheviks (the majority) and the Mensheviks (the minority). The main disagreements revolved around party membership, with the Mensheviks arguing for a broad-based membership…

atrocious effects of an oppressive regime they need look no further than the gulags. The gulags were forced-labor camps that existed within the Soviet Union during the reign of the oppressive dictator Joseph Stalin. The book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the single day of an average prisoner in the camp named Ivan Denisovich. In order to understand the society and conditions within the gulag one must first know how and why it came to be. For what…

start a revolution and take his power. Another example is the purge of his own government party. He killed everyone who helped him get to where he got. Not only did he kill people, he also stuck them in Gulag camps. He stuck his own people in Gulag camps so they could not revolt against him. Gulag camps…