RESISTANCE IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (1918-1956)

By Donald G. Boudreau, PhD, MPA

How miserable is a society that knows no better means of defense than an executioner.

-Karl MarxAs quoted by Albert Camus in Camus’,

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, at 240.

INTRODUCTION

Back in the balmy summer of 1974, I spent many hot and humid nights working as a waiter in a steakhouse restaurant, out on the highway known as US Rt. 22, in northern New Jersey. In arriving home thereafter, late in the evening to a nearby suburb, feeling wired and needing to unwind before sleeping, I began bedtime reading a significant number of works authored by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn had been receiving substantial media attention then, regarding his published release a year earlier in 1973 of the first volume of his highly acclaimed The Gulag Archipelago, depicting life and death in the Soviet prison labor camp system during the years 1918-1956.

Given his, Solzhenitsyn’s firsthand perspective of the harsh life therein the Gulag camps, and reading his lightly fictionalized accounts contained in his many novels and stories and poems authored, I thought it would be useful in exploring the question as to how resistance manifested itself in its many ways among the inmates in the Gulag camps. I set about to doing so through reading the works of Solzhenitsyn and some other observers including noted historians of that particular era, whose writings depicted or otherwise memorialized authoritative experiences, acts of dissenting, protesting, and resisting that had occurred in the Gulag during those years.

In the fall of 1974, while preparing my senior college thesis for the advanced Scope and Methods in Political Science course at Montclair State College (now University) in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, on this very same subject, the senior requirement for a Political Science Major culminated in the student presenting an hour long oral presentation of the same written thesis of some serious length manuscript, before and in front of the entire classroom audience, comprised of the course’s professor and one’s fellow students.

My dear friend and fellow classmate, Janet Serra, just days before my scheduled senior presentation before the class, kindly presented me with an early surprise birthday present. It was a first edition, hardcover of the just released volume one of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. She was also, admittedly, sparing me in the process she had rightly said, the shamelessly classless embarrassment of having to read excerpts of the same, from my much worn and rabbit eared, paperback edition, during my hour long class presentation that she knew I was to be delivering soon before the entire class.

Thereafter, my professor, the now since retired Dr. George T. Menake, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Montclair State University, kindly recommended to me in the months thereafter upon returning the graded paper with comments, that he thought I might seriously wish to consider “publishing the paper someday”, which of course, at the time, I did not do so, that is until this day, as this is largely that same very paper verbatim with some incidental, minor cosmetic changes, which you now have before you.