Reflections from the Archipelago

In a history fraught with tragedy, the darkness of the Soviets hangs as one of the heaviest. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is less a hero than a madman, whose recounting of the Soviet Gulag system is the product of eloquent scribbles. Despite heavy citation, his work does not resemble an academic thesis, but is rather draped in anxiety, as if he were racing against the clock, his pen briskly attempting to record the mass of thought and memory from his head into permanence, afraid of nearby entities ready to erase him at any moment. And yet, this anxiety never led itself to brevity, instead encompassing a stubborn determination to realize every possible thought, opinion, and fact, never hesitant to break the scholastic in favor of waxing philosophical.

I cannot help but make the comparison to Elie Weisel’s Night, which also conveys the reality of a European tragedy. Both men transmit the horrors of their experience, and yet their methods are opposed. Where Eli Weisel brings the reader with him on his apocalyptic journey for a brief and intensely personal hundred pages, Solzhenitsyn writes like a thorough and frank obsessive, exercising his thoughts in well over 1000 pages, hovering somewhere between memoirist and journalist. But, the work is not just Solzhenitsyn’s own memoir. It is the memoir of the millions who suffered and perished with him. His liberal use of anecdotes paints a shocking picture that at first instinct feels surreal, but is quickly and constantly supported by punch after punch from Solzhenitsyn’s heavy fists. He wants to show the reader that this, too, is humanity.

He often expresses a maniacal shock and laughter at his reality. Perhaps what most separates the Soviets from the Nazis is the constant ridiculousness of their behavior and methods. Solzhenitsyn accounts a situation in which Stalin visited a factory, of course welcomed by an unmatched applause. The applause could not end, for who would be so brave as to be the first to stop clapping for the infallible and inimitable Stalin? It lasted for five minutes, six, seven, ten! Finally, after eleven minutes, the director of the factory ceased clapping. The director was later arrested. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. The interrogator told him to never be the first one to stop clapping, to which Solzhenitsyn remarks “and just what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to stop?” This is the impossible Soviet reality, a far cry from the ruthless Nazis, who could rationalize their actions and made no qualms about their intentions, simply executing their work efficiently and without excuse.

The Soviet reality borders on hilarious in the same way as some Adult Swim shows. Does the scene I just described not sound like a caricatured satire that would be at home in a dark comedy? But, we remember the victims of the farce were very real, and perhaps that is why Solzhenitsyn does not stop, because we can believe in tragedy, but this? How can we believe this to have been real? This is a tragedy wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a joke.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

For me, this is the passage that most accurately reveals the whole of the book. To confront the absurd reality of the Gulag is to confront humanity as a whole. Just as those interrogators and prison guards should have asked “what if it were me?” before they humiliated and devastated the lives of their victims, so should we have asked ourselves, what if it were us? I don’t mean to consider if we were victims, I mean to ask if we were the perpetrators of the atrocity. Why could it not be? Do you think you are too good? We cannot pretend that millions of Soviet soldiers and officials were tricked overnight into becoming agents of the apocalypse. No, they were convinced that what they were doing was right, just as we fight for our flag today and believe our enemies ought to be defeated, so did they believe they were righteous amongst hordes of infidels, traitors, and undesirables. They were like us, and we are like them.

Deep within all of us is the capability for great terror, a state in which everything we have built is torn from our self and we recede and disappear into an ancient programming that cannot recall any flavor of enlightened thought. We are Mother Nature’s greatest accomplishment, and yet we are still her child. We cannot escape. We are not special, not in the way we are taught to believe. Would you have acted any differently? Honestly confront yourself. Had you been living then, would you have rebelled? Do you think you are capable of such heroics? I think you would have sunk into a meek and submissive state, an unrecognizable state so terrifically removed from what you thought you were capable of, and so distant that you are not even at liberty to think these thoughts, you are instead only living in this moment, too filled with despair and an ironic will to survive, and too weak to take that survival into your own hands, and so you wait, afraid to make any decision because you might be wrong, and so pathetic that you do not have the confidence to be right, not like you thought; in fact, you are nothing like you thought you would be, you are like everyone else and you will fall in line with everyone else because that is comfortable and easy and that is your best chance at survival, and so you say your yessir and you bow your head and you remove the humanity from the other until he becomes a pure other, and a pure other does not require nor deserve your respect — he is an animal, and therefore your selfishness is rationalized as easily as removing the pests from the house, and so you can sleep easier knowing you did as you were told and you will live another day, because taking a stand would require you to actually be special, and you are not. Instead, you feel your heart drumming in your throat, nauseous, helpless, desperately fluttering through possible antidotes for this anxiety, always landing on the most pathetic of remedies, bowing your pathetic head in submission.

And, so, too, are the slaves pathetic—and in much the same way. They who outnumber their captors walk in tight clumps with their eyes on the ground, frail and spineless animals backed into a corner and too held by anxiety to create even the idea of a rebellion, somehow continually yielding to power, hoping for someone else to save them. But, who? You are acknowledging your own failure by surrendering any agency in your future! Your entire being is no longer within your purview. And even if you have been made a slave by chain, you have surrendered your mind of your own will, completely inadequate to risk the idea of insurrection. Solzhenitsyn marvels at how all those arrested go in peace, sometimes even publicly taken through the streets, all without incident. He cannot believe how rare an occurrence it is to hear an accused man squealing for help as he is heaved from street to street. Shouldn’t this man, who knows he has done nothing wrong, struggle? Instead we submit quietly, hoping the person whose hands now hold our life will perhaps be generous, even if we are apparently aware that only tragedy and injustice await us. We let these things happen, somehow.

The victim and victimizer are two sides of the same strange coin. Both are paralyzed by a higher power into acting in ways they never thought they could. This higher power is usually an idea that has been convincingly implanted within us by the few great people gifted enough to do so. These great people are often enraptured by broad ideas that they have embedded to become their own, though sometimes they develop their ideas independently — in either case they do not bow. They would rather die than be the meek victim. They are not capable of such submission. They do not accept that “this is the way the world is”, but instead are heroic or villainous enough to attempt to make the world in their vision. This is the human tribe, full of sheep, scattered with herders. It is visible from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia, Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. If we accept that we are all equal, then we must also accept that this human behavior, however extreme, is still within the human spectrum, because no man conducts a genocide on his own. Within these armies of the apocalypse are thousands and millions of soldiers who are just like us.

Recall the Milgram Experiments, in which a test subject was told to transmit an electrical shock to a stranger on the other side of a wall. The experiment was meant to test the way humans respond to authority. There was no person on the other side of the wall, but fake cries of pain were used to convince the test subject that he was responsible for the torture of an innocent person. When the test subject protested, the test administrator would calmly state “please continue,” or “the experiment requires you to continue.” A majority of test subjects indeed continued, ultimately inflicting the maximum electrical shock. This led Milgram to conclude that “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” What does it say about our moral and ethical codes if we give in so easily to an authority who orders us to violate those codes? What kind of judgment can we really pass on those participants in genocide, systematic imprisonment, or any other atrocity?

It is hard to extrapolate from this experiment full and concrete evidence that explains the Holocaust, Soviet Gulag system, or the genocide in Darfur. While these experiments only lasted an hour and the test subjects operated under assurances that no one would be permanently harmed, the aforementioned atrocities lasted years, its participants had time to reflect on their actions, and they were often fully aware that they were torturing and taking lives. But, at the same time, the participants in Milgram’s tests were not under any threat. They merely obeyed a stated authority. Surely, one would think that if these Milgram participants knew the pressing of the buzzer would lead to the death of a stranger, they would not act so opposed to their morals and ethics. There must be a limit. And so while the damage inflicted by these test subjects was much less than the genocides of the 20th Century, so too were the stakes. Perhaps an authority that explicitly or implicitly punishes those who disobey with death or exile would be able to turn people so far from their moral code as to commit murder.

Milgram’s experiment is not an outlandish explanation. After all, is there a better one? How do we explain the mass participation and bureaucracy involved in these atrocities? It must be rooted in some aspect of human nature. Here, too, Milgram proposes the agentic state theory in which people begin to view themselves not as independent beings, but merely as instruments that carry out the will of others. This absolves them of responsibility. Again, this is a stunningly submissive and arguably selfish state in which the agent has abandoned their morals and ethics, perhaps in order to survive. We tend to think we would not behave this way, but most of us apparently do. Power and authority are inescapable realities that often confront and conflict with our ideas of equality.

The utopia in which we want to live — in which everyone is equal and possesses the same inalienable rights, in which injustice is rare and thoroughly punished, in which “love thy neighbor” is universal — is such a delicate place as to almost be unnatural. That does not mean we should not strive for that utopia, but clearly achieving it is to overcome our very instincts. Murder and injustice is more natural than peace and equality. But, we have put a man on the moon, and that is far from natural. This is much more complicated and demanding, but not impossible.

Solzhenitsyn’s catalog of atrocity and absurdity is a building block towards this future. To never forget is to never repeat and to do better than before. Today’s mass literacy and interconnectivity also contribute to an increase in empathy. It is much more difficult to infringe harm upon those with whom we sympathize. As atrocities become more and more documented, it becomes easier to not only learn from them, but to actually remember what we learned, so that we recognize the terrible roads down which we may be heading, hopefully soon enough to exit. And yet, we are clearly also capable of inflicting harm upon a fellow human being — a fellow American — on the other side of an experiment wall, simply because we are told. How could we not have empathy for that person, who we just met, and with whom we could have easily swapped positions? Clearly this is about more than empathy. It’s about recognizing our innately human flaws and overcoming them. In the same way we are taught to control our anger, lust, or other primal desires, we must also be educated on how we are affected by authority. Only then can we overcome it.

One of the participants in Milgram’s experiment wrote to him years later saying that that experience was the main reason he was willing to risk imprisonment instead of accepting the call to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Milgram had inadvertently made him aware of the flaws in his tendencies. He recognized his morals were to be tested and this awareness allowed him to overcome the power of authority. By learning about Milgram and by reading Solzhenitsyn we prepare our minds for the ridiculous and unbelievable realities of human nature. Only by understanding our primal instincts can we ever hope to overcome them.