How Does Bureaucracy Shape the Soul?

in

Years after many of the Zeks––prisoners in the Soviet Union’s gulag system––had been released from their long captivity another round of arrests began. The standard sentence in Stalin’s purge of 1937 was 10 years for presumed political activity. Yet the system demanded so much more than that miserable internment. In 1949 the freed convicts, barely eking out existence as exiles in Siberia, were being absorbed into the Soviet bureaucratic machine once again. It had nothing to do with the people or their behavior, simply that they had once been convicted of political activity and had been born with a particular surname.

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Remembering the Soviet Century

in

The Soviet Century is the sort of volume that pairs well with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Not only does it have the heft of Russian literature, but it also fills in much of the background that Solzhenitsyn describes. While The Gulag Archipelago gives a jarring portrait of life within the prison, The Soviet Union fills in many of the puzzle pieces around that massive literary work.

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