Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The GULag Archipelago Volume 1 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

1. In a letter to me in the Literaturnaya Gazeta , November 29, 1963.

2. OLP = Otdelny Lagerny Punkt = Separate Camp Site.

4. And V. I. Lenin in 1897 boarded the St. Nicholas in the passenger port like a free person.

5. V. Shalamov tells about this in detail in his Ocherki prestupnogo mira ( Sketches of the Criminal World ).

6. Decades have passed since then, but how many times Soviet citizens have met with misfortune on the world’s oceans—and in circumstances where it seems that zeks were not being transported—yet because of that same secretiveness disguised as national pride they have refused help! Let the sharks devour us, so long as we don’t have to accept your helping hand! Secretiveness—that is our cancer.

1. According to the researches of the Social Democrats Nicolaevsky and Dallin, there were from fifteen to twenty million prisoners in the camps.

2. Kostya Kiula doesn’t respond, he’s disappeared. I am afraid he is not among the living.

3. The task of the Fourth Special Department of the MVD was to solve scientific problems, using prisoners.

4. In my preprison and prison years I, too, had long ago come to the conclusion that Stalin had set the course of the Soviet state in a fateful direction. But then Stalin died quietly—and did the ship of state change course very noticeably? The personal, individual imprint he left on events consisted of dismal stupidity, petty tyranny, self-glorification. And in all the rest he followed the beaten path exactly as it had been signposted, step by step.