'The Gulag Archipelago' is a work par excellence by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russia), the Nobel laureate in literature (1970). It sheds light on forced labour camp treatment at Gulag (acronym in Russian which means 'Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps') by soviet. He begins by the way how people were arrested in mass and on what basis/allegations. The book is obviously based on history and writer's personal experience there in prison. I'd like to share some excerpts from the translated version by Thomas P. Whitney, which I have been currently reading.
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.
..... to imprison many more citizens of a given town than the police force itself numbers.
"No right to correspondence"-and that almost for certain means: "Has been shot.”
They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102.
You are arrested by a religious pilgrim whom you have put up for the night "for the sake of Christ." You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theater. Any one of them can arrest you, and you notice the concealed marooncolored identification card only when it is too late.
In the strained and overloaded years of 1945 and 1946, when trainload after trainload poured in from Europe, to be swallowed up immediately and sent off to Gulag, all that excessive theatricality went out the window, and the whole theory suffered greatly. All the fuss and feathers of ritual went flying in every direction, and the arrest of tens of thousands took on the appearance of a squalid roll call: they stood there with lists, read off the names of those on one train, loaded them onto another, and that was the whole arrest.
And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night.
"Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they'll put me in too." (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.)
A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.
All three had been officers. Their shoulder boards also had been viciously tom off, and in some places the cotton batting stuck out. On their stained field shirts light patches indicated where decorations had been removed, and there were dark and red scars on their faces and arms, the results of wounds and bums.
However, in memory they get all mixed up together because they are so similar: in the illiteracy of their convoys, in their inept roll calls based on case files; the long waiting under the beating sun or autumn drizzle; the still longer body searches that involve undressing completely; their haircuts with unsanitary clippers; their cold, slippery baths; their foul-smelling toilets; their damp and moldy corridors; their perpetually crowded, nearly always dark, wet cells; the warmth of human flesh flanking you on the floor or on the board bunks; the bumpy ridges of bunk heads knocked together from boards; the wet, almost liquid, bread; the gruel cooked from what seems to be silage.
They didn't distribute rations to individuals but to units of ten. If one of the ten died, the others shoved his corpse under the bunks and kept it there until it started to stink.
Half a mug of water a day; there wasn't any more.
