On Sunday (3 August 2008), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died aged 89, in his home in the Moscow area. He, through great hardship, brought the Russian word gulag, into the mainstream of the English language.
His book, The Gulag Archipelago, was written in secret while he was living in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in the early 1970s. It is probably the definitive work on Stalin’s forced labour camps. Having spent eight years in the camps for criticising Stalin, he used his own experience, research and other prisoner’s testimonies to create the book.
Gulag was a loose abbreviation for the government agency administering the ‘corrective’ labour camps across the Soviet Union:
Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’notrudovykh lagereĭ
Gulag came to be used to denote the camps themselves or the procedural system of arrest, interrogation, transport, and forced labour. It is now also used specifically to mean a prison camp for political dissidents (although the gulags had no such distinction). It also can be used metaphorically for a place of great hardship.
Solzhenitsyn and his works had a huge impact in the West culminating in his Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.
I remember that, when I was a boy, he showed us that both personal courage and the power of words could challenge the evils of the state. His most famous quote is reproduced in the image:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
He was saying that he witnessed cruelty and humanity on both sides of the Gulag perimeter. He also was saying that he could also see the capacity for good and evil within himself. The Gulag was the creation of the Stalinist system, but the human failings that made it possible were not peculiarly Soviet. The line between good and evil does not run between us and them. It runs through every one of us.
I hope we remember him as he deserves.
Updated 23 August 2026–replaced a poor image with an artificial intelligence generated image and added the quote and explanation.