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Part 3, Chapter 15: Punishments
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Gulag Archipelago, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Oppression and Totalitarianism
Survival and the Human Spirit
The Dangers of Ideology
Power as a Corrupting Force
The Value of Religion and Spirituality
Summary
Analysis
Solzhenitsyn meditates on how the Soviet regime’s romanticization of thieves as revolutionary figures reshaped how society and the camp system perceived them. Unlike Old Russia, which viewed habitual criminals as incorrigible and kept them separate from political prisoners, the Soviet authorities adopted a new ideology. Stalin’s government portrayed thieves as a revolutionary force, victims of a corrupt capitalist environment, and therefore allies of the working class. This notion permeated Soviet literature, which glamorized the thieves’ defiance and nihilism. The official corrective-labor policies and Gulag regulations treated these criminals as “socially friendly elements,” emphasizing their supposed potential to unite with the proletariat against capitalist remnants. However, this theoretical optimism ignored the brutal reality of the thieves’ behavior, which undermined any semblance of order among camp prisoners.
The Soviet idealization of thieves as “socially friendly elements” shows the regime’s willingness to distort reality to uphold its preferred ideological narrative. By casting thieves as allies of the proletariat, Stalin’s government aimed to align even criminality with class struggle, turning habitual criminals into supposed revolutionaries. This portrayal of thieves in Soviet literature and policy highlights the dangers of ideological romanticization, where theoretical aspirations disregard the lived realities of exploitation within the camps. Such romanticization is particularly dangerous because supposedly good intentions are attached to it, even if this was not actually the case.
Themes
In practice, this misguided ideology gave thieves unchecked power in the camps. The hardened criminals, or “urki,” became de facto rulers over their fellow inmates, living in relative comfort while exploiting others. They had control over camp resources and often chose temporary “wives” from among the female prisoners. The thieves would plunder food parcels, strip clothing off weaker prisoners in freezing temperatures, and even murder cellmates for personal gain. This behavior contradicted the regime’s idealistic portrayal, exposing a disturbing reality where these so-called allies of the proletariat turned into oppressors.
The unchecked power granted to thieves within the camps exemplifies the perverse outcomes of the Soviet regime’s ideological blindness. Solzhenitsyn’s account of the “urki” exploiting and brutalizing other prisoners illustrates how the Gulag’s internal hierarchy mirrored the oppressive nature of the state itself. By elevating these criminals, the regime established a class of privileged oppressors within the camps, undermining any notion of justice or equality.
Themes
The regime’s policies not only emboldened the thieves but also rendered the broader prison population defenseless. Ordinary prisoners had no means to resist the thieves’ tyranny. The thieves’ dominance reinforced the dehumanization within the Gulag, as they brutalized those around them without fear of meaningful punishment. The authorities’ deliberate leniency toward thieves—issuing light sentences for crimes against individuals compared to harsh penalties for offenses against the state—further fueled this culture of impunity.
The regime’s leniency toward thieves while punishing political dissenters harshly exposes the moral inconsistency and arbitrary cruelty of the Soviet penal system. By prioritizing control over justice, the regime’s policies effectively empowered the very forces that dismantled solidarity and exploited the weak. As with most things the Soviet system did, this was either intentional or became intentional over time after the negative effects of the policy were apparent.
Themes
