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The Dangers of Ideology
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Gulag Archipelago, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Throughout The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn examines how power, when left unchecked, corrupts individual people and entire institutions, leading to widespread suffering. Solzhenitsyn shows that the corrupting influence of power can permeate every level of society, from high-ranking officials to prison guards, using the Soviet regime under Stalin to illustrate his point. One striking example is the NKVD officers who wielded absolute power over prisoners. These officials, driven by loyalty to the state and their own self-preservation, would often fabricate charges and use torture to extract false confessions from the accused. Solzhenitsyn describes the horrors of the interrogation process, where agents used psychological and physical torment to break down prisoners, turning innocent people into supposed enemies of the state. The interrogators acted with impunity, knowing full well that their authority would shield them from facing any consequences for their misconduct.
Solzhenitsyn also exposes corruption within the prison camp hierarchy. Guards and camp commanders held immense authority over prisoners, often using their positions for personal gain. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn highlights how guards and other officials would often withhold food and medical care, meted out punishment based on whims, and sexually abused female prisoners. Solzhenitsyn describes guards who, enjoying their dominance, treated prisoners with a casual disregard for life. One of the worst things about the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn suggests, is that it persisted not because of its benefit to society, but because those whom it empowered—from camp guards, all the way up to Stalin himself—did not want to give up their position in society. Ultimately, then, Solzhenitsyn suggests that unchecked authority, can lead to widespread suffering, especially if those in positions of authority are more interested in self-preservation rather than in the common good.
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Power as a Corrupting Force ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Power as a Corrupting Force appears in each chapter of The Gulag Archipelago. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Power as a Corrupting Force Quotes in The Gulag Archipelago
Below you will find the important quotes in The Gulag Archipelago related to the theme of Power as a Corrupting Force.
Part 3, Chapter 13: Hand Over Your Second Skin Too!
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Can you behead a man whose head has already been cut off? You can. Can you skin the hide off a man when he has already been skinned? You can!
This was all invented in our camps. This was all devised in the Archipelago! So let it not be said that the brigade was our only Soviet contribution to world penal science. Is not the second camp term a contribution too? The waves which surge into the Archipelago from outside do not die down there and do not subside freely, but are pumped through the pipes of the second interrogation.
Oh, blessed are those pitiless tyrannies, those despotisms, those savage countries, where a person once arrested cannot be arrested a second time! Where once in prison he cannot be reimprisoned. Where a person who has been tried cannot be tried again! Where a sentenced person cannot be sentenced again!
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Part 3, Chapter 17: The Kids
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Children accepted the Archipelago with the divine impressionability of childhood. And in a few days children became beasts there! And the worst kind of beasts, with no ethical concepts whatever. The kid masters the truth: If other teeth are weaker than your own, then tear the piece away from them. It belongs to you!
Part 3, Chapter 20: The Dogs’ Service
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Malice, cruelty. There was no curb, either practical or moral, to restrain these traits. Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Part 7, Chapter 1: Looking Back on It All
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We never, of course, lost hope that our story would be told: since sooner or later the truth is told about all that has happened in history. But in our imagining this would come in the rather distant future—after most of us were dead. And in a completely changed situation. I thought of myself as the chronicler of the Archipelago, I wrote and wrote, but I, too, had little hope of seeing it in print in my lifetime.
History is forever springing surprises even on the most perspicacious of us. We could not foresee what it would be like: how for no visible compelling reason the earth would shudder and give, how the gates of the abyss would briefly, grudgingly part so that two or three birds of truth would fly out before they slammed to, to stay shut for a long time to come.
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