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He points an accusing finger at Stalin's accomplices who still hold office in the Soviet Union: "What a path to ruin lies ahead if we cannot cleanse ourselves of this filth festering in our body!"
Much of Gulag's power to persuade lies in the author's unsparing personal account of the path he traveled before arriving at the convictions expressed in his book. An archetypal child of the Russian revolution, he was born in 1918, the son of an officer, and brought up in the provincial city of Rostov-on-the-Don. As a youth, Solzhenitsyn dreamed of writing a history of the revolution. "Then," he recalls, "I never needed anything but Marxism to understand the revolution." He failed to recognize signs of mass terror, like the column of prisoners he remembers seeing pass through Rostov in his boyhood. Solzhenitsyn entered Rostov University to study mathematics in 1936 on the eve of the Great Purges, which sucked millions of innocent people into the camps. He admits that it was only by accident that he was not hired by the secret police when their recruiters came to the university. "I was a fully qualified executioner," he writes. "If I had gotten into NKVD school under Yezhov,* maybe I would have matured just in time to serve Beria."
Instead, Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. After that, he confesses, he acquired the habits of the Soviet elite: "I ate my officer's butter with pastry, without giving a thought to why I had a right to it, while rank and file soldiers did not... This is what happens when you put epaulets on people's shoulders; they begin to feel like little gods." Rising to the rank of artillery captain, Solzhenitsyn was decorated several times for bravery while serving on three fighting fronts. Then, in the midst of a battle in 1945, he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in letters to a friend.
Solzhenitsyn views his arrest as a great personal turning point—the beginning of his life as a thinking being. At that same crossroads, he suggests, millions of Russians entered into one of two categories of Soviet citizens: the oppressed and the oppressors. This national dichotomy, he says, tragically disturbed the balance of good and evil that he perceives in every man. Speaking of the oppressors, he asks: "How did this tribe of wolves arise from among our people? Are they not of the same root, the same blood?" He confesses that he too might have joined the predators had he not been imprisoned.
In Gulag, Solzhenitsyn describes his arrest for the first time. In February 1945, as the Red Army rumbled inexorably through Germany to Berlin, the battle-worn captain was suddenly seized near Konigsberg, on the East Prussian front. He was stripped of his rank, his medals and his gun, and escorted by armed guards back to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. It was then that the writer was born. Passing through a Moscow subway station en route to Lubyanka on that bitter winter day, Solzhenitsyn paused and surveyed the scene: