THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, VOL. Ill by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Translated by Harry Willetts; Harper & Row; 558 pages; $16.95
After a two-year delay following its Russian-language publication in Paris, Gulag III has reached the U.S. It is the last volume of Solzhenitsyn's 1,800-page chronicle of the Soviet penal system, beginning with the Red Terror of 1918 and ending with the release of millions of political prisoners from slave labor camps in 1956. Up to now the narrative has been one of unrelenting horror, recounted at a high pitch of indignation modulated by black sarcasm.
America's tolerance for this tale has been lamentably low. Sales of Gulag II fell far behind the bestselling Gulag I. Many of the books' best-intentioned buyers have lacked the stamina to hear Solzhenitsyn out to the end. Harper & Row's postponement of further publication was apparently designed to provide readers with a respite before tackling the final volume.
Gulag III should prove less formidable than its predecessors. The bleak panorama of I (the prison system) and II (the labor camps) opens on to more heartening vistas of resistance and rebellion in III. The book is principally an enthralling account of the first postwar escapes and strikes in the camps that exploded into full-scale mutinies after Stalin's death. That heroic era coincided with Solzhenitsyn's own eight-year term, and its heady air still exhilarates him. The pride and zest with which he describes the convicts' resistance contrast sharply with the fury he expended on their earlier docility. In Gulag II he had thundered: "The strongest chains binding the prisoners were their own universal submission and total surrender to their situation as slaves." But writing from Vermont, where he now lives, Solzhenitsyn prefaces the English translation of Gulag III by saying: "To those readers who have found the moral strength to overcome the darkness and suffering of the first two volumes, the third volume will disclose a space ol freedom and struggle."
In Gulag III Solzhenitsyn abandons the thesis that Soviet totalitarianism could not have developed had there been resistance from below. "A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf," he once raged. "We didn't love freedom enough. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!" If only people had fended off their arresting officers with pokers instead of cowering "like rabbits in their warrens, paling with terror," then the cursed machine would have come to a halt," he added.
As it turns out, that hypothesis was mostly hyperbole, the outgrowth, perhaps, of fantasies spun by helpless Russians who in fact could scarcely utter a whisper against the system of mass police terror. Gulag HI marks a judicious turnabout: "The Communist regime has not been overthrown in sixty years, not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West."