“Soul Mange”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described “soul mange” in The Gulag Archipelago.

And in addition you are constantly gripped by fear: of slipping off even that pitifully low level to which you are clinging, of losing your work which is still not the hardest, of coming a cropper on a prisoner transport, of ending up in a Strict Regimen Camp. And on top of that, you got beaten if you were weaker than all the rest, or else you yourself beat up those weaker than you. And wasn’t this corruption? Soul mange is what A. Rubailo, an old camp veteran, called this swift decay under external pressure.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, pp 620-621

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Good and Evil

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about good and evil.

For a good person even a crust is healthy food, and to an evil person even meat brings no benefit.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 610

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. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 615

How Gulag Camps Proved Economically Profitable

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about how Gulag camps proved economically profitable.

The reason why the camps proved economically profitable had been foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia. The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform. For work in remote and primitive localities where it would not be possible to construct housing, schools, hospitals, and stores for many years to come. For work with pick and spade–in the flowering of the twentieth century. For the erection of the great construction projects of socialism, when the economic means for them did not yet exist.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, pp 578-579

The camps were uniquely profitable in terms of the submissiveness of the slave labor and its cheapness–no, it was not just cheap, it cost nothing, because in antiquity money did have to be paid for a slave, whereas no one paid anything to buy a camp inmate.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 581