The Gulag Archipelago 2. [antikvár]

Chapter 1 The Fingers of Aurora Rosy^fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the Archipelago. When our compatriots heard via the BBC that M. Mihajlov claimed to have discovered that concentration camps had existed in our country as far back as 1921, many of us (and many in the West too) were astonished: That early really? Even in 1921? Of course not! Of course Mihajlov was in error. In 1921, in fact, concentration camps were already in full flower (already even coming to an end), It would be far more accurate to say that the Archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser Aurora* And how could it have been otherwise? Let us pause to ponder. Didn't Marx and Engels teach that the old bourgeois machinery of compulsion had to be broken up, and a new one created immediately in its place? And included in the machinery of compulsion were: the army (we are not surprised that the Red Army was created at the beginning of 1918); the police (the militia* was inaugurated even sooner than the army); the courts (from November 22, 1917); and the prisons. How, in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, could they delay with a new type of prison? That is to say that it was altogether impermissible to delay in the matter of prisons, whether old or new. In the first months after the October Revolution Lenin was already demanding "the most