Julie Yeuillaz Mr. Sanders English IV 4 January, 2023 Topic 1 Freedom in the Gulags One of the main characteristics of both gulags and concentration camps was the almost complete absence of freedom. Gulags are a system of labor camps maintained in the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1955 Ivan Denisovich is the pseudonym that the author, Solzhenitsyn, uses in the book A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenistyn is a Russian novelist who lived in the gulags and, once released, wrote and published this novel, which gives an inside of the lives in the camp. In the gulags, the fundamental difference between people’s approach was the level of attitude and self respect they wanted to keep. Giving up one’s attitude could sometimes mean the difference …show more content…
Both contained categories of people hated by the government, and that’s why simple labor or imprisonment was not enough. But, while concentration camps aspired at the extermination of the prisoners and for this there was no release, gulags had more prison-like characteristics, such as solitary cells, or freeing their prisoners, even if often their release dates were postponed. From what is known from books like Primo Levi’s If this is a man, people tended to become more religious and respect their beliefs more during their imprisonment, since they felt so close to death, which was always present. On the other hand, gulags prisoners had actual hope to get out, so, to maintain that hope, it could have made more sense for somebody to lose their attitude and beliefs, just to be able to reach the release date, since causing problems and not following the rules could lead to a postponing of the released date and eventually even cause death because of …show more content…
A clear example is how the people react when they are out of tobacco: on the one hand there’s Fetyukov, a person who seems to have chosen to abandon dignity, and it is said that he would “even pick them (cigarettes) out of a spitoon without batting an eye” (p. 56); he is not only reducing himself to someone who lives off other people’s waste, but he also exposes himself to many diseases, just for the butt of a cigarette. On the other hand, Sukhov is a more respected person; Caesar offers him his cigarette butt, and he is happy because “he’d beaten that scavenger Fetyukov to it” (p.34). That does not only show how he doesn’t often ask for favors, like Fetyukov does, but that he is regarded more than he is, and that is probably because he tries to keep his dignity