Summary: A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich demonstrates the many cruel and unnecessary ways they treated their prisoners. Granted, they were prisoners, many did something worthy of landing themselves in the Gulags, so they deserved some type of punishment, but to this extent? Some of the things needed for survival were barely or not at all provided by the gulags and the conditions were inhumane. This is what the author was getting at. I say ‘many’ as opposed to all because some of the prisoners were merely accused and not proven, like the main character, Ivan Denisovich. Since it was a dictatorship, those things were allowed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticizes the treatment of prisoners in the gulags, from the conditions, food, to clothes. The conditions that the prisoners endured, whether it’s the working conditions, the weather, or the their shelter, were detrimental to their health and well-being. The weather in Siberia is uncontrollable and inevitable, so not much blame is on the workers of the gulags. However, they don’t do much to help. They make the prisoners live in not

As I previously mentioned, Siberia winters are harmful and hazardous. The human body can only take so much and needs clothes to lock in heat and block out the cold in order to prevent illnesses like hypothermia and death, so they are dependent on layers of warm clothes for their survival. They also have rules on clothing. For example, two layers are the maximum layers allowed and they have to maintain a certain condition of their clothing so they can read the numbers on them from afar, as demonstrated in this quote, “He looked at his jacket—the number on the chest was almost rubbed off. That might be noticed. He ought to have it touched up.” (pg. 21). Clothing was one of the basic human needs to survive that were not sufficiently provided for the