The Zoomer Archipelago

The politics of intergenerational envy

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn explores the waves of Stalin’s purges and show trials through the 1930s by following the average journey of a zek, or prisoner, through the Gulag system.

The book begins with the process of arrest by the NKVD. Solzhenitsyn marvels at the techniques they use to avoid resistance; they arrest people when they are disoriented and least expecting it, and by building up the process of arrest as a series of small incidents, none of which offered a definitive reason or moment for the soon-to-be-prisoner to resist. As he wrote;

At what exact point, then, should one resist?…An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about anyone of them individually. 

This is how freedom is eroded. Brick by brick, the prison is built; and right now, brick by brick, a prison is being built around Britain’s young.