Long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich (1962) shocked the Western world with its frightening
description of a typical day in a forced-labor camp during the
Stalin era, some readers in the West already knew of prison life in
the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, and other Communist countries.
A powerful genre of gulag literature had emerged in the late 1930s
and developed throughout the cold war. Books by survivors revealed
in graphic detail the systematic implementation of a totalitarian
police state that induced terror in its citizens through torture,
imprisonment in slave labor camps, and death. In Enemies of the
State, Donald and Agnieszka Critchlow have selected excerpts from
nine of the most widely read books from this gulag literature. The
stories are riveting and inspiring. They are dramatic by their
nature and illustrate humanity at its heroic best. But they have
historical value too, because in addition to providing a ghastly
record of Communist terror, they also explain why Western readers
developed such deep mistrust of "peaceful coexistence" with any
Communist nation. Memoirs from survivors of Communist prisons
confirmed beliefs that the Communists could not be trusted. They
told readers that Communist regimes operated through deception and
denial, and that sympathetic visitors to the Soviet Union, China,
North Vietnam, and Cuba were too often misled by the carefully
staged performances of Communist officials. In short, gulag
literature reinforced among American anti-Communists the idea of an
apocalyptic struggle between communism and Western Christendom.
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