Gulag Archipelago Chapter 2 : The History of Our Sewage Disposal System
Chapter 2 continues to describe the bureaucracy that channeled citizens off to the Gulag. The tone is much the same as Chapter 1: a seemingly endless list of people and groups marked for disposal, following fast one on the other, interspersed with attempts to make sense of it all. The theme of parallel reality continues with the metaphor "sewage disposal system:" think a network of underground tunnels beneath the surface of ordinary life, mostly hidden and yet always present. Any minute, based on an often trivial activity in the present, or far in the past, or even for no reason at all, one might be designated "sewage" and disappear into the underground. Solzhenitsyn begins the chapter by noting that the years 1937 and 1938 are noted for mass arrests, but that is mainly because the people arrested previously were mostly illiterate and therefore did not leave much evidence of themselves. "Through the pipes the flow pulsed. Sometimes the pressure was higher t...