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The Gulag Archipelago Abridged Audiobook

I give my apologies to the no doubt often mispronounced Russian names and places. Additional apologies for sometimes mispronounced English words…

Again, Solzhenitsyn's dark humor prods us along into further reading of these horror stories.

>In literature the latrine bucket has become the symbol of prison, a symbol of humiliation, of stink. Oh, how frivolous can you be? Now was the latrine bucket really an evil for the prisoner? On the contrary, it was the most merciful device of the prison administration. The actual horror began the moment there was no latrine bucket in the cell.

>In 1937 there were no latrine buckets in certain Siberian prisons, or there weren’t enough. Not enough of them had been made ahead of time—Siberian industry hadn’t caught up with the full scope of arrests. There were no latrine barrels in the warehouses for the newly created cells. There were old latrine buckets in the cells, but they were antiquated and small, and the only reasonable thing to do at that point was to remove them, since they amounted to nothing at all for the new reinforcements of prisoners. So if long ago the Minusinsk Prison had been built for five hundred people (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was never inside it; he moved about freely), and there were now ten thousand in it, it meant that each latrine bucket ought to have become twenty times bigger. But it had not.

**Part 1 The Prison Industry **

Part 2 - Perpetual Motion

**The Gulag Archipelago Abridged Audiobook** **[Part 2 Chapter 02 - The Ports of the Archipelago](https://files.catbox.moe/7d8wqr.mp3)** I give my apologies to the no doubt often mispronounced Russian names and places. Additional apologies for sometimes mispronounced English words… *Again, Solzhenitsyn's dark humor prods us along into further reading of these horror stories.* >>In literature the latrine bucket has become the symbol of prison, a symbol of humiliation, of stink. Oh, how frivolous can you be? Now was the latrine bucket really an evil for the prisoner? On the contrary, it was the most merciful device of the prison administration. The actual horror began the moment there was no latrine bucket in the cell. >>In 1937 there were no latrine buckets in certain Siberian prisons, or there weren’t enough. Not enough of them had been made ahead of time—Siberian industry hadn’t caught up with the full scope of arrests. There were no latrine barrels in the warehouses for the newly created cells. There were old latrine buckets in the cells, but they were antiquated and small, and the only reasonable thing to do at that point was to remove them, since they amounted to nothing at all for the new reinforcements of prisoners. So if long ago the Minusinsk Prison had been built for five hundred people (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was never inside it; he moved about freely), and there were now ten thousand in it, it meant that each latrine bucket ought to have become twenty times bigger. But it had not. **Part 1 The Prison Industry [All Chapters here](https://mega.nz/file/ZINSiB4D#OEaVqIGPXqVc-M-Eg3tWLqnBIkKyX62y45z9NTfs3N4)** [Introduction](https://files.catbox.moe/73kxit.mp3) [Chapter 01 - Arrest](https://files.catbox.moe/ep8du7.mp3) [Chapter 02 - The History of Our Sewage Disposal System](https://files.catbox.moe/3y8hwv.mp3) [Chapter 03 - The Interrogation](https://files.catbox.moe/agp3dl.mp3) [Chapter 04 – The Bluecaps](https://files.catbox.moe/takv7w.mp3) [Chapter 05 – First Cell, First Love](https://files.catbox.moe/xd1u3r.mp3) [Chapter 06 – That Spring](https://files.catbox.moe/12a1lm.mp3) [Chapter 07 – In the Engine Room](https://files.catbox.moe/zej3kp.mp3) [Chapter 08 - The Law as a Child](https://files.catbox.moe/qhyhws.mp3) [Chapter 09 - The Law Becomes a Man](https://files.catbox.moe/cw5kat.mp3) [Chapter 10 - The Law Matures](https://files.catbox.moe/m2z2dx.mp3) [Chapter 11 - The Supreme Measure](https://files.catbox.moe/ug4zk6.mp3) [Chapter 12 - Tyurzak](https://files.catbox.moe/syxsac.mp3) **Part 2 - Perpetual Motion** [Chapter 01 - The Ships of the Archipelago](https://files.catbox.moe/o38cv0.mp3)

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[–] • 0 pt

The riddle is answered in the next paragraph:

>Our Russian pens write only in large letters. We have lived through so very much, and almost none of it has been described and called by its right name. But, for Western authors, peering through a microscope at the living cells of everyday life, shaking a test tube in the beam of a strong light, this is after all a whole epic, another ten volumes of Remembrance of Things Past: to describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket, where prisoners are taken out to the toilet only once a day! Of course, much of the texture of this life is bound to be quite unknown to Western writers; they wouldn’t realize that in this situation one solution was to urinate in your canvas hood, nor would they at all understand one prisoner’s advice to another to urinate in his boot! And yet that advice was the fruit of wisdom derived from vast experience, and it didn’t involve spoiling the boot and it didn’t reduce the boot to the status of a pail. It meant that the boot had to be taken off, turned upside down, the boot tops turned inside out and up—and thus a cylindrical vessel was formed that constituted the much-needed container. But, at the same time, with what psychological twists and turns Western writers could enrich their literature (without in the least risking any banal repetition of the famous masters) if they only knew about the scheme of things in that same Minusinsk Prison: there was only one food bowl for every four prisoners; and one mug of drinking water per day was issued to each (there were enough mugs to go around). And it could happen that one of the four contrived to use the bowl allotted to him and three others to relieve his internal pressure and then refuse to hand over his daily water ration to wash it out before lunch. What a conflict! What a clash of four personalities! What nuances!

[–] • 1 pt

Note to self: Guard food bowl from that one literal asshole, don't get caught without your boots.