**The Gulag Archipelago ABRIDGED** **Chapter 03 – The Interrogation: https://files.catbox.moe/agp3dl.mp3** Why you should listen: • This book is 1984 before 1984 was written. • The powers perpetrating mass incarceration and murder throughout this book are still in power today. Why Abridged? • If you don't have an intimate relationship with Russian history, the full version will make you feel lost most of the time. • The full audio version is about an 80 hour adventure of dry listening. I suspect this will be under 40 when I am finished. • This was written for a western audience. I give my apologies to the no doubt often mispronounced Russian names and places. Additional apologies for sometimes mispronounced English words… Previous Chapters: 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 Fun quotes which haunt me from Chapter 3: *• "In the dark closet made of wooden planks, there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bedbugs, which had been allowed to multiply. The guards removed the prisoner’s jacket or field shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawling onto him from the walls or falling off the ceiling. At first he waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur."* *• "…they could give you a salt-water douche in the throat and then leave you in a box for a day tormented by thirst (Karpunich). Or that they might scrape the skin off a man’s back with a grater till it bled and then oil it with turpentine."* *• From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”* *• The colonel sat down on the prisoner’s back. Alexander Dolgun was going to count the blows. He didn’t yet know about a blow from a rubber truncheon on the sciatic nerve when the buttocks have disappeared as a consequence of prolonged starvation. The effect is not felt in the place where the blow is delivered—it explodes inside the head. After the first blow the victim was mad with pain and broke his nails on the carpet. Ryumin beat away, trying to hit accurately. The colonel pressed down on Alexander Dolgun’s torso—this was just the right sort of work for three big shoulder-board stars, assisting the all-powerful Ryumin! (After the beating the prisoner could not walk and, of course, was not carried. They just dragged him along the floor. What was left of his buttocks was soon so swollen that he could not button his trousers, and yet there were practically no scars. He was hit by a violent case of diarrhea, and, sitting there on the latrine bucket in solitary, Alexander Dolgun guffawed. He went through a second and a third session, and his skin cracked, and Ryumin went wild, and started to beat him on the stomach, breaking through the intestinal wall and creating an enormous hernia through which Alexander Dolgun’s intestines protruded. The prisoner was taken off to the Butyrki hospital with a case of peritonitis, and for the time being their attempts to compel him to commit a foul deed were suspended.) *