An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.) - The Gulag Archipelago Abridged

I am stunned, just stunned. This is my first Russian novel and Solzhenitsyn's prose and sarcasm translates so well. At first, the repetitive details seemed odd, but then it hit me, this was the only way to tell this story. This story is about people with real names and real events and Solzhenitsyn gave them a face and told their story, and did so in a manner that the Russians knew was true and could not refute.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) used these memorable pages to describe the Soviet Union's harsh gulags in the era of Stalin. A political prisoner from 1945-1953, the author recounts the hard labor he experienced, plus torture, beatings, and killings that he witnessed. His descriptions how the dangers of unbridled power, government-controlled media, and secret police - specialities of communism and other systems that promise idealism but deliver something very different. Solzhenitsyn was serving in the Red Army when he was arrested for criticizing Stalin's leadership in a private letter home (thus earning a ten-year sentence). Consider his description of a Communist Party dinner during the purges. When a speaker mentioned Stalin's name all rose to applaud, and none dared stop for endless minutes until one brave soul finally sat down - not surprisingly all others immidiately sat down, and that brave soul was arrested within hours. This is a rough book with tales of torture and abuse that seem endless; perhaps that was the author's intent.

Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, lived in the USA, then returned to his Russia after Soviet Communism collapsed. The author came to criticize the USA for greedy materialism, but of course, nobody arrested him for it. This book is a testament to the dangers of communism and other forms of totalitarian rule.

I've read a couple dozen books on Soviet history, but inexplicably avoided this classic. Maybe it was the daunting length (unabridged,) or misguided thought that modern scholars would have superior information or perspective. My prejudice was that nonfiction historical accounts from before 1990 have been outshined by this generation of excellent historians. But that was dead wrong, in this instance.

Solzhenitsyn outdoes almost all the contemporary Oxbridge historians, in style and substance. If it's between Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" and this, sorry, Ms. Applebaum. Modern tomes might have better corpse-counting estimates--that's about it. He actually makes the Oxbridge/Penguin history elite look kind of bad, in their schoolmarmish assemblage and recitation of atrocity statistics. He lived the history, and researched the book as events happened, and his stylistic genius is unconstrained by a half-bright Knopf editor who "knows" how to structure a serious work of historical scholarship (at least in the unabridged version.)

His writing style (even in translation) is about as lacerating and impactful as say, Christopher Hitchens, at his best. Some hoary 70s apparatchik accused Solzhenisyn of having "pathological hatred" for the Soviet Union, and that sounds about right. He despises it, but you can't for a moment begrudge him. He was betrayed by his government near the end of the war, after risking his life for his country--that's pretty clearly when he snapped, this betrayal was so monstrous and inhuman. So don't expect "praise" for Stalin for mobilizing the USSR economy to outproduce the Germans, for instance. No praise here. The book is merely a vicious, nonstop indictment of all aspects of injustice, tyranny and incompetence in the Soviet regime.

Go unabridged if you're hardcore. It may have been written in the 60s but it's hard to not see it as the "final word" on the early Soviet Union, in a sense, and I say that after reading newer biographies of Stalin, Robert Conquest's work, Anthony Beevor's Eastern Front books, etc.

One of the most monumental accounts of one of the cruellest ideologies of history,this book should be read by all
Layer by layer Solzhenitsyn exposes the hideous system of imprisonment ,death and torture that he refers to as the 'Gulag Archipelago'
He strips away that the misconception of the good Tsar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs and exposes how it was Lenin and his henchmen who put into place the brutal totalitarianism , which would be inherited and continued by Stalin
In fact the only thing that Stalin really did differently was to introduce a more personalised ,Imperial style of rule but otherwise carried on the evil work of Lenin
It was Lenin who imprisoned the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) , Mensheviks,Social Democrats,Social Revolutionaries Anarchists and independent intelligentsia and had many killed
In this way he completely destroyed all opposition to Bolshevik hegemony
Under Lenin the persecution started of anybody convicted of religious activity and the complete destruction of the church in Russia
And it was Lenin who began the genocide of whole ethnic groups that would later gain momentum under Stalin
Under the Communist system all that is spiritual or not purely material in nature is destroyed.And we discover what a horror Marx's idea of 'dialectic materialism ' really is
But I cannot describe the horrors which Solzhenitsyn outlines in this book :the hideous torutres,the slave markets selling of young women into sexual slavery
Solzhenitsyn describes how the prison system of the Tsarist system was compassionate by comparison but the mild abuses of Tsarist imprisonment where reacted to with a shrill outcry that never greeted the horrors of Bolshevism and Communism
As he says in his ever present biting sarcasm "Its just not fashionable,just not fashionable
And even today,even after the fall of Communism in Europe (though its iron grip remains strong in parts of Asia,Africa and in Cuba) its still not regarded as fashionable to highlight the horrors of Communism as it is to do so for other human rights abuses of this and other centuries

Oh man, this book is intense. You think you've got it hard with your job or relationship or life in the modern world? Try living in a prison camp and subsisting on almost nothing while doing back-breaking labor day-in, day-out.

This is a tale of struggle and woe, as you might guess, but ultimately it's a story of triumph! Many people have survived the greatest forms of human adversity that has been created by other people. That's a sick thought, I guess, but Solzhenitsyn weaves an amazing book about the triumph of the human soul here.

Read this book. It will stay with you forever.

`Magnum opus' is something of an understatement to describe Solzhenitsyn's 3 volume, 2000-odd page study of the Soviet Gulag. And certainly at first glance, such an epic analysis of a subject as grim as the labour camp system seems like very heavy going. But don't be daunted; despite its immense length and bleak subject matter, `Gulag Archipelago' is not too difficult a read, thanks to Solzhenitsyn's engaging writing style.

Essentially, the book tells two parallel stories. Firstly, there is a description of the camp system itself, tracing its history and implementation, as well as describing the camps themselves. Secondly, there is a study of an individual prisoner (or "zek"), and his/her arrest, confinement, torture, confession, transportation, and life in the camps.

Volume 1 deals predominantly with the history of the prison system, including a study of the infamous Article 58. The book is far too long to attempt a detailed analysis, but essentially Solzhenitsyn's study reduces to two key points:

1) The Gulag is a product of Lenin, not Stalin, and far from being some sort of aberration is in fact an essential component of the Communist system.

2) That conditions in the Gulag are even worse than those experienced under the Tsars.

The second point is particularly devastating, and Solzhenitsyn reinforces over and over that Russia has merely exchanged one evil regime for another that is even worse.

Volume 1 also covers the first part of a zek's imprisonment, including arrest, initial confinement, and torture. Solzhenitsyn goes into great detail in describing some of the methods for extracting confession, many of which are almost unbelievable. In particular, some of the psychological humiliations, such as being confined in a tiny space or being forced to remain in one position for days at a time, are far more brutal and sadistic than any physical beating could be.

As with `Ivan Denisovich' and most of his other works, Solzhenitsyn employs heavy use of black humour, irony and sarcasm throughout, which stops the book from drowning in its own despair. He has also assembled an extraordinary amount of first-hand testimony, and in fact most of the book is basically a series of case studies of individuals who have suffered through the camps. This gives the book a deeply personal and emotional feel, where it could have been a fairly dry academic exercise. The only potential issue that readers may have is that the book doesn't have much narrative momentum, due to the sheer number of testimonies and Solzhenitsyn's detailed focus on each aspect of the camp. I can see how some people might tire of the "Here's A, he was tortured by method B, here's C who was tortured by D...." and so on up to Person Y and torture Z.

As I say, this probably seems a daunting read even for those who appreciate Solzhenitsyn's other books. But this is a lot more accessible than it looks, and Solzhenitsyn should be congratulated for turning what could have been merely an "important" book into a very readable one.

What can be added to what has already been celebrated about this book? I'm only embarrassed to have read the abridged version, somewhat mockingly--even if authorized by Solzhenitsyn--referred to by the author as offered to those too busy in our modern world to read the entire text.

Nonetheless, this abridged *Gulag Archipelago* is as powerful a document of human evil and the capacity...if we dare...of the human capacity to transcend that evil as has ever been written. Part horror story, part Russian history, part holy book, *The Gulag Archipelago* is virtually an alternate Bible penned by a man who has the moral authority of an Old Testament prophet.

With savage satire and a well-earned bitterness that makes absolutely no attempt to conceal his unmitigated contempt and outrage, Solzhenitsyn vents the long-repressed, apocalyptic anger of a man whose witnessed--and suffered--first-hand the worst indignities that man can inflict upon fellow men.

*The Gulag Archipelago* isn't only about Stalinist totalitarianism, it's about totalitarianism as it exists everywhere--even within our own hearts. Solzhenitsyn appeals to his readers to examine--honestly and uncompromisingly--their conscience to see the wrongs we've committed and the wrongs we've been complicit by turning the other way. Evil is not "out there" in some other government, some other people, or person--it's a potential within all of us, all the time, as is the good we might access instead to stand up to it.

*The Gulag Archipelago* was a dangerous book when it was written and it's still a dangerous book today--dangerous because of its universality, its individuality, its radical apolitical morality. It's a book that should be required reading in every school--but never will be--because it teaches us to beware, not of this or that political regime, but of *all* political regimes, of all power, of all concentrated authority, of all complacency in the face of injustice and the oppression so often committed in the name of the "common good."

If you don't have time to read the unabridged text, this shortened--not quite 500 pages--version will be more than enough to convince you that someday you should, that *The Gulag Archipelago* is, indeed, one of the greatest, noblest, most important calls to conscience ever written.

Recently while wandering around my college's campus, I came across a rack of books which the school was donating for free to whoever wanted them. A quick scan revealed nothing much of interest at all, that is, except for one book, the hugest book on any of the shelves. No chance of this being just a coincidence as you can imagine my surprise when I saw Solzhenitsyn's name on it in big red letters, he is my favorite author.

You could read this book without reading Volumes One or Three, but you would be doing yourself a great disservice by doing so. For me, Volume Two is more of a reward in a sense for completing Volume One. It contains parts three (The Destructive Labor Camps) and four (The Soul and Barbed Wire). In my opinion, The Soul and Barbed Wire is the best part out of the whole Gulag Archipelago. Further, it might be the deepest writing ever written. This is really where Solzhenitsyn condenses and shares the spiritual gems which years in the concentration camps have taught him. Yes you could start with Volume Two if you want and get something out of it, but no you would not know what is going on in the first place. This would be like wandering into a theater in the middle of a Forrest Gump showing, where you had never seen that movie and it is already half over; yes you would enjoy it but Forrest would look simply like a dummy rambling to himself, you wouldn't be able to discern what was really going on. Obviously you should read the Volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag in order.

Don't underestimate this memoir, there is a reason why Time Magazine said that this is the best nonfiction book written during the twentieth century, though really you owe it to yourself to read the whole Gulag Archipelago from beginning to end. It will teach you lifelong lessons about human behavior, morals, cruelty, endurance and spirituality, lessons which you can't find anywhere else and which you will never in your lifetime forget. I will say this, as far as the most meaningful books that I have ever known, this book came in a close second next to the Holy Bible in first. Actually come to think of it, that would be a disservice to the 66 million good souls who are murdered in communist Russia, I'll say that this book ties with the Bible for the best book ever written. If you're looking for that one great book to read this year, you need to make it this one, because it needs to be read now during these times, more so than ever before, Endure. Enjoy.

Just bought volume 1 and 2 today after hearing a lot of volume 1 on a book on tape. Crucial information even now. This and 1984, which is fiction, show why we must be informed before we vote or throw away vital rights and enable unaccountable Governments. It is all quite terrifying. Jordan Peterson emphasized the importance of this amazing work of history. They should make high schoolers read this.

"The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being."

This abridged edition of Solzhenitsyn's hauntingly intimate portrait of his own arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, rebellion, and eventual release during Stalin's purges is a book like no other. This book, written by a constantly watched and persecuted dissident - bent but not broken by the brutality of Stalinist work camps, shares the author's (and his other inmates') personal experiences falling into this dark, usually fatal, abyss. Solzhenitsyn's original work was published in 1971 and produced an absolutely damning indictment of communism in Russia. Indeed, the stunning quality and importance of his writing earned him a Nobel prize.

Besides his own experiences, Solzhenitsyn collected personal stories from hundreds of his fellow inmates. The sadism of interrogators, the cruelty of guards, the indifference of neighbors, the paranoia of the public, the betrayal of stoolies, and the true comradery of innocent inmates are presented in vivid, factual detail. In addition to this, the author also presents an encyclopeadic knowledge of the entirety of the gigantic Stalinist security apparatus (normal labor camps, special labor camps, transfer camps, railroad transfers, prisons, holding cells, interrogation cells, NKVD, SMERSH, commissars, exile communities, and still more).

But at the heart of it all, the book remains an unforgettable journey through man-made hell. Stalin meant to destroy every man, woman, and child arrested, regardless of their innocence, and he largely succeeded. But survivors like Solzhenitsyn did truly 'tear down the wall' and made this world a far better place to live in. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude!

Reading Solzhenitsyn's GULAG ARCHIPELAGO can be a tough slog. For all its rewards, GULAG can be disjointed, repetitive and confusing. I found the early history of the Gulag in Volumes I and II to be particularly grim.

Volume III, by contrast, contains some of GULAG's richest storytelling, particularly in the chapters that tell of escape, resistance and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unbearable suffering.

My suggestion would be for the new reader to begin with a sampling of chapters from Volume III, including " The Forty Days at Kengir" (about a revolt at a labor camp in Kazakhstan about a year after Stalin's death), "The Committed Escaper" and "The White Kitten" (a marvelous escape story). Fortified with the knowledge that not all prisoners surrendered their humanity to the Gulag system, the reader will be better prepared for the literary challenges and vicarious suffering to be withstood in Volumes I and II.

This is certainly one of the best books ever written about the modern world and we are lucky that Solzhenitsyn survived the gulag. If he had been killed while in the gulag we would still be hearing in the western media about how benign the Soviet system was.

While Solzhenitsyn's main emphasis is describing the horrors of the Soviet system, he mentions the gullibility of western reporters here and there which he knows so well. While the following are not mentioned in the book, they are the main examples of this gullibility.

Let's start with Lincoln Steffens, that reporter from New York (the world's center of gullibility) who visited the Soviet Union in 1919 and proclaimed that he had seen the future and it works. As Solzhenitsyn mentions, the gulag system started at the very beginning of the Soviet Union and was already killing and imprisoning its opponents while Steffens was singing its praises.

The worst example is the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty who visited the Soviet Union in 1932 at the time when Stalin was carrying on his man-made famine, which killed about 7 million people and was designed to exterminate the "class" of private farmers who opposed Soviet collectivization. Duranty spent most of his reporting energies helping the Soviet Union deny that there was any famine. Needless to say, he got a Pulitzer Prize for his great reporting.

Next in line is FDR who had great affection for "Uncle Joe" who must be the greatest mass murderer in history. After all Uncle Joe was not an "imperialist" like Churchill. Apparently when Uncle Joe, a fellow leftist, takes over half of Europe it is not imperialism. While it is true that FDR could do little to stop Stalin, there was no need for him to co-operate in forcibly deporting from western control millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and other nationalities Stalin wanted. Most of these people ended up in the gulag or were shot upon their return to the worker's paradise.

Solzhenitsyn mentions another incident that shows the gullibility of the west. He ran into one political prisoner who had been a Soviet soldier stationed in North Korea around the time of the Korean War and defected across the DMZ into American control. The Americans gave him back to the Soviets and he of course ended up in the Gulag.

Stalin was probably puzzled by the enigmatic policy of the United States which continued the servile policy it established with Stalin after World War II regarding Soviet escapees but opposed him in his proxy war in Korea.

This review refers only to Volume 3 (Sections 5 thru 7)

This amazing volume chronicles Solzhenitsyn's years in a Siberian labor camp for political prisoners and later in exile, a limbo status, where the state's support of physical needs is withdrawn, but the prisoner's reentry into mainstream society isn't allowed because of his status as a former prisoner. The final section takes place after Stalin's death in 1953, when both those in power and in prison were trying to figure how what to do in the absence of the mastermind of the Soviet Union's system of internal terror.

Soltzhenitsyn describes with alternating wit, pain, sarcasm, challenge the life of a zek (this story is also presented in his much shorter "A Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich", which in the years after the death of Joseph Stalin was actually accepted by the Soviet government for awhile). For awhile common criminals were mixed with politicals - their sentences were generally shorter than the "quarters" (25 years) given to the politicals, and they were useful to prison management as stoolies.

Often soldiers recently released from German prison camps were imprisoned for political offenses. After his release from political prison, Solzhenitsyn surreptitiously collected information from other former prisoners about conditions in other camps and about ethnic cleansing programs around the Soviet Union. Their tales are harrowing. Detainees in one camp actually managed to take it over from its local management, who showed sympathy to their plight. Upper level Soviet officials visited the camp for "negotiations", after which they "agreed" to meet all demands. You can guess what happened next.

The Soviet Union may have lost 20 million citizens in combat, but Stalin's program of political terror must have killed at least as many more.

Of any man who lived, Solzhenitsyn probably did the most to expose the brutal nature of the Soviet regime, particularly that of Joseph Stalin, who in the rest of the world enjoyed status as Papa Joe, leader of part of the Allied forces that defeated Nazi Germany. His efforts to publish the Gulag Archipelago were always in jeopardy. As such he never had the entire manuscript in one place, making of the great political documents of the 20th century that much more remarkable.

Despite its length (Volume 3 alone runs to about 600 pages in hardback) and grim subject matter, I found Gulag Archipelago relatively readable. Solzhenistyn's personal style - much is written like he was telling you the stories face to face. Five stars for all readers, if only to highlight the dangers of a totalitarian government that spies and imprisons its citizens for their political and religious beliefs in name of ideology.

I thought this was a pretty good book. The abridged version (this one) is just under 500 pages & most of the time it really does feel like the author is just scratching the surface. In those 500 pages I felt like I was missing a lot, but I have no urge to read the 2000 page unabridged version. The book does seem disjointed in parts but the author explains that much of the reason for this is that at no one time was the entire text together in one place. It was spread all over the place because he was afriad of being caught with it all by Soviet authorities.

The author was very brave to tell the truth as he knows it & to expose the brutal Gulag system. I thought the best parts of the book were where the author describes the intimate details of someone's escape plans or how they were punished but just when you start to get interested in this one person's story you would turn the page & there was nothing else about it. This happens several times in the book. That gets frustrating at times. Besides that I thought it was a great work on a chapter of history that very little was known about before Solzhenitsyn wrote his book.

The book was put together from Solzhenitsyn's personal experiences & over 200 fellow prisioners. In my personal opinion I would enjoy reading a 500 page book about any one of the 200+ people who contributed to the book than one little paragraph (or page) from each of the 200+ people - that is just the type of book I enjoy reading more. As a description of history the book does it well.

On another note, in response to the "1 star" review below by "BANE" from Dec 7,2005 he claims the numbers killed in the Gulag were more like 750,000 people & tries to discredit Solzhenitsyn's claims of millions. From the January 2006 National Geographic issue it has a section on Genocide in the 20th century. It puts the numbers murdered in the Soviet Union between 1918 - 1953 at 20,000,000 people (most under Stalin's regime). The source for National Geographic's data was Barbara Harff, Strassler family center for holocaust & genocide studies, Clark University. Only China under Mao with 30,000,000 killed was worse.

I read this book (this edition is only Vol 1; I highly recommend reading through at least Vol 2) 25 years ago in the wake of this work becoming a political slogan and football bandied about so much during the Reagan years, as it turns out by people who obviously had not read it. While intially approaching that task with some skepticism, I quickly concluded that it was very well written and informed, being worth the time spent in reading it.

"Gulag" is an acronym in Russian for an agency that was known as the Central Administration of Corrective Labor Camps which the author, a former Red Army officer, entered in 1945 as a "zek" or prisoner. The book(s) is a very absorbing chronicle of the history of this system in general and through the personal stories of specific individuals that became known to the author. While Solshinitsyn is very explicit, obviously, in making his bitterly and well earned anti-communist outlook known, this work is not a hysterial rant or screed, but a serious memoir and work of historical literature, one that is neither boring nor tendentious. Moreover, while the author's affinity for Russia's Orthodox traditions shines through, a certain social-revolutionary sensiblity that has also been a hallmark of that culture during the last century and half of upheaval also emerges. As Herzen observed about Bakunin, who endured his own stuggles with Russian Tsarist tyranny and Siberian exile in the previous century, it seems that the Gulag's author was not born under any ordinary star, but a comet.

The forced labor camp system set up by Stalin was designed to purge his political opponents, set up a system of cheap forced labor to subsize his economic development and industrialization programs, and as a vehicle for the implementation of his own peculiar take on ostensible Marxist-Leninist class struggle, social cleansing, and transformation. Thus the first section is entitled "The history of our sewage disposal sytem," detailing how a quarter of "Leningrad" was "cleaned out" in the political and psuedo legal context of the newly adopted Soviet Constitution (Article 10 as I recall) that criminalized the formerly privileged classes and "socially hostile elements." In the camp context this meant that the common criminal element, "the socially friendly" (the title of a chapter in Vol 2 as I recall) that may have been present was pandered to while being incited against political enemies of the state, parts of this story being reminiscent of MacKinlay Kantor's fictional descrition of POW life in "Andersonville", although in this context it was a concious policy pursued as part of the "institutionalization of the dictatorship of the proletariat." And how does one recognize the socially friendly? The presence of tatoos on their bodies, for one thing, the author astutely observes.

The first camp that was set up was in the Solovetsky Islands during the era of the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20s in the wake of the Civil War was not particulary egregious by prison standards of the time. The theme was set by the slogan on the Herring Gate which stated the theme, "For the Workers and Peasants!", a context in which one not atypical prisoner arrived garbed in a tuxedo. Later, in the days of the Great Purge and thereafter, privileged seeming arrivals would be jeeringly greeted at the Kolyma by the socially friendly with comments like "Welcome to Vorkuta, Fascist Gentlemen!" At this point, however, the definition of socially privileged was dramatically lowered to include "kulaks" or landed peasants; the campaign of the Soviet state against whom was an unmitigated moral and economic disaster.

The Gulag system in its maturity was set up under the leadership one Neftely Frenkel, a former Turkish businessman who oversaw the creation of a large network or "archipelago" of camps all over the Soviet Union, reaching to the remotest parts of Eastern Siberia. He supervised this vast fiefdom from his personal railroad car in which he traveled where he willed in the manner of a robber baron.

Solshenitsyn describes the pathological paronoia that set in during the era of the Great Purge and the arbitrary predations of Stalin's petty "Chekist" hacks, whose own subsequent demise provides some sweet irony to the author. All this actually weakened Russia, from the destruction of its officer corps to the inefficient and shoddy projects completed by convict labor, such as the Belamor Canal which Stalin forced to be built by hand and which turned out to be too shallow. Given the meagre rations that were based on Frenkel's concept of the "differentiated ration pot" which meant that, in theory, food was given out on the basis of labor expended, but in reality meant the socially friendly and others with relative privileges got more, survival meant getting out of "general assignment" into some special assignment outside of working in the main labor project. This the author managed to do by getting a job in camp administration based on his education. Otherwise he would have faced the prospect, leaving execution aside, of slow starvation after he fell out as one of the camp's "last leggers." Although executions are described in these camps, including en masse, they were not death camps on the Nazi model, as Stalin's regime, for the most part, didn't wait to ship people off it had already marked for death before killing them. In this connection, the abuses of the "differentiated ration pot" are discussed, a theory by which people were fed according to the amount of work they did, but more often in reality according to who was in favor leading to the weak and dissident elements being worked and starved to death.

While the author disparges Marxism and atheism, he gives some grudging respect to Bolshevik and revolutionary traditions when linked with the struggles of the common folk and Russian patriotism. Thus we have the story of the Cossack who pole-vaulted over the camp walls to join the front line fight against the German invaders and Volume 2 concludes with the story of the Red Army veteran in 1945 who walks off a job cleaning up war rubble in protest of not having any shoes. When confronted by a cop with a threat of arrest and deportation to camp, he responds angrily that he is veteran of the war and a Bolshevik, willing to make further great sacrifices, but insists on at least having shoes. The cop backs off. Thus the theme is returned to that opened the work when the author, indignantly informs those arresting him, for writing comments critical of Stalin in personal letters, of his status as a Red Army tanker. Then of course there was his angry implication in reponse to the students that heckled him at Harvard in the late 70s that those privileged socially hostile elements could perhaps use some corrective labor.

I am surprised that Solshentisyn has not emerged more as a public figure in post-Soviet Russia. It seems that he would have a lot to contribute. I encourage people to read this work. It fully deserves the awards and accolades it has achieved.

What can be said about Solzhenitsyn's work? It's so huge, so sprawling, so detailed that on a certain level it must be taken in generally, just as an impressionist painting must be viewed from a distance rather than each paint stroke. Here's my own impression, filtered, of course, through my own political and moral prism.

You read about the massive Gulag system and the first thing you think of is "Wow. Practically any crime can be gotten away with if it's done in the name of the people." But it's so much more than that. It's not just hoodwinking, propagandizing or frightening the populace into allowing a system of political prisoner camps 20 million strong to exist for decades. Stalin could never have done what he did without the tacit consent and approval of the Russian people. I don't believe they were too cowed or ignorant, just like I don't believe the Germans were too cowed or ignorant to know what Hitler was doing during WW II.

And the same mindset that produced the Gulag continues to the present day. Humanity hasn't changed. Stalin's murderous reign of terror is now purposely overlooked* or even celebrated throughout the world. This is a testament to the inner sickness extant in every human being, not just those who lead or carry out the evil themselves. People like Stalin would never have been able to get away with what they did if it weren't for that secret, sometimes unconscious desire for death and destruction of others and of oneself that exists in the human soul, the "death instinct" referred to by Freud and present in many people and groups, from Palestinian suicide bombers to American university professors.

* Have you ever seen an anti-Stalin Hollywood-produced movie?

Oh man, this book is intense. You think you've got it hard with your job or relationship or life in the modern world? Try living in a prison camp and subsisting on almost nothing while doing back-breaking labor day-in, day-out.

This is a tale of struggle and woe, as you might guess, but ultimately it's a story of triumph! Many people have survived the greatest forms of human adversity that has been created by other people. That's a sick thought, I guess, but Solzhenitsyn weaves an amazing book about the triumph of the human soul here.

Read this book. It will stay with you forever.

The point can't be made forcefully enough: this book is *not* a novel! It is not even literature, in any meaningful sense. It is a 2,000 page indictment for crimes against humanity. Chief among the accused is of course Stalin who, if justice exists, is currently serving 60 million consecutive life sentences in Hell. But as Solzhenitsyn abundantly documents, the Gulag death-camps were part of Lenin's vision from the very beginning. (In January 1918, he stated his ambition of "purging the land of all kinds of harmful insects", in which group he included "workers malingering at their work".) But it is not only the architects of Bolshevism who stand accused. It is also all the collaborators with oppression, from the camp guards who summarily executed prisoners too exhausted to stand to the people who informed on their neighbors. Complicit even are the passive victims of the Terror who, as Solzhenitsyn says, "didn't love freedom enough" to fight for it from the beginning.
Needless to say, "The Gulag Archipelago" is not beach reading. (Although Solzhenitsyn's searingly sarcastic style makes it anything but a dry collection of facts.) The evil that it obsessively documents is so dark that even reading about it is often difficult to bear. But anyone with pretentions of understanding the world we live in needs to go through it from first page to last.
But if you aren't willing to make the effort, here's the lesson boiled down for you: Totalitarianism doesn't begin with a Stalin or a Hitler. It begins with *you*, on the day that you let a government become more powerful than the people it governs. Remember that or someday it might not be the Russians or the Jews or the Serbs that the men with guns come for. It just might be you...

Anyone willing to invest a significant amount of time reading will do himself a great service to read these three volumes. I have finished the first two and can without a doubt state that this must rank as one of the greatest and most important works of all time.
Those who wish to discount the inherent evils of collectivism simply cannot argue with its real life results. Some may say that the Bible is responsible for many deaths and torments, also. But the Bible, when correctly applied is never forced on anyone. Those who have mis-used it for a gain in power are not applying its true principles.
Communism, however, when properly applied, must result in force against those who do not agree with it. Mr. Solzhenitzyn correctly shows that it was not only Stalin, but Lenin and those since Stalin as well who sunk to the lowest depravities of man in their quest for power.
Those who argue that Orwell's 1984 is only fantasy and not realistic would do well to read Gulag also. For in Gulag, we read a real life 1984 which is similar, only more horrifying.
When we look around at todays political climate, we must come to the painful conclusion that America is not immune from from such atrocities, either. Anywhere that government is given unlimited powers, it will use and misuse them to the fullest. We should all be aware of this and fight for limited government at every opportunity.
Finally, Mr. Solzenitzen, though not a theologian, gives a stirring explanation of the spiritual growth which may accompany earthly suffering. Posssibly without knowing it, he has answered the skeptics number one battle cry: The problem of evil and suffering in the world. The most emotional and beautiful words in this volume are these: "Bless you prison, for having been in my life!"
I cannot endorse this and other works by this authur strongly enough. Do yourself, and the world a favor. Read this book and heed its warnings.

Too many accounts of history are written by those who live in ivory towers and sit in comfortable chairs. A. S. experienced the Russia of which he wrote. He documents what the reigns of communist premiers from 1918 to 1956 (especially Lenin's and Stalin's) were really like: terror, perverted logic, unjust sentences, and at least 20 million Russians executed, starved to death, or sentenced to the Gulag.
The author's style is unique; some of his sentences are the length of a long paragraph but one is able to follow them to their and his conclusion. And he offers many conclusions as he details trials sentencing innocent victims to the frozen wasteland from which few returned.
This book so shook me that I could not read anything else by A. S. for 15 years.

Solzhenitsyn gave the world a glimpse of man's darkness in the twentieth century far better than any fictional dystopia Orwell could dream up. Although this is an abridged version, it generally flows well and still hits with a punch. The book is a powerful testament to the best and worst qualities within the human race (mostly the worst). I must commend Solzhenitsyn on his brilliant combination of personal experience, history, dark humor, and at times optimism.
Solzhenitsyn isn't the first Christian author to portray the nightmare of totalitarism. Corrie Ten Boom's "The Hiding Place" and books by the Wurmbrands are quite powerful in their own right. I suppose one key difference is that Solzhenitsyn seems to be a more talented author (both an advantage and a disadvantage[sometimes personal experiences are better conveyed in more straight forward writing]).
Hopefully, readers (who weren't already aware) will realizes the tremendous harm and suffering political communism brought on the world. I get a little tired of the fact a certain dead communist revolutionary is considered "cool." Okay, so this book is about the U.S.S.R. and not about Latin America. Anyway, the sheer scope of the tragedy is difficult to even attempt to comprehend. Thankfully, the stories of at least some of those who suffered are available to enlighten future generations.

When I was in college back in the early 80s I felt a strange attraction towards Solzhenitsyn's books.

I read many of them twice.

The reason was as I read them I felt a strong bond with Solzhenitsyn.

I think somehow fate wanted me to read these books at that time to prepare my own mind for the struggles that lay ahead in my own life and to perhaps put them into perspective.

This is the story of people from different walks of life including highly educated intellectuals who are cast into a brutal and sinister environment.

Solzhenitsyn himself was one of those people. A very gifted writer. This is the story of his journey.

After I read books I don't have space to keep them all so I give a lot of them away.

However I have hard cover issues of the Gulag Archipelago books as well as my all time favorite 'The First Circle'. They have made it into my permanent book collection.

Who knows maybe someday I may brush them off and read them a third time.

Jeff Marzano

The Mind of Adolf Hitler (The Secret Wartime Report)

Cancer Ward

The First Circle (European Classics)

Hogan's Heroes - The Complete Third Season

Mein Kampf

One of the most monumental accounts of one of the cruellest ideologies of history,this book should be read by all
Layer by layer Solzhenitsyn exposes the hideous system of imprisonment ,death and torture that he refers to as the 'Gulag Archipelago'
He strips away that the misconception of the good Tsar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs and exposes how it was Lenin and his henchmen who put into place the brutal totalitarianism , which would be inherited and continued by Stalin
In fact the only thing that Stalin really did differently was to introduce a more personalised ,Imperial style of rule but otherwise carried on the evil work of Lenin
It was Lenin who imprisoned the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) , Mensheviks,Social Democrats,Social Revolutionaries Anarchists and independent intelligentsia and had many killed
In this way he completely destroyed all opposition to Bolshevik hegemony
Under Lenin the persecution started of anybody convicted of religious activity and the complete destruction of the church in Russia
And it was Lenin who began the genocide of whole ethnic groups that would later gain momentum under Stalin
Under the Communist system all that is spiritual or not purely material in nature is destroyed.And we discover what a horror Marx's idea of 'dialectic materialism ' really is
But I cannot describe the horrors which Solzhenitsyn outlines in this book :the hideous torutres,the slave markets selling of young women into sexual slavery
Solzhenitsyn describes how the prison system of the Tsarist system was compassionate by comparison but the mild abuses of Tsarist imprisonment where reacted to with a shrill outcry that never greeted the horrors of Bolshevism and Communism
As he says in his ever present biting sarcasm "Its just not fashionable,just not fashionable
And even today,even after the fall of Communism in Europe (though its iron grip remains strong in parts of Asia,Africa and in Cuba) its still not regarded as fashionable to highlight the horrors of Communism as it is to do so for other human rights abuses of this and other centuries

It is a marvel to flip through this book again, though the abridged version is nothing compared to the original 3-volume trilogy. Though it is very difficult to get into - in the original v1 there is a long abstract section on gulags as a sewage system in turbid prose - once the reader gets swept into thos narrative of suffering there is no other reading experience like it.
Solzhenitsyn spent his youth as a gulag prisoner for having criticized Stalin on a postcard. V1 covers his arrest and interrogation and transport into despair and disillusionment. What he experienced, from his start as a strong and idealistic young war leader, can only be described as hell on earth. Only Hitler's death factories could compare, and yet Stalin's slave labor camps were being held up as marvels of social policy and redemption. The cruelty of treatment, the insights into the astonishing characters around him, and the compilation of other people's stories - Solzhenitsyn describes his experience as only one gulp from an ocean of bitterness and shattered lives - are unequalled in the modern literature on totalitarianism. My experience was to be utterly transported into this realm, to look at my life and values and think about what mattered most to develop within myself. No other book ever had a deeper impact on me. That makes this, in my opinion, essential reading to understand the last century at its very very worst.
The second volume follows Solzhenitsyn as he becomes a hardened and grief-stricken prison slave, indifferent to whether he is killed by a stray bullet during riots and abandoning his faith in communism. A central pert of the book is his religious conversion - the only one I ever read about that I truly understood on an emotional level - at the deathbed of perhaps his greatest freind. V3 covers his relesase from prison and his attempts to rebuild his life.
All three volumes offered to me the experience of living totally outside of myself and in the reality of a totalitarian state. I first read these in EUrope when they appeared, and the debates on the merits of the communist sytem were very much alive at the time. Now they are only of historical interest, but I still think they are must reading for anyone who wants to understand the worst of one of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of mankind.
Highest recommendation.

The Archipelago refers to many great ports scattered from the

Bering Strait to Bosporus.There were thousands of small islands where people were transported for varying periods of time.

In addition, there were transit prisons at Ust-Usa and portable

confinements by rail.

Prisoners were subjected to extensive methods of interrogation

including sleep deprivation at night, persuasion, humiliation,

cursing, long periods of standing, sound effects, lighting and

general confusion. Trials were quick and often it was difficult

to access witnesses because they were scattered or in prison

themselves.

People in every station of life were imprisoned for a variety

of reasons- most of them directed to criticism of the State.

Tanya Khodkevich was imprisoned for saying:

" you can pray freely,

But just so G-d alone can hear'

Students were arrested for criticism of the system.

Historians; such as, Platonov and Gotye were arrested.

The Buryat-Monguls were imprisoned in Kazakhstan. Tribal

members of the Northern Caucasus were jailed. People were

convicted by analogy, place of birth/origin or contact

with persons considered "dangerous" to the State.

The work is a testament to the implementation of power in the

Soviet State from Lenin onward. It is written in a

belles lettres style-much like a continuous story. The volume is

highly recommended for a wide audience of college students,

historians, journalists and readers of great literature.

When I was younger, I would occasionally read communist books, hang out at "Revolution Books"--the communist bookstore in Boston--and naively bash capitalism with some of my snobbier friends.

If I had read this book though, none of that would have ever happened. This book, although it takes place almost entirely in Russia, and is about Russians and about communism, is among the most pro-American, pro-capitalism, pro-freedom and democracy things I've ever read. It's an amazing document of just what can happen when idealism and revolution give way to dictatorship, and when dictatorship gives way to an entire country enslaving and being enslaved, an entire country of millions of lives lived in fear that AT ANY MOMENT and FOR ANY REASON, ANYONE could be arrested, taken away to prison for decades, tortured, and/or shot.

This book is an examination and an investigation of the long period of Russian history when the Soviet government just went nuts arresting everyone, out of cruelty, and out of fear that the people would rise up and overthrow Stalin's dictatorship unless opressed to the point of no possible resistance, to a point of extreme grief and weakness.

The book details the sudden and violent arrests of millions of USSR citizens for little or no reason, the rough and hateful ways used to interrogate them, the inhuman treatment the prisoners faced in (and being transported to) the Soviet prisons, and the USSR's frenzied overuse of capital punishment (a.k.a. killing people).

You aren't working in the fields hard enough? Ten years in prison for you!

You suggest we do something that might increase the fields' crops? Are you saying the Soviet Union needs to change? Twenty-five years!

The book's author was a Gulag prisoner himself, but he never lets his own story overshadow the story of the country and the merciless prison system as a whole.

The book is by no means perfect, but it is shocking, and well-written, and incredibly brave considering that this senseless system was still taking place when the book was written, and he could have been killed for it.

I highly, highly recommend reading it, and the next time some beatnik kid tries to tell you how much better communism is, you'll have some passages to quote to him. And the next time you feel like taking our freedoms for granted, you'll something to make yu feel lucky.

I can think of no other book, fiction or nonfiction, that has so captured the evil we faced from the Soviet Union. Orwell accomplished much with 1984 and Animal Farm, but here we have something much more valuable: genuine life experience. Solzhenitsyn doesn't just pen an autobiography with the Gulag Archipelago. He recounts, examines, and criticizes the entire Communist/Socialist/Marxist worldview, and the reality that came from the theory. The last century cannot be properly understood without reading this book. It is my belief that socialism will rise again - not in our lifetimes, but somewhere down the road when intellectuals agree that "Well, mistakes were made, but we're so much more advanced now." The movement will return under another name. This book is the cure.

There are so many anecdotes, statistics, personal experiences, and cited resources in the Gulag Archipelago that a single review cannot hope to capture the breadth of this work. The saying is correct: great atrocities have been committed in the name of social justice. So it was with the Marxist worldview. The Soviet Union once shot 40,000 of its own citizens in a month of peacetime for 'counter-revolutionary' actions. They would herd thousands onto aging, floating barges and tow it out to the middle of the ocean, where they would sink the barge to kill the people. Some (Western intellectuals, mainly), try to forget this sort of thing happened, but Solzhenitsyn shows this was a logical progression of Marxist and socialistic philosophies. The entire worldview is wrong and malignant, and history has shown it to the dustbin for now. What remains are the fumes of Marxism. One example is political correctness, which is Soviet propaganda writ small. The intention of PC is not to persuade, but to humiliate dissenters into silence. It's a brilliant ploy, really, because by keeping your mouth shut and going along, everyone becomes 'just a little guilty'.

Anyway, the Gulag Archipelago should be buried in every time capsule, recommended to friends, and airlifted to every university in this country. The reason? I'll let Solzhenitsyn explain. "Everyone knew, of course, that arrests were being made every day and every hour, but no one was to be horrified by the sight of large numbers of [prisoners] together. In Orel in 1938, you could hardly hide the fact that there was no home in the city where there hadn't been arrests, and weeping women in their peasant carts blocked the square in front of the Orel Prison just as in Surikov's painting The Execution of Streltsy. (Oh, who one day will paint this latter-day tragedy for us? But no one will. It's not fashionable, not fashionable...)"

Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of life under Stalin and indeed the whole communist regime is a reminder to those of us who live in democratic nations about the importance of freedom, especially the freedom of speech and association.

Solzhenitsyn looks back into his past and into the histories told him by other survivors of this Russian `holocaust' to reveal to us the great suffering endured by those who lost the best years of their life to a dream gone wrong.

Much of the narrative is recollections from Solzhenitsyn about his days in interrogation, the transports and the labor camps. It is a very personal and at times moving account of lives forgotten by the world but now remembered. At times the constant repetition of the countless stories does get a bit tiring, not because it's boring but because it seems impossible that such things could happen in this modern world.

I came away from this book learning a lot of personal lessons about life, lessons that, thanks to Solzhenitsyn, I have avoided learning the hard way. For example, that when we hold on to things too tightly we sometimes cause unnecessary suffering by worrying about them. It would be better to be less tied up in our material possessions and give more thought to the weightier matters in life such as our relationships... it sounds clichéd I know, but when you are told this lesson by someone whose idea of a possession was one item of clothing on his back, then you begin to gain some perspective.

The style of writing is not very inviting at first, it's almost as if it was stream-of-consciousness writing so at times he may be longwinded and reminisce about one incident for a long time and then suddenly jump to something else that seems completely different. It took me awhile to get used to this, but I promise you, after you get half way and get used to this style of writing, you will be glad you persevered. I would highly recommend this first work to anyone interested in the history of the Soviet Union, a different (human) perspective on Communism or just a great autobiographical work.

Probably one of the most important works I have ever read. Solzhenitsyn gives voice to the millions of voiceless victims of Stalin's Soviet Russia. Unfortunately this is one of histories lesser known crimes, and the power of this man's voice helps to rectify this. This book is powerful and brutal. Solzhenitsyn forces his readers to stare into the face of evil and see the horrors that can happen when tyrants are allowed to run roughshod over a people.

This book is so tremendously important as a warning for all people to take care that tyranny does not get the opportunity to capture a people. It illustrates the inhumanity that man is capable of, and he shows readers the terrible price that dictators impose.

This book needs to be required reading because it has the affect of so eloquently exposing readers to the reality that people all over the world face. This is why this book is so powerful. It is the universal nature of this work that shows the reader what happens to people in this situation. This book forces the reader to be empathetic to the plight of suffering people the world over. What this work shows is that this type of oppression becomes so pervasive that it is almost impossible to overcome. The people don't want this nor do they simply acquiesce to this tyranny. What happens is that a society becomes totally corrupted to the point where there is nothing left.

This is an extremely important work that needs to be read.

I can see why this book is called one of the most important books of the 20th century. Communism is evil. And the oddest thing about the idiot marxists is that they just do not get it. They keep pushing a system that has NEVER worked, and will NEVER work. As an economic system it is a total failure. In terms of slaughter and death and human misery, nothing has brought more pain to humanity than this stupid "philosophy." The only reason communism has survived anywhere is because marxists are beasts and willing to kill and torture and frighten people into submission. An Ethiopian friend used to tell me about Menghistu and the horrors he committed. My friend's sister was taken in the middle of the night and tortured, then died young as a result of the abuse. The sister's boyfriend was also killed. The kind of terror my Ethiopian friend described is the same sort of horror that Solzhenitsyn writes about in this great and important book. Communism amounts to police state security, slave labor, killing and torture...in every single country that this vicious system has been implemented. INSANE. The idiot leftists in America would do well to remember the lessons of history.

Oh man, this book is intense. You think you've got it hard with your job or relationship or life in the modern world? Try living in a prison camp and subsisting on almost nothing while doing back-breaking labor day-in, day-out.

This is a tale of struggle and woe, as you might guess, but ultimately it's a story of triumph! Many people have survived the greatest forms of human adversity that has been created by other people. That's a sick thought, I guess, but Solzhenitsyn weaves an amazing book about the triumph of the human soul here.

Read this book. It will stay with you forever.

"...may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning acheivement." --Time

In "The Destructive-Labor Camps," the first part of this volume, we experience the terrible plight of the working prisoners, the cruelty and caprice of camp authorities, and the tragic fate of the women prisoners and the luckless children born to them.

This chronicle of inhumanity is made bearable by the vitality and emotional range of Solzhenitsyn's writing that make his work on the "Archipelago" of Soviet repression one of the extraordinary literary events of our age.

"The Soul and Barbed Wire," the second part of this volume, is a magnificent statement on the possibilities of purification and redemption through suffering.

It was at the threshold of the camps that the first volume of GULAG left us. GULAG TWO takes us inside them.

It is very interesting to compare The Gulag Archipelago, the true story of a horrible and real dystopia, with George Orwell's 1984, the story of an imaginary dystopia, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, another imaginary dystopia.
The difference between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book and the others is his more convincing, more concrete detail. Solzhenitsyn describes the gritty details of the arrests, tortures, kangaroo court trials and murders or imprisonments that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union inflicted on countless millions of people while Lenin or Stalin were in power. He gives exact details about the coarse criminality and ingenious cruelty of Communist prison officials whom he watched while he was in prison. He also weighed and sifted evidence that he gathered from other prisoners and he reports it here.
Solzhenitsyn entered prison a convinced Marxist. He gradually lost his Communist faith only after many years of physical and emotional abuse by other Marxists. The hope of a free lunch in a Communist paradise dies hard.

With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking fictional work, still the author writes with stunning clarity and unimpeachable style about the many horrors for the Soviet everyman caught in the unbelievable grips of this brutal nightmare world.
The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. He lovingly and yet unsparingly looks at the prisoners themselves, caught up in an insane world, and how they attempted to cope and survive, to interact with each other, and what the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned were like.
What forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats.
The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise.
Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas.
One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its expose of the existence of the Gulag itself by detailing the ways in which it was operating, albeit it fictionally. Yet both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag have been greeted with something short of horror by the West. Compared to the much more extensively and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, until the publication of this masterful work almost nothing was known or published about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag.
Given the recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work of fiction will remain the standard in understanding the moving and horrible experience the Gulag posed for ordinary Russians. This is a terrific book, and although it is a work of fiction, it is one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!

What ever faults "Gulag Archipelago" may have, it is a monumental and important work. For anyone who does not know the meaning of the title, "Gulag" is the Russian word for prison, and an archipelago is, of course, a chain of islands. The idea behind this is that the Soviet concentration camp system under Lenin and Stalin were like an island of prisons spread all over the Soviet Union.
The content of "Gulag Archipelago" is quite extraordinary. Solzhenitsyn includes countless anecdotes of prisoners and their families in various phases of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, slave labor, death, or release. He buttresses these stories with statistics, and with his own personal narrative of his years in the Gulag. The information in this book is simply staggering, not only for the cruelty and evil it describes but also the folly. The Soviet government murdered indiscriminately across all lines of race, class, and gender. In many cases, it murdered the most brilliant and productive members of its society--the very people who could have built it into something great.
Many people take umbrage with Solzhenitsyn's style, which involves a lot of ranting and run-on footnotes. Personally, I find his narrative interesting and invigorating. Solzhenitsyn's narrative is vigorous, untrammeled and loaded with sarcasm. While many find this gimmicky or uncultured, it helped buoy me through the unbearable sadness of the book's subject matter.
Obviously this book isn't for everybody and it requires a considerable degree of fortitude to get through it. But I think it is essential in all our lives to read this book or one similar to it.

This book makes me want to never complain about anything ever again.

The Gulag Archipelago details the suffering faced by countless millions in the U.S.S.R.'s prison and labor camp system. It is a book beyond review - Solzhenitsyn has profound insight, devastating wit, and a staggering memory.

From page 590:

"What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do no pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of other devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - a prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well. Do no hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!"

So much has been written about this particular work that little I say here will have any great meaning nor any great insight. When finishing the reading of a work such as this, it is tempting to go into line after line of pontificates..this I won't do. I will say though that this work is important. Not only do we learn, as if we did not already know, the horrible things men can do to other men, it also gives us a great insight to the cold war, why it was fought, and what the outcome could have been if the wrong side had won. For me, and I have given this work several readings over the years, this is one of the more important books written in the past 100 years. I is some comfort to me to know that I and my family were able to live in a relatively free society and while that society might not be perfect, it is certainly better that that delt some people in this world. Unlike some of the reviewers here, I would recommend that the statistics quoted in the book be ignored. They are somewhat meaningless. Rather focus on the writer, his thoughts, his feelings and focus on his countrymen who lived through these times. Highly recommend this one.

For some, truth can be stranger than fiction. Certainly, it can often be more compelling. This real life personal version of Orwell and Kafka combined is available in this abridged version approved by the author, and in a more manageable form it loses none of its original power -- indeed, one can argue that the distillation simply concentrates that vision. Some might find it a tough slog, but if so then one either isn't paying attention or prefers keeping one's eyes closed. Reserve a lot of time to read this carefully and in a measured way. Meditate on what you read. It's important to experience it, one way or the other. Highly recommended.

Political discord may drive disgusted citizens to disassociate from current affairs but this book is the ringing alarm from our past to wake us from ambivalence. The unfathomable cruelty we so often see spoken in the modern age morphs to physical cruelty in the Gulag Archipelago. Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenistsyn magnificently captures a multitude of psychological and societal sins. Too many people and governments are susceptible to their darkest angels unless we all remain vigilant and aware of how this unleashed hatred, paranoia and greed can demolish nearly all that is good in a society. For all it's progress deep down Russia has yet to recover all the wounds Solzhenistsyn lay bare so many years ago. As in Germany the tortured past is too often covered up, avoided and ignored. My 12 year old and 9 year old sons may be too young to sit and read this through alone, but I will make sure they both read and understand this book. Teachers, please include this in your mandatory reading and by all means, discuss!

Solzhenitsyn's three-volume record (although I read only the first) is deeply moving for the description of its intensity. Having won the author a Nobel prize for Literature, I half expected some unapproachably haughty Kunderesque crypto-novel, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Archipelag Gulag is the 'island chain' of the concentration camps that streched throughout the most remote and uninhabitable regions of the Soviet Union. Through his own eyes, and those of 227 fellow survivors, he relates in a deeply sarcastic yet sympathetic way the movement and experience of the individual through the system with such beauty and so completely that one feels one can almost begin to understand. One suspects that his sense for black humor must have helped him survive. I was relieved not to find here any simpering gushy 'forgiveness' of his opressors-- Solzhenitsyn knows them and understands how they were able to exact such terror, and he fully holds them accountable.

I would most emphatically persuade you to read this.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book explores the forced collectivism of the gulags, which were established under Lenin's regime and remained through Stalin's reign of terror, until he died in 1953.
Solzhenitsyn, unlike most "literary" authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Martin Amis, doesn't allow the plot in his novels to become secondary to the prose. Emphasis is placed solely on plot and character development alone, leaving the prose to complete the rest of the job. (In that sense, he reminds me of Philip K Dick, another writer who never sacrificed plot for prose.) Because of this method, the reader is intimately privy to the thoughts and emotions of the "non-fictional" political and religious dissenters who slaved in these camps, building Siberia's highways, railways, and hydroelectric plants.
It still amazes me that after all the expositions of genocide that took place under Soviet totalitarianism have been uncovered, left-wingers, in their typically off-balanced condescension, continue to erect phoney moral high grounds over the alleged "greed" of the free marketplace. The "greed" defense is the refuge of the coward, who strenuously denies (or tries to evade) what brave men like Solzhenitsyn and Paul Johnson have written about, and, in Solzhenitsyn's case, lived through.

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not
having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined it all.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author's epigraph to The Gulag Archipelago
It seemed as if it was no longer I who was writing; rather, I was swept along, my hand was being
moved by an outside force, and I was only the firing pin attached to a spring.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies
It certainly helps that he looks like a figure out of the Old Testament, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's enduring image is likely to be that of the
prophet of the Soviet Union's doom. No one, including Ronald Reagan, deserves more credit for making the West, and Russia itself, face
the fact that Communism was evil, that it had to be defeated, and that it was entirely possible to defeat it. Where One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich, his most widely read work, is a devastating portrait in miniature of the effects of Soviet oppression on one man, the
multi-volume Gulag Archipelago is the sprawling canvas upon which he depicts the entire vile system, sweeping across the decades since
1917 and touching upon every facet of society. It is, in essence, the Prosecutor's indictment, stating the case against the enormous criminal
enterprise that was the U. S. S. R. It's always seemed to me that the only document you can really compare it to is Martin Luther's 95
Theses. It too represented a righteous and unanswerable rebuke to a seemingly invincible institution, served as a rallying point for reformers
and outright opponents, and ultimately contributed to wholesale changes in that institution (Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the
Catholic Church in one case, eventual demise in the case of the Soviet Union) which would have been nearly inconceivable in its absence.
The Gulag represents Solzhenitsyn's attempt to document nearly every phase of the Bolshevik's use of the police apparatus and prison camps
for the suppression of dissent, or suspected dissent. Using a wide range of actual examples--many of them personal, others taken from
fellow prisoners he might while he was detained--he takes the reader step-by-step through the process of arrest, interrogation, conviction
(always conviction), transportation, and imprisonment. One is prepared for a tone of righteous indignation and bitter irony, but I was
surprised to find here a kind of dark good humor. Perhaps this is done for effect, Mr. Solzhenitsyn suggesting that the claims of criminality
upon which the authorities persecuted, and murdered, so many are worthy of only bemusement. After all, what can be more dangerous to
absolute power than for people to greet it with contemptuous laughter? Obviously nothing, since Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished from the
Soviet Union on February 13, 1974, just two months after portions of this work began appearing in print in the West, after the KGB had
obtained a draft copy. In all likelihood, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's life was only spared because he was already a Nobel Laureate by then, having
won the prize in 1970, though he was forbidden to travel outside the country at that time to accept it.
Besides offering a comprehensive Russian account of Soviet terror, Mr. Solzhenitsyn does something of extraordinary importance here, the
importance of which most in the West did not fully comprehend until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if then : he drapes the crimes of
Communism around the neck of not just Stalin but of Lenin too, and traces the roots of the terror to the very philosophy of Communism
itself. It had been a convenient myth for party members in the Soviet Union and fellow travelers here in that the Russian Revolution had
been a noble cause and an initial success that was gradually corrupted by the personal evil of just one man, Stalin. True believers clung to
this idea both to justify their collaboration with the regime and to give themselves hope that the system could be reformed, to get it back on
its original track. Mr. Solzhenitsyn began the process of yanking this prop out from under them, of demonstrating that the system was rotten
to its evil core, that no past actions were justified and no just future was possible. In his excellent book, Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick
makes a convincing case that Gorbachev failed to understand this critique and its power, and failed to anticipate that it would be the central
feature of Glasnost, delegitimizing and destabilizing communism entire, whereas he expected only criticism of certain past leaders and
practices, which he could use to his own advantage.
In later years Mr. Solzhenitsyn would move on to an equally powerful criticism of the moral vacuousness and extreme individualism of the
West, earning him the loathing of Western intellectual elites. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he has become a harsh critic of the
new Russia, for its failure to return to its roots in Orthodox Christianity, earning him the enmity of Russian bureaucrats. You would think
that folks might have learned that he is a prophet whose jeremiads you ignore at your own risk.
GRADE : A+

This is a time and place that except for the courage, bravery and sacrifice of a few souls would still be unknown to the West today. One can fault Solzhenitsyn's monarchial views but his courage and stamina cannot be disputed.
He has given us a penetrating portrait of another time and another place - somewhere unimaginable to those of us accustomed to freedom. Remarkably, he has enfused it with a humanity that shines brighter than the frozen landscape or the continual cruelty. In the pages of this book (written and secreted out in parts) the inmates lose their anonymity and take on a life of their own as we find ourselves shivering, crying, rejoicing and even laughing with them. Tears in a Hades of Ice.
Solzhenitsyn is more than a national treasure, a historian or an author. He is the modern-day reflection of the ancient Jewish prophet, preaching to the unbelievers. The portraits of his beloved Russia reflect the greatness that he feels Russia is not only worth but due. This should be required reading for all high school students.

This book should be read by everyone. Any description of the story feels like a very poor representation, so I will only leave you with my strong recommendation. By the way, Why in the world is the Kindle version unavailable? It's very frustrating.

This book is a courageous act of witnessing. It is one of the outstanding works of twentieth century writing. It is a description in tremendous detail of a world which did everything to keep itself being described. The writing of it was the heroic act done at risk to his own life of a former inmate of the Gulag who told the truth of Stalin's nightmare world and portrayed the suffering of millions. This ' breaking of silence' had historical as well as literary significance and may have been a key element in the fall of the Soviet Empire.

There is a point where Solzhenitsyn apprehended by the KGB and taken to the Gulag asks himself why he did not scream out. He says that he wanted to scream not so that one or two would hear. But that he wanted to scream for the millions so the millions would hear.

In this tremendously moving work he does this.

Probably one of the most important works I have ever read. Solzhenitsyn gives voice to the millions of voiceless victims of Stalin's Soviet Russia. Unfortunately this is one of histories lesser known crimes, and the power of this man's voice helps to rectify this. This book is powerful and brutal. Solzhenitsyn forces his readers to stare into the face of evil and see the horrors that can happen when tyrants are allowed to run roughshod over a people.

This book is so tremendously important as a warning for all people to take care that tyranny does not get the opportunity to capture a people. It illustrates the inhumanity that man is capable of, and he shows readers the terrible price that dictators impose.

This book needs to be required reading because it has the affect of so eloquently exposing readers to the reality that people all over the world face. This is why this book is so powerful. It is the universal nature of this work that shows the reader what happens to people in this situation. This book forces the reader to be empathetic to the plight of suffering people the world over. What this work shows is that this type of oppression becomes so pervasive that it is almost impossible to overcome. The people don't want this nor do they simply acquiesce to this tyranny. What happens is that a society becomes totally corrupted to the point where there is nothing left.

This is an extremely important work that needs to be read.

As someone who actually read the entire unabridged version, I recommend that you do so.
This book is primarily known as the Soviet Union's literary tombstone. A righteous yet determined anger shouts from every page. As such, it is seen primarily as offering historical interest.
This is a shame, because it's a book of the present as much as of the past. And thus the future.
I reread it a couple of years ago after having been in modern Russia for a couple of weeks. I needed it to sort out, partially, what I'd been through.
And I needed to reread all three volumes. If you stop at Volume I, you'll have gotten an excellent overview of the history of Soviet repression and how it worked. By itself, the contribution to history and the cause of human rights is immeasurable.
But it still doesn't make it a book. Solzhenitsyn wrote three volumes for reasons other than that he's Russian. This may have been the biggest seller in the West, but to reduce his work to a tool of anti-Communist propaganda efforts is to greatly diminish it.
(I also find it interesting that the same righties who embraced Solzhenitsyn when he wrote this are DK'ing him now that he is back in Russia, speaking out against the privatization of land and sipping tea on his porch with Vladimir Putin. Funny how times change).
Volumes II and III go a long way to explaining contemporary Russia - yes, even today, after both Stalin and the USSR are gone. You learn a lot about the culture of the camps and their daily operation. How much the Russian people were implicated in and collaborated with their own oppression. It's horrifying in some spots and almost laugh-out loud funny in others (best chapter is on the "true believer" types who got swept up in 1937 and went to absurd lengths to differentiate themselves from all the other prisoners and/or suck up).
But, in the culture and role of the thieves (common criminals) that Solzhenitsyn describes in so much detail, you can see the genesis of the present-day Russian mafia (As he aptly observes, the NKVD/KGB did not so much re-educate the thieves as the other way around). Little has changed except that now they are dressed better and have a lot more money.
And lastly there is the disturbing picture, completed in Volume III where he writes about his post-camp exile in what is now independent Kazakhstan, of the gradual spread of prison culture and prisoner values throughout the entire society as a result of such mass, reckless imprisonment of so many.
One has to ask: Are we in America not subtly doing the same thing courtesy of the So-Called War on Some Drugs? Entire communities in some areas are being ripped to shreds through mandatory minimums for drug possession (how like the Stalinist decrees Solzhenitsyn mentions!) and gangsta rap music and the more thuggish aspects of hip-hop culture begin to transmit the coarsening jailhouse sensibility even to those who have never been to jail (much as one of Solznehitsyn's fellow prisoners found his students knew all the Gulag slang terms, even though they were too young to have been to prison). Can we really stand by and read this so smugly? Is this really all in the past? There are lessons here for right and left.

This is the best history book I've ever read, it made me cringe and rage at times, and gave me nightmares but in the long run, it was an exceptionally enlightening read. It shed much light on the modem-day "climate" as to attitudes, trends, and perpectives in general in the world and perhaps especially my own country, to me, the parellels are quite clear. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has quickly become one of my very favorite authors and as far as I'm concerned should be Sainted, to have gone through so much, and to come out good on the other side, is worthy of it in my opinion. Next chance I get I'm going to be reading his "Warning to the West" book and from there probably a biography on the man. To me he is that interesting. An excellent book, well worth your time to read.

First, I gave Sozhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" a 4 star rating because of the style of its writing. Content-wise, this book is far beyond even a 5 star rating. As my title says, it should be mandatory reading for everyone in this country. Regarding the style, the best I can say is it's very Russian. Solzhenitsyn uses tons of well-researched details to present his thesis. The only problem is that after a while it gets depressing. Also, he uses a heck of a lot of scathing sarcasm throughout the book. So much so, that you start to become numb to it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you should be aware that this is NOT a novel. Also, it's not really a history. As the subtitle on the title page says, it's "An Experiment in Literary Investigation." Personally, I'd have been more satisfied with a history. The content of this book is simply inconceivable and far outweighs my minor criticisms of the style. It describes how the Communists in the Soviet Union consciously tortured and murdered millions (if not tens of millions) of their own people. With this book in print, I can't understand how anyone could ever say anything good about Communism. It's a long book, but READ IT. I rate it at a Very Good 4 stars out of 5.

This book is a learning experience. It is somewhat difficult reading, but it contains so many valuable lessons about life. The book made me think of Buddhism, although it was never mentioned. It is filled with descriptions of the torture the inhabitants of the gulags went through; on looking back on reading these I concluded that it was important to laboriously read and think about all of these painful experiences in order to genuinely feel the insights the author gained. Here is a condensed quote: "It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years... how a human being becomes evil and how good... it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sense within myself the first stirrings of good...And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil... good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains.. an unuprooted small corner of evil." But I feel this message would not really have gotten to me if I hadn't read all about the horrible prison experience.

This is probably as significant a book as has been published in the 20th century. Not because it changed the course of history or influenced a huge number of people. It did neither of these things. The history it deals with was already long passed and its size and severity kept it from being read by a mass audience. Still, it is significant because it tells a story that otherwise could not have been told. The full extent of what happened during the half century of Soviet rule to millions of Soviet citizens is the focus of this book and Solzhenitsyn's narrative, often numbing in the regularity of repeated cycles of arrests, 'trials', and imprisonment, seems to be his effort at repaying those who perished - at insuring that they are remembered and that those who subjected them to lives of torture are remembered for what they did.
Solzhenitsyn is a true hero of the 20th century. A military officer of the Soviet Union during WWII, he was imprisoned for writing a letter that included a joke about Stalin. During his time in prison he met numerous others who had been in different camps - different places and different types - and started piecing together in his mind the full scale of the vast Gulag enterprise which eventually consumed more of his contrymen than the total count of those of all countries who died in WWII. That the size and scope of this mass internment was kept virtually a secret to most of the world (and to most Russians)for so long is only part of the horror to which Solzhenitzyn is responding.
From his first book, A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch, a small volumn about a single day in the life of a typical Gulag prisoner - smuggled out of Russia and published in the West - he has devoted his life to various tellings of his country's recent history. Most of it to do with the Gulag. This isn't pleasant stuff. It isn't tight fiction like Darkness At Noon. This is the real stuff with no prettifying. He feels that someone had to tell the truth. We owe it to him to listen.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote this revealing account of the vast network of Soviet political prisons from his experiences as an inmate. The author was serving in the Red Army during World War II when the secret police (NKVD) arrested him for daring to criticize Soviet dictator Stalin in a private letter. Solzhenitsyn got eight years in Siberia, where inmates enjoyed forced confessions, mistreatment, beatings, and worse. The author describes labor camp conditions, political propaganda, and the struggle to survive. The author also examines the Soviet political system with anecdotes like one about a party gathering when none dared be first to stop applauding after Stalin's name was mentioned - naturally, the first that finally stopped clapping was arrested the next day. This book reminds us of the blessings of freedom, the dangers of police states (including right-wing ones), and the reality that communist governments exist via an odious combination of secret police, controlled media, and the outlawing of political opposition.

This book has a powerful message but is stiff and repetitious - as if the author wished to pay tribute to every victim he encountered. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize in 1970, lived in the USA from 1974-1994, and he returned to Russia after the fall of communism a critic of Western pop culture - but appreciating its free speech. Sadly, too many people that condemn communist oppression are blind to oppression from the right - and vice versa.

The Communist system, built on lies, secrecy and deception was exposed forever with this book.
Solzhenitsyn made it his goal to make sure that the real history of the prison camps was told, in detail. While in prison camp, he vowed to recall it all (in his memoirs [The Oak and the Calf] he tells HOW he was able to remember all the thousands of details that he learned in the camps. He often spent as much as 3 weeks out of each month just reciting all that he had previously committed to memory, just to make sure that his memory of it remained clear).
Some of the [many] things that I found interesting were the tactics of deception used by the Soviets to cover up all the torture that was going on in the camps. In fact, Solzhenitsyn at one point listed 26 different tortures that don't leave marks or scars.
Solzhenitsyn validated the truth of this work by putting his life on the line just to get it to us.
--George Stancliffe

I read the entire work in 1984, trying to find out if Owell was writing about the Soviet Union. The prose took me down a terrifying cataract, helped along by the very involved but equally fluid and transparent translations by Whitney and Willets. It is like no other translation. At any rate, yes, Orwell was talking about the Soviet Union. The snoops and informers in the SU were the secret to its success, as were the snoops and informers in 1984. The six months I spent reading this, 10 pp per day, were segments of a nightmare. Now, the SU is no longer. But gulags still exist, at least in the hearts of intellectuals who know what is best for everyone else. How Solzenhitsyn managed to record this experience with such sarcasm and understanding the root of the evil (socialism itself) is a sign of his greatness and goodness.

This stark revelation of the Soviet gulags (jails) during the communist regime is an amazing achievement of memory and dedicated work. Solzhenitsyn deserves the highest marks for his work, both for its revealing nature as well as its painstaking attempt to account for the events inside this archipelago of prisons that stretched across the Soviet empire. Solzhenitsyn's pronouncements and thoughtful interpretations make this more than just a listing of horrors, giving the readers the stories involved. The writing is terse and somewhat rough, perhaps due in part to this being a translation from the Russian, but partially owing to Solzhenitsyn's rough hewn style as well. In all, enlightening and terrifying reading.

This book is not a novel. It is an unusually constructed history in three volumes, written by a word-class writer. It is a heavy read. In this volume, Solzhenitsyn describes arrests, interrogations, tortures, trials, prisons, and methods of transporatation from the prisons to the labour camps. He gives a brief history of the genesis of Gulag, its principles and its expansion, in the chapter "A Brief History of Our Sewage Disposal System." Solzhenitysn marshalls an impressive range of facts and first hand anecdotes in addition to his own experiences, usually relating them in a straightforward manner, sometimes with bitter, vicious sarcasm, sometimes with passionate anger. The book is an astounding achievement, especially when one considers that he wrote it in sections, hiding each as it was completed; he was never able to refer back to what he had previously written, yet I noticed no repetitions. The book is an astounding achievement, immensely powerful, but very depressing, sometimes heart-breaking. Nonetheless, anyone who wishes to be well-informed in general, or about history in particular, must read it.

Solzhenitsyn is an extraordinary man of courage, depth, and insight! This book is his all-time best and will challenge every mortal with his look at the horrors and brutality of Communism. A better book on the state of Russia from 1918-1956 has ever been written-period! This book takes time and patience to get through but it is well worth the effort. If you are interested in the history of Russian Communism, seen through the eyes of a staunch-supporter-political-prisoner-turned-dissident, then this is the book for you! You will not regret reading this amazing, extraordinary, fascinating, heart-breaking book. It has all the elements of the world's greatest novel but it is FACT!

I was originally refered this book by a freind, who said "it's too depressing, don't read it".
I found it an amazing insight of rage, frustration and humilty. He speaks for a nation that allowed itself to be subjected to such barbarity, and only to become resigned to it because of the generations the reign of terror it covered.
To a police officer in a democrocy, to hear that such barbartiy took place (no, not isolated incidents)on a scale so vast (16,000,000) persons imprisoned) as slave labour is so hard to imagine. I do not think anyone could have conveyed its' truth so powerfully.
If you read one book of intelect in you life, let it be this

The title of this review is truly the way I feel about this book. The first volume relates stories of arrest and interrogation, the second volume tells of life in the camps, and the third talks of life in internal exile.

The second volume, in particular, is at times haunting and at others uplifting in ways that are absolutely beyond description. The story of the woman who was set aside to starve to death simply because she "wasn't worth her bread ration" is one of the many that will stay with you forever.

The book was absolutely earth-shattering when it was published as the Soviet Union was still at the height of its power, but in bringing forth reports of Stalin's brutality it creates universal, timeless themes. Anyone who wishes to understand the human experience and to truly examine one's own soul must read this book.

In this book Solzhenitsyn describes the intelligentsia as those who are preoccupied with the spiritual side of life. Reading this book will focus you on the spiritual in ways you could never imagine. A beautiful, stunning work. Monumental.

Reading Solzhenitsyn's GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is a daunting task, not simply because of its excessive length, but because at the conclusion, the reader is left with judging it and comprehending just what it was that he read. Solzhenitsyn sub-titles his book 'An Experiment in Literary Investigation.' As the reader plows through the author's strange mixture of compelling narrative in parts and excessive fascination with names, dates, and places in others, the reader begins to see that this investigation is a new genre. It is part autobiography, part novel, part polemic. Solzhenitsyn tries to guide the reader through a half century of the evolution of the Soviet prison system, the Gulag, by using his sewage disposal metaphor. A good idea, but the wrong metaphor. Since his work so often uses bodily phrases like 'cancer' and 'metastasizing', perhaps he might have switched to an organic one. He describes the very beginnings of the Gulag system as the core foundation for post-Revolutionary communism. It was to the gulags that waves of multi-generational opponents of first Lenin, then Stalin, were sent. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear early on the very first leaders of communism saw in the gulags a long term solution to reshaping a multi-stranded Russian society into a mono-stranded Soviet one. No one knew it then, but such an effort was doomed to fail. It is remarkable that it lasted as long as it did when Yeltsin stood atop a tank to topple the communist regime. The gulag system was a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, swallowing in huge gulps entire waves of segments of Soviet society. What is astonishing is that he reveals that most often there was no logic to the call to rounding up the usual suspects. In Soviet Russia, everyone was a usual suspect. Even members of the secret police, first called the Cheka, then the NKVD, finally morphing to the KGB, were expected to place their necks on the chopping blocks when called to do so. It was routinely assumed that if the police did not come for you today, well, tomorrow was another day. At the start of the book, 'today' occurs for Solzhenitsyn, when he is arrested for writing subversive letters. He is accosted by security officers and hustled off to a gulag where he remained for decades. While incarcerated, he learns, he thinks, he remembers a vast waterfall of details that later goes into the writing of this book. A minor criticism I have is that I wonder how, without detailed notes, he was able to retain accurately this overwhelming flow of data.
He calls Part II 'Perpetual Motion.' By this he means that Russias gulags were constantly on the prowl, ever seeking new victims. Perhaps an unspoken assumption is the circular direction of this movement. It began in lawlessness in 1918 and ends the same in 1991. Evil seems to exist for as long as it takes good men like Solzhenitsyn to be able to cry out in the night to stop the madness.

Gulag--a Russian acronym for the network of camps where prisoners languish without recourse to law or justice, where women are gang-raped by thieves, and where innocent people are starved, beaten, tortured, killed, disappeared. Though Solzhenitsyn's experience of the Gulag took place under Soviet rule, the phenomenon does not seem to be uniquely Communist but is symptomatic of totalitarianism in general. This is why this "experiment in literary investigation" is so relevant right here, right now. The potential for something like Gulag in the age of the eternal "war on terror" is terrifying. (And as the author notes, many of the evils committed in Gulag depended upon the perpetrator believing that what he did was not only necessary, but actually moral.)

Yet Solzhenitsyn's indefatigable sense of humor and generosity of spirit keep this book (at 615 pages, the first volume of three) from being a work of torture in itself. Instead, he mocks the pretensions of the Soviet penal code and revels in the small joys (i.e., sleep, reading, comradery) he experienced in Gulag. In fact, at times, Solzhenitsyn conveys the sense that Gulag was a potentially redemptive experienced for those who made it through, since it winnowed away the chaff of life from the wheat and revealed the nobility we may find in our darkest, deepest hour.

Review by Mike, Age 13
Solzhenitsyn does an excellent job of retelling the story of the atrocities of the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is a disturbing account of what happened inside the Gulag prisons. This is an account about the things hidden from the public and the things the Marxists wanted to keep hidden. And how he gave a first person account of prison life, well that was just amazing! His vivid descriptions about the kinds of arrests that took place I thought was very interesting and an amazing brainchild of a distorted Soviet Union!
How Stalin could turn an innocent gesture of two long lost friends being reunited into an arrest is beyond me. The Gulag Archipelago is an excellent book that unveiled an entirely new side of the Soviet Union and its perverted system of justice. It's a great book for historians and World War II buffs, or even if you are trying to find out more about the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is quite possibly one of the best books I've ever read! I would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in the Soviet Union. (Content will be confusing for younger readers.)

I was so excited to finally read/listen to this book. It was good, however, it was very confusing and somewhat slow. The horror of the time and place is astounding. Just think of all the great minds and opportunities that were thrown away to rot in prisons for no reason.

Your media, publishing houses and education system were apparently to busy raving about the horrors of McCarthyism and sculpting Stalin into Time Magazine's Man of the year for 1943- they didn't have time to tell you how the communists got by with liquidating over 100,000,000 people in the 20th century. Well now the dead have a voice... Out of the evil empire, a voice emerged to tell the story that academia and the media didn't care to hear. This book is haunting, because it brings historic fact to the table from someone that lived firsthand in the Soviet Gulag state. The accounts of life (and death) in the gulag are vivid and engrossing. What I find most disturbing is how so many dogmatic leftists still play apologists for the Soviet Union.

I cannot stop admiring the courage of the author and his belief in art as the most powerful and necessary form of preserving memory of history and humanity. His writing, neither history nor memoir, is compelling, and passionate, and inspite of his passionate criticism, I think I read his love for Russia and his people. I enjoyed reading his lecture as well, which shows more of his brilliant and yet rather humble analysis on the mission of literature/artists in the time of pervasive and universal atrocities againt humanity. He not only wrote but also lived his convictions.

While on semester break during my college days, I began to read this book. In awe of the courage and spiritual strength of the Russian people, the writing kept me sympathetic toward the many Russians who were wrongly treated during Stalin's reign.

At the middle of the book, I got a knock on my apartment door. I arose, opened it, and was met face-to-face with a man identifying himself while holding FBI credentials. Accompanying him were another FBI agent and a police officer.

The guy to first speak to me was in charge, it appeared. He and his men, he told me, had kept my apartment under surveillance for the past few days and wondered why I chose not to leave, why I remained cooped up. "Are you hiding? You haven't left that seat for hours, and you've been out only once to order food at Benny's."

My explanation was that I was a poor college student who was attempting to get a head start on reading assignments for next term. "I'm majoring in literature and the workload can be overwhelming at times," I said.

I asked him what this was all about. His reply was, as if it jumped right out of the pages I was reading, "You fit the description of a man who raped and murdered a girl thirty miles south of here. We're taking you in for questioning."

To them, I must not have displayed any worry or guilt, because they didn't handcuff me. "Surely, there's been some mistake," I told myself. The police station was located less than two blocks from my apartment. During our slow walk there, the same agent asked me what else I did with my leisure time. I told him I liked to fish.

"What kind of fish do you catch?"

"Whiting and flounder mostly." .

"Where do you go?" he asked.

"Mostly to the pier, but flounder are best caught at night near the jetties in Mayport," I informed him as we entered the station.

I was told to take a seat inside a scarcely furnished foyer as the agent continued talking. He told me he and his buddy planned to do some fishing while they were in Florida. Did I have any pointers to share with them? I explained how to set lines and the type of baits to use. Probably, the fish talk was part of their normal routine, to get a suspect to open up, and to see if the description of his life seems normal.

After ten minutes, I was led into a room where my fingerprints were taken, at which time I was thanked for being so cooperative and told not to leave town for a few weeks. I complied. Never again was I called to the police station, and I never did find out if they caught the guilty man.

When I got back to my apartment, I picked up Solzenhitsyn's book, continued reading. It felt a little bit of what happened to him.

I never did see those guys at the jetties.

The Gulag Archipelago is certainly one of the important books of the 20th Century, and gives insight into Soviet politics, life under the Soviet regime, and especially, life in the Gulag and in transit thereto. The depth in which it covers these subjects is far greater than that available in public education or the popular press. As such, I regard this is a must-read for any student of Soviet history, Soviet politics, politics of resistance or revolution, politics in general, or even penology for that matter.
However, I think that for any but the most devoted reader, this book will be a very heavy read, and I imagine that nearly all students who are forced to read it find their suffering tolerable only because of the much greater travails borne by the characters in the book. I must wonder if the positive reviews this book has received are more due to the sense of accomplishment one feels after finishing the book than an appreciation for the writing.
Though it is commonly regarded as a novel, it is thinly veiled as such, and is for the most part basically a first and second hand description of the Gulag, and the Soviet Union from the end stages of the Russian Revolution through the Stalin era. It does not read like a novel, but more as a somewhat disjointed series of narrative accounts along similar themes combining to form a larger picture. Though I haven't read any other translations, there were various points within the book when I wondered if there might perhaps be a better on out there. I suspect not, however, as it is my impression that Solzhenitsyn intended this to be not a novel, but a massive collection of narratives interspersed with his own political sentiments, and the disjointed nature is likely not the fault of the translator.
This is not to say that this book is not good. To the contrary, it is a classic. I highly recommend it highly to a serious student of the disciplines mentioned above. But if what you are looking for is a novel describing life in the Gulag, you would be far better served to read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is in fact such a novel. Further, it offers a very vivid account of a prisoner's perspective on the Gulag, is a much lighter read, and is put together in a much more readable format. (Note that Ivan Denisovich) goes much lighter on the politics, without the digressions for accounts of show trials and such characteristic of Gulag Archipelago.)

This book should be a must read for all high schools; but our schools have rejected it and embraced the very same thing this book exposes. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was booed at Harvard by a hall full of indoctrinated statists several years ago. Both political parties embrace Marxist statism and have almost eradicated LIBERTY. Their ignorance and greed has opened our country up to ideologies that want to destroy us from within. You may not believe in God; but that doesn't mean He doesn't exist and we need His help.

I originally read the three-volume "Gulag" while in college and then later read this abridgment. This abridgment is very well done; it definitely captures the meat of what Solzhenitsyn wanted to convey. The three-volume work had a lot of detailed accounts of those who did not survive the Gulag or the Stalinist state, but those details can be hard to absorb and are easily forgotten. This volume provides the essence of what is THE book of the 20th century.

When Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" it started a storm of spittle from the Liberal establishment. Solzhenitsyn reminds us that Reagan was absolutely, precisely, CORRECT! The Left in the West told us all through the Cold War that the Russians were just like us, that they were being lied to about us and we were being lied to about them, that they didn't pose a threat, that they were just afraid of us, etc., etc. Solzhenitsyn proved that they were absolutely WRONG! That's why he was accepted when he was a harmless, cute, dissident, but he refused to shut up and the response from the Western Left was almost as virulent as that of the Soviet regime that imprisoned him for criticizing Stalin in a personal letter. Read this along with First Circle and thank God that we were the ones who won the Cold War.

i am speechless and only 1/3 of the way through this book. i am awakened to the fact that any human being has the capacity to become cannibalistic, and demonic, and evil, under the right circumstances. I cannot point a finger at anyone, for all humanity are my brethren. I do not know what I would do under these circumstances, but I know we have a GOD who alone, forgives, and receives us back into his protection,upon repentence. HE alone is our only hope, for we all are doomed in our sins. THANK YOU LORD, for opening my eyes, and may I not deny you in my day of trial. Terri Vining

The Gulag Archipelago is more than complete. It's downright exhaustive and extensive. Make no mistake about it- it certainly is a massive tome of a work, packed to the brim with autobiographical and biographical anecdotes, political commentary, and social critique, spoken in a voice that switches from wrath to sadness to bitter, biting irony and wit. Although it may take a long time to read, those who do read it will be richly rewarded. It provides in- depth information about the Russian penal system and how it operates, demonstrating that it lay upon the foundations of self- interest, greed, hate, social control, and masked motives. The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of five is that it truly is a long book which takes a true devotion to the subject to read. I found it a book to be as much studied as read, so as to better understand the main tenets of the work and to come closer to its emotional, spiritual, and psychological core. It is, however, a powerful statement on the human response to captivity, the corrupt ways of people consumed by power, and a work to be treasured and read for years to come.

Reading this book you cannot help but be filled with rage, wonder and astonishment. The sheer number of innocent lives that were thrown away for the sake of paranoia is astonishing and enraging. It is a pattern that is constantly repeated in countries where there is one leader who eventually succumbs to paranoia and imprisons the whole country. It was the exact same thing with Mao's China, he started off with good ideas but eventually ended up throwing the country back to the stone ag.

Solzhenitsyn used an amazing writing style, he conveys what started off as simple interviews into an almost poetic style. Intertwined in his writing were many open ended questions, some of which he answered and some which he left for us to think about. This makes the book all the more engaging and fascinating. The fact that he used interviews was pure genius, he could've simply given us a plethora of facts, but he chose not to. He chose to use the words of the people, people who had lived through this torment (he too was one of the people). It was their stories of torture, arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, labor and exile that truly help us realize how much of a madman Stalin was.

This is an amazing piece of work told in the greatest writing style imaginable. A fantastic insight into Communist Russia and what went on behind the Iron Curtain.

have read this book in just 4 days and this is the most powerful captivating enlightening work of literature. It is absolutely perfect - Solzhenitsyn gives us an experience of history through stories of hundreds and hundreds of affected lives, there is nothing dry about it and of course it's biased but yet the author's raw passion about the subject would disarm anyone. 40 million lives slaughtered and crippled in the period of over 30 years - a fact not known or simply ignored by too many people. I just find it so enraging that 30 years have passed since this book was published and so much is revealed and we can talk about it freely - yet no one cares! Especially in Russia and former Soviet Union - a country whose own people were abused, butchered! A country forever scarred with one of the biggest crimes in human history (with some survivors still alive!) - widespread indifference.

Gulag Archipelago is not a simple account of historical facts, it's an exercise questioning the quality of the nation, whose people allowed this, the quality of humanity itself. In a case of such absurd, unimaginable cruelty, where one is denied a right to justice, a right to the very status of a human being, how will you react? Will you rebel or become a slave, "kill today to live tomorrow" - Who is to blame where hundreds murder millions and the rest remains aware but passive?

"You are the only one to blame that people are killed! You alone are responsible for my death and you will live with it! If they weren't any hangmen there wouldn't be any executions".

Please read this book, not only will it make you feel very bad about your country if you're Russian, it is also full of useful survival tips - who knows what happens.

Alas, I have never met anyone else who has actually read the entire first volume. I even wonder whether there is anyone besides myself who has read all three volumes. Once I got started I just couldn't stop until I had read the final page in the third volume. I was entranced with the stories of the Soviet prison system. Mr. Solzhenitsyn and his translaters could have done a better job from a literary standpoint, but the message they present is powerful despite the difficulty encountered in reading the book.

Amazing narrative by an amazing author from an unbelievable time. It reminds me of how fortunate I am to be free.

My version is SBN 06-080332-0, 660 pages including index, and nowhere does the word "abridged" appear.

This book was impossible to put down. I think it is essential reading for people of all cultures. It is blunt, brutally honest, eye-opening, non-apologetic and confronting. It educates and enlightens the reader. The author gives a voice to many who had been silenced either by death, torture or fear of both. In exposing a leader, a system and a regime, he also exposes humanity everywhere. In his description of what occurred, he is putting the spotlight on the inhumanity and cruelty that humans are capable of inflicting on each other, and have done again, since the collapse of the Soviet system. Whilst the setting is Soviet Russia, history shows that people elsewhere, and in other styles of regimes have been just as cruel and life-destroying, in their own, or in similar ways. Despite the despair, the anger, the tragedy of it all, the author also shows that there is hope, survival, and a light at the end of the tunnel. The human spirit is capable of overcoming seemingly impossible hurdles. Despite being exiled for the book, and believing that he would never see it in print in his lifetime, he returned to Russia.

How thin is the veil we call Civilization!! This book is indeed a tedious read by virtue of its length. However, Solzhenitsyn's history is written with the prosaic style of a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Captain in the Soviet Army as it charged through Nazi occupied Poland when he was arrested on trumped-up charges in February 1945. Thus began his odyssey through Gulag, "the country within a country". The perpetually weak economy of Communism could not survive without the forced labor of millions of is own citizens who became prisoners for one reason or another, or no reason at all. Solzhenitsyn relates his own experiences as well as those of other prisoners with whom he became acquainted while incarcerated. He relates how ordinary Russians were arrested and charged with fraudulent charges (if charged at all), interrogated, tortured and forced to confess under extreme duress, and sent off to labor for the good of the Motherland.
Throughout the book, Solzhenitsyn asks the reader incredulously, "how did we let this happen?" That is no doubt one of the most important questions posed in all of human history. If we study history in order to prevent the repetition of our mistakes, then Solzhenitsyn's work should be required reading of all residents of Planet Earth.

In my opinion if one wants to read one book that will expalain why communism is wrong. I would suggest you read this. Unlike many so called great writers such as Orwell, his work is true and explodes the communist myths that Orwell and his like created.This shows both the moral bankruptcy of communism along (as he sets the background) the economic failure. This book is also extremely well written with his grating style much superior to the flowery style of other 'great' authours. In fact even in style this deserves to be the best book of all time. Also the glossary is very interesting and illuminating. In short he deserved to win a nobel prize for this rather than later for Cancer Ward. This book is essential reading for any economics student, russian history student or any student whose syllabus crosses communism in any form. Although Solzhenitsyn has been the subject of a vendendetta of both the MGB, the Guardian and some trendy novellists (such as Malcom Bradbury who attacked him in 'Doctor Criminale')he was definitely the person of the 20th century and was possibly greater than any other writer, fiction or non ficition ever.

I'm surprised to see reviews calling this a "heavy" read. While it does help to have some knowledge of revolutionary Russia and the people involved, this is a truly fascinating read, with brilliant, searing writing unlike few other books. Deserves to be read and reread every few years.
The first volume is superior to the second and third ones. In fact it's superior to just about every other history out there.

It takes some effort to read this book, as it is very detailed, with lots of names of people and places, forcing you to refer to the glossary often, but worth going to the trouble for. I say this at the risk of sounding blasé, but my only complaint is that there were unexciting stretches in the book, especially the descriptions of the trials in the chapter "The Law Becomes a Man". The writing is sometimes haphazard. Even so, it is an important book, and well worth the read, and I enjoyed it for the most part.

I'm the only person I know that has read volumes 2 and 3. Many more are familiar with volume 1. Reading the 3 took me over 2 years and several times I cried while reading. This is the only book you ever need to read about oppression. Oppressive thugs have no imagination and have used the same methods since Babylonian times. To wit:

- Divide with hatred and suspicion
- Isolate individuals and convince them that there is no hope
- Tag all dissent as insanity
- Rewrite history
- Encourage personal betrayals
- Use of torture mental and physical
- Encourage poor morality and use breeches of morality as an excuse for punishment

It doesn't surprise me that people who are unfamiliar with these methods are prone to be victimized by them.

When the inevitable lists of the most important books of the 20th century appear this one must surely be near the top. It should be required reading for any history or political science course, or anyone interested in current affairs or policy. It should be taken as a cautionary tale by anyone currently looking towards adminsitrative or bureaucratic control as a solution to social, economic or environmental problems.
Solzhenitsyn documents the Soviet Holocaust which began earlier (no Virginia, it didn't start with Stalin, it started with Lenin in 1917) lasted longer, and killed many more people than the more famous Nazi Holocaust. Indeed, the juxtaposition of the two events and their relative prominence in our consciousness is itself a worthy subject for meditation.
In an age infatuated with the progeny of Marxism, this book should provide a remarkable antidote to baroque, theoretical academic exercises.

This book allows a view into the realities of the Soviet Union, hidden for so long from the rest of the world. The author is nothing short of brilliant. He is able to paint a clear picture of the suffering and evil treatment that went on, both to himself and others. It is a remarkably compelling story of survival that is written so cleanly and smoothly that it is difficult to put down.

I was expecting a very hard read. Judging by the other PHD written reviews on here. But I was very surprised. This book grabs you from the very 1st word. It is written in a manner that appeals to any reader. But the most shocking thing about the book is the number of times it made me laugh out loud & smile. Yes the dark humour in this book is incredible. He can even pull a funny quip out of the nighmare of his own interogation. So from page to page your taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. He has a way of fleshing out the people in the book, so you can feel thier pain directly. You could be close to tears on the top of one page & laughing by the time you reach the bottom. I dont know the words to truly relate how well written this book is.

I can say without reservation . This book is one of the most important ever written.

A book of amazing horror and power. What makes it more than just a list of atrocities is Solzhenitsyn's effort to understand how the functionaries in the Stalinist prison system have come to be so inhumane -- and his conclusion that given only a slightly different fate, he, too, might have been a prison guard or interrogator or informant rather than a prisoner. While documenting a dehumanising, utterly destructive system, he shows us how the system itself results from the very human failings of the people running it. Absorbing, shocking, I couldn't put it down. And I've lost sleep knowing that the same sorts of regimes still exist in other countries, even today.

To me the three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago not only document the atrocities commited in the Soviet Union, but much more importantly, they reveal how people become evil and how they can become good. Though Communism is gone (as a religion, at least) and the Soviet Union as well, these eternal truths are well worth returning to these books again and again.
If you are put off by the first few chapters of the first volume, please, jump to the second or third volume. Some of the best material is there. I've read all three volumes over three times and consider them a major influence on my life and thought.

I have the full three volume set of the Gulag that I read years ago. It is the greatest book ever written. In portraying Communism, as he described as man's inhumanity to man, Solzhenitsyn has an exceptional ability while depicting the excessively cruel treatment of human beings in the Gulag to demonstrate his dignity and the dignity of those who suffered at the hands of their oppressors. The entire book is full of stories of the courage of human beings in the face of such evil. In that way, while depicting the horrible conditions of the Gulag, the book ultimately provides an uplifting message that peace and kindness are enduring human traits that can and do shine through despite overwhelming attempts to erase them. Never has there been a more courageous and humane writer.

This book is a beutiful piece of literature and history. It was also written while on the run from the most devastating goverment in existence. The book is much more intresting to read, literature wise, than most academic works. The truth of the horrible soviet conditions in the gulag and the horrible and equally evil denial of the west that these things happened.

This is a book that should be read in many places, at least in Russia, and for anyone else who truly wants to understand human life and the history of humanity.

This is the most shocking, frightening horror story I have ever read. It's the only genre I want to put it in, even though it is a non-fiction book. I first heard of this book back in the 70's and have just finished reading it for the first time. Too, too many times did I have to put the book down and shudder from what I read. Jason, Freddie Kreuger, and Leatherface, were pussies compared to Stalin's distant hand.

In this abridgment authorized by Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago has been made even more accessible to more readers (the complete work is 1300 plus pages). One of the most important books of the 20th Century, The Gulag Archipelago exposed the horrific, authoritarian state that was the Soviet Union. In this book, Solzhenitsyn revealed the failure of the utopian, socialist/communist experiment in Russia. Sadly, in order to perpetuate this experiment, the Soviets used mass imprisonment as a way to control its citizens. The Gulag Archipelago was that system of prison camps stretching to the outer reaches of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner of the Gulag for 8 years and collected his and others' stories in this book. Before this book, much of the West was still under the illusion that the Soviet Union was a wonderful workers' paradise. Solzhenitsyn shattered that myth. For those with an interest in the Cold War, you must read this book.

I read all three volumes, and it took me about a year (although I did not read them straight through, but took some breaks). I thought it was well worth the effort. The writing, even in translation and even under the adverse conditions under which it was written, is extraordinary: his tone is informal, even slang, yet compelling -- as if someone was grabbing you by the lapels and shouting at you. At the same time, it's as if Leaves of Grass was written in a labor camp. No matter what your politics, it's epic and gripping.

If you read this reference book and then a day in the life of.....you will have dived deep enough....if you want to get a women's perspective, check out "Till my Tale is Told" or the amazing account from Verlam Shalamov and you will be all set to fight any discourse trying to prove that those times were happy times (I have heard it, as amazing as this can seem!).

This is not a light reading. Cannot be read at the pool or on the beach....living room with a fire on is a better setting.

Solzhenitsyn takes the reader on the incredible journey of soviet prisons and the penal system, based on his (and other anecdotal) experiences. he also exposes the fallacies of the stalinist regime and illuminates the reasons behind the terror of the communist years in the USSR.

This is the book that sobered the French up after the follies of 1968. This is the book that prevented the New York literary cognoscenti from completely dismissing Solzhenitsyn as a ranting bumpkin. This is the book that gave hope to Russians that the mass graves of zeks would not be unaccounted for, after all. And, this is the book that inoculated me against my college education. It is the literary equivalent of that famous photo of the lone man facing down a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.
As Solzhenitsyn is at pains to impress upon us, it is not a political expose'. Rather, it is an effort to collect victims' testimonies to the savage early decades of Soviet rule. It is also, and more importantly, an exploration of the human soul under all-out assault by the state. As Western leftists, complicit in the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, innocently glided from "It never happened" to "Who cares? It can never happen again", this book brought all the evil of Soviet communism into the light. That light was the moral vision of arguably the 20th century's greatest prophet, without honor in the putative homelands of liberty, and in perpetual mortal danger at home.
The first book of _The Gulag Archipelago_ takes the reader from arrest through interrogation, transport, and transit camp, up to the gates of the labor camps themselves. Along the way, there are many asides about prison life, its denizens and customs, and the spiritual deformations they inflicted. There were whole waves, entire cycles, of specifically targeted repressions. Hundreds of thousands of people were disposed of without a trace, either by bullets or by exile above the arctic circle. The repressions of 1937, the _Yezhovschina_, made Western intellectuals gulp only because, for a change, the victims were communists. We also, through Solzhenitsyn's account of his spiritual awakening, get an up close view of how a strong religious faith can sustain a person in the face of this faceless evil (though this aspect is more fully developed in volume 2)
What makes this "huge, loose, baggy monster" of a book more remarkable is that Solzhenitsyn never once had it all on his desk at the same time, for a proper editing. Parts of it were always stashed away somewhere, while he was working on another part, always under official surveillance. No pampered western academic radical could last ten days under those conditions, let alone produce such a powerful witness. Read this for a bellyful of what it is like not to be free, what it costs to try to become free. You'll never take your loony left professor seriously again.

I read this work while doing research in preparation for my senior Western Civilization presentation. Most students struggle to locate primary sources of any merit, it was not so when I found The Gulag Archipelago. Not only did I find that it provided me with an understanding of the Soviet penal system, Solzhenitsyn also manages to bring his words to life using his own experiences and recognizing his own faults. I would recommend this book to any student who didn't mind wading through long tirades and could fully appreciate the style the author uses to make his statement.

The author spent 10 years in one of these prison camps, this work is going to be biased. I have to admit that this book despite the bias that is inherent it is a great book. He details what happened to soviet citizens during 1920-1950's. its not pretty and he puts in his personal experiences with the system. This book is a first hand account of the conditions of the soviet gulags as well as history of the gulags. It is a must read, if you want to understand Russia now.

Most people in the world are unaffected by this book, as evidenced by the fact that most people now in 2011 continue to be socialists.

However, Gulag Archipelago remains a classic. Solzhenitsyn's warning about the end result of socialism is made conveniently accessible by this authorized abridgment.

John Christmas, author of "Democracy Society"

and I'll just say that this, along with Volumes 2 & 3, was one of the most incredible books I have ever read. It opened my eyes, made me see in new ways, and made me appreciate how wonderful life is.

Solzhenitsyn wrote the TRUTH as he knew it, and reviews calling him a liar (and there's at least one that I saw) are just wishful thinking. This book is a chilling documentary of the TRUE nature of Marxism-Leninism.

I have not much to add to the praisals of this book above them all regarding GULAG. It really is the most important work about GULAG and nothing is above it.

However, the year is 2008 and Solzhenitsyn does still not want to publish his sources and in history writing souces are everything and without them it is only ledgends and fairy tales. In the case of Solzhenitsyn it is obvious why he could not reveal his sources earlier and his personal credibility ranks very high, but it is high time to tell about the sources now.

*The Gulag Archipelago* is a prodigious human achievement. Written in secrecy, it is the most damning indictment of a country/political system ever written.

Solzhenitsyn's intelligence and writing talent are obvious.

Still, it must sit on top of the pile of unfinished books in many attics. Though it one of the most powerful and influential nonfiction works of all time; it gets too long, redundant and complicated with Byzantine Soviet bureau descriptions and other detours.

A better editor would have taken out talking-to-the-reader asides such as "And I am not joking."

The best abridgment has yet to be written.

This book reads like a dictionary. It's well worth reading, but it's hard reading. The author lists a lifetime of anecdotes from inside the 1920-1950 Russian prisons, sorted by topic. For example, 30 some types of torture, with actual names of prisoners tortured in each way. My favorite anecdote was the prisoner who had been appointed at birth to become Emperor of all Russia.

I will be reading this with a group. My only comment at this point is that the link to the audio download is actually to volume 3 of the unabridged version, not to the complete abridged version. There seems to be no audio version of the abridged edition, alas.