The gulag archipelago by ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN (1973-05-03)

This book is exactly what a memoir should be. Solzhenitsyn puts you right in the center of the action, with scenes so vividly sketched that I had nightmares I was in the Gulag myself. This is a good book for any of your friends or loved ones who have recently become enamored with Marxism. It's definitely the "Scared Straight" of the prose world.

The lessons of history recorded for us by Sollzhenitzn are pertinent to this generation, long after the fall of the Soviet Union. The same kinds of oppression arise over and over in various times and places. We were blessed to have this great author and true prophet here for some years. He has left a record for us and a warning in his address at Harvard (?) years ago when he predicted the kind of cultural and moral decline we have been experiencing and urged our nation to take responsibility to preserve our freedoms and way of life. Mostly, we have not listened.

I'm glad his books are available on the store to all who will read what he has to say.

Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago was for me, a page-turner that I couldn't (or didn't want to) put down. It reads like a novel, but is so densely packed with first-hand, second-hand accounts, hearsay, demonstrable facts and plausible speculations.

If "History" were always this gripping of a read, perhaps we'd be less inclined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

For anyone interested in history or politics, this is an absolute must read.

Solzhenitsyn is one of the best authors of all time and one of the gems of Russian literature. It's terribly depressing but it's worthwhile and an excellent addition to your collection. His other works and other works of Russian authors like Tolstoy are the best so check out this one!

This book is damned depressing but does offer hope that human beings can endure and overcome almost anything short of being killed. It is a deserved Nobel prize winning book, and the writer writes in a prose that makes it easier to read about all the injustices and suffering under the communist regime. Should be required reading for all college students who are being brainwashed with Marxism by their professors.

Solzhenitsyn is so complicated, where to begin? My Russian and Ukrainian friends tell me they can't read him because he's too dark. I laugh out loud regularly while reading Gulag. Slavoj Zizek once pointed out that the first sign that things were going really bad in Yugoslavia was that people stopped telling jokes that had been commonplace. Milan Kundera's novels_The Unbearable Lightness of Being_, and _The Joke_are statements on the human soul's resilient ability to see humor in the face of a soul crushing reality. Dostoyevsky peppers _The Brothers Karamazov_ with the old man's buffoonery in the most inappropriate places imaginable. The darkness of Slavic humor is not something everyone gets. But if you can laugh at loud with the zeks as the mechanism of state terror grinds them to dust you will love this book as I do.

This is the third volume of the Gulag Archipelago trilogy written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, after his internment in the Soviet prison system. The first book contains Parts I & II, the second book contains Parts III & IV, this third book contains Parts V, VI, & VII. His work was beginning to be translated from Russian into English as early as a 1972/74 publishing of the first Book; which he considered "An experiment in Literary Investigation" All three volumes are very serious, heavy reading- and I read in slow increments, as the content is very disturbing. It touches on many subjects, with a baseline goal of just normal human survival in extremely harsh conditions. Whatever Solzhenitsyn's crime may have been that warranted imprisonment for over a decade in the new Soviet Russia, he has redeemed himself and all other "innocents" also felled to the system in this comprehensive work. He writes factually, with dry humour, and a somewhat compliant attitude. He does not seem resentful, though he should be, for the lifetime stolen from him. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, and went to Zurich with his family. He has visited the United States and Canada, and gone on to write more cultural literature based on Soviet Russian themes such as: 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and 'The First Circle' among others.
I personally have only recently been introduced to Solzhenitsyn's work, and currently laboring through the second volume only of Gulag Archipelago.

I am a missionary and this book was recommended to me from a Russian friend. I have not been able to read it all the way through because it is hard to take. It is hard for me to conceive the actual events that are recorded.

I recently saw on You Tube a documentary recounting how the book came to be written in absolute secrecy, how he meticulously gathered the testimonies that former zeks sent him through different ways after the success of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", and later on, when the KGB came to know of its existence, how it was smuggled out of the USSR by a close-knit circle of "co-conspirators" that helped Solzhenitsyn all along at a high price for their lives, for publication in Paris. I just felt compelled to read it once again. When I first read this book almost 30 years ago I was too young to really understand what it was all about but still, many of its testimonies are so personal, so human, and sometimes so strangely humorous that these were ever since impressed on my memory as if by fire: The prisoners of Kolyma frenzily eating chunks of frozen prehistoric fishes around a makeshift bonfire, the scatologically funny anecdote of the two tank officers arrested along with Solzhenitsyn while on their way to interrogation by the SMERSH, or the tragic story of the poor illiterate bloke that was arrested and sent to the Gulag for learning to sign his own name on Pravda's effigy of the "Great Father of Nations". After a couple of chapters seeing, as Solzhenitsyn says, whole Lenas and Yeniseis of people (little cogs as Stalin contemptuously called them) marching to their places of damnation, his foreword (forgive me because I didn't note everything, because I didn't remember everything) become a huge lump in your throat and for a fleeting moment you can even sense the utter desperation of these innocent victims or collateral damage of Power. This is the story of the people that History usually forgets, that is, you and I, the little cogs that keep this world turning. This book is a must read, but it requires time and the proper attitude for it is hard reading. It is in my view not as much an indictment of Communism as a powerful and compelling vindication of innocent men and women (Depending on the edition you can read their names at the end of the book) and a way, poor as it may seem to us, of making them justice postumously.

A classic. Read to learn just how nasty communism is, and how lucky you are (assuming you haven't lived under the tyranny of communism).
Everyone should be required to read this (and Man's Search for Meaning).

Anybody who thinks Communism is not that bad must read this book. What insight into the heart of a system built for self-destruction because of its inherent vicious cycle of fear and paranoia. It's a perfect example of Psalm 9:15-16, "The nations have sunk down in the pit which they made; in the net which they hid, their own foot is caught . . . . The wicked is snared in the work of his own hands."

This is vintage Solzhenitsyn; his brilliant mind shines forth splendidly. A book that is difficult to put down, places one inside his mind to see what he describes, so much from having spent hours memorizing while in the camps so he could later give us a glimpse of the horror that millions upon millions of human beings endured.

This is an essential read by an indispensable man. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was once a school teacher and a devout Communist. He was recruited into the Red Army during World War II, and dragged an artillery piece, most likely by hand, from one end of the Eastern Front to another, blasting away at Hitler's army. When the war ended, his own country thanked him for his contribution to saving the Soviet Union by throwing him into the notorious system of prison camps known as Gulags, falling victim to Stalin's postwar purges. Solzhenitsyn worked in conditions ranging from relatively tolerable camps for scientists and inventors to hard labor camps designed to work prisoners to death. Instead of living day by day and hoping to survive, he made it his mission to write, and document everything he experienced, producing three volumes and titling them: The Gulag Archipelago. I now have all three volumes. Reading them has been like a journey, both gripping and educational. Solzhenitsyn is one of the greatest writers of all time, and I look forward to chatting with him in heaven.

Had always wanted to read this book since puberty but waited for nine years so that I could read with mature understanding. It fills me with energy and renews my youthful conviction. Finally I can discuss communism with people with sophistication.

If you think political correctness is dangerous, if you think it's a slippery slope to being arrested for what you say, or don't say, or how what you say is perceived, even what you are thinking, then this book should be on your reading list immediately. It is an ugly story about a grossly sick man who made himself and his insanity the measure of all things. Hitler, the one so many see as the Anti-Christ took notes on Stalin's implementation of brutality. Every American should read this book. We ignore it and its lessons to our peril.

Read the Gulag books in the seventies. Am now re-reading them. Solzhenitsyn is truly a literary giant, and I do not think people really appreciate his genius. These are books hard to read because of the sadness, but these are things we need to know. He was absolutely correct in his remarks at Harvard, and those dummies did not appreciate or show respect to this wise and experienced man. Rest in peace, Aleksander !!

Excelent,very informative and very detailed accounts of human suffering in comunist prisons. Hard to beleive what human beings will do to their own race!
The Gulag Archipelago Val. l,2,and 3 should be mandatory reading to all our students in our American Schools.

Alright, this is one of the more difficult books to review. The truth is that when you read this book you also must consider and understand the context and biases that influence Solzhenitsyn. It would be somewhat naive to treat this book as a completely neutral portrayal of the Soviet prison system. However, it would also incorrect to underestimate the importance of this book in exposing an ugly element of Soviet society--even if it isn't neutral. The result is that this book does present important aspects of the Soviet prison system. Equally important, the book helps you (the reader) consider the dehumanizing and brutal way in which the Soviet state failed to live up to its own ideology rhetoric. However, the author is (for good reason!) a bit biased which does come through. So, while the book is a fascinating and interesting read, it is worth remembering the context in which Solzhenitsyn wrote it.

This is just to clarify that this is an Abridgement. I wish it had been more clear in the description that this edition was an abridgement and not the entire work. Fortunately, I the store refunded my money as I wish to read The Gulag in all its glory.