The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Book Overview

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labor camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060803320
• ISBN13: 9780060803322
• Release Date: June 1974
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 3 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Captivating, Heart Breaking

Great book, came is near perfect condition. This is a book that should be read in upper level highschool classes and college classes. It should be read by anyone who has an interest in not repeating history.

Wake Up America!

This book is a literary MONUMENT! It is a firsthand reiteration of the horrific GULAGS, & he calls it an archipelago because there were so many! And filled with it's own people! in unbearable conditions sentenced there by corrupt courts,run by corrupted personnel who were masters of cruelty to extract confessions of guilt from innocent people to fill quotas,to justify propaganda, no one was safe from the bureaucrats that decided Russian policy(USSR),even they themselves. Not even the loyalists of Communism were safe. It is an incredibly hard book to read due to the fact that you have to face the unimaginable atrocities that men will inflict upon their fellow man. Soltzhenitsyn was a loyal Communist & served in the army but he became a Gulag citizen for 25 years! He barely escaped with his life but he finally was in freedom & was able to write this very big volume of what he saw,experienced, heard etc & certainly no longer a Marxist who followed the tyranny of a Communist totalitarian rule! The starvation,the beatings,the oppression, the cold,the brutality,the terror,the mass executions,the darkness,the terrifying trainrides to Siberia,the suffering,the zero sanitation,the miniscule daily food(gruel),the inhumanity....the death, on & on. This book, if u only read 1 book in your life, THIS IS A MUST BE READ TRUE HISTORICAL ACCOUNT of Soltzhenitsyn's firsthand experience of the government,courts, injustice,paranoia of Communist leaders&bureaucrats, the Gulags,WWII etc. In 2023 MARXISM/ SOCIALISM/ COMMUNISM is raging across the USA & this book will open your eyes! If u love your FREEDOM, LIBERTY...YOU MUST BE ERUDITE on the subject! You must educate YOURSELF & know what history teaches & WARNS! Books like this from firsthand eye witness & experience tell a truth so horrific,so hard to comprehend,so shocking that it is very hard to take in....but it must be always exposed & any emergence of this evil type of power in this country where people are being "cancelled" for exercising their free speech,when justice weighs heavy only on the ruling power's side, when the Constitution is considered an inconvenience & ignored with impunity,when Constitutional rights are being threatened,when propaganda is constantly spewed by the media day& night,when the courts begin reinterpreting the law to fit a political agenda, when people are political prisoners or threatened or have a 5am heavily drawn armed FBI raid on their homes for their opinions,catholic churches being spied on & called domestic terrorists,when anti-Semitism is openly practiced in our streets & terrorist groups are supported in major cities & college campuses,on &on....it is the ugly head of tyranny& totalitarian rule getting a foothold & it needs to be stopped NOW! This book shows the truth of the quote "Those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind". Don't think it can't happen here, it already is starting.

One of the most important books ever written.

A true indictment of the evils of Marxism and a look behind the Iron Curtain. Every human needs to read this book.

The Most Important Nonfiction Work of the 20th Century

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.

Not a novel, an indictment

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...

Bombastic Brilliant Unforgetable

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.