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.


Not a novel, an indictment   June 13, 2001
 23 out of 23 found this review helpful

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...


Says more to us than we realize   June 15, 2001
 23 out of 28 found this review helpful

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.


magisterial   January 2, 2002
 22 out of 26 found this review helpful

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+