Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully.

Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.

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.


Someone has to tell the truth   December 2, 1999
 58 out of 63 found this review helpful

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.


An important work, but not to be undertaken lightly   November 7, 1999
 38 out of 45 found this review helpful

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.)


Fills in the historical blanks left from public education   August 10, 1999
 30 out of 39 found this review helpful

Gulag provided for me a powerful and shocking history lesson I had never been taught in high school or college. So much has been taught on Hitler, but barely anything of substance on Soviet Communism. After reading this book, you'll understand the reasons for the so-called paranoia of McCarthyism. Ronald Reagan had it right when he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." I found this book so compelling, though heart wrenching, that I went on to read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" as well as a recent biography on Solzhenitsyn by D. M. Thomas called "Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life." I have come to the conclusion that nobody but a man like Solzhenitsyn could ever have written Gulag.