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.

The original three volumes of this book changed my life, my world, my soul. There is little I can add to what others have already said except for one thing. This bitter humor, the voice of incredulity, the moments when Stalin's mask slips (for instance a scientific article are about the discovery of a frozen mammoth in the Siberian tundra and the casual reference to how it tasted - only Gulag prisoners would eat a 10,000 year old mammoth).

Overall let me put it this way. This is the greatest exercise in SUSTAINED IRONIC TONE in the history of literature. The derisive, incredulous, witnessing voice never stops digging for the Truth.

"A stone is not a human being, and even stones get crushed."

This was an absolutely brutal, yet enlightening read. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a young, decorated Red Army officer who served bravely during the war, only to be arrested, tortured, and sent to the Gulag Archipelago (the forced labor camp system) to do a ten year sentence, followed by permanent internal exile. This book is a combination of his own personal experiences, and a general history of the gulag system which he has gathered from research as well as other personal stories sent to him by other inmates.

For privately criticizing Stalin, the author was clearly guilty of being a dangerous "enemy of the people" worthy of torture and death,(Solzhenitsyn writes with a brilliant sense of sarcasm) but the fact is, many were arrested quite arbitrarily, many simply because of a need to fill quotas. I'm reminded of a quote by Stalins right hand man Molotov, when speaking about the randomness of arrests, years after the war: "a man could have been a right-winger, and not realized he was a right-winger. We had to be sure." Or something to that effect. These enemies of the people would feed the "sewage disposal system" of the Soviet state.

In his sarcastic, metaphorical writing style, the author describes all the horrors of the system, beginning with arrest and torture, *ahem* interrogation, and all through the stages of the camp system where death and cruelty became the only certainties. Ruthlessness, Solzhenitsyn writes, was the measure of a Bolsheviks worth. The more single-mindedly cruel he was, determined his dedication to the state. Any form of kindness toward the accused was seen as a sign of weakness and lack of zeal. Most disturbing was his descriptions of the torture, he claims that there were 52 different methods at the interrogators disposal, to ensure they don't become bored of course! 14 hour work days in subzero temperatures with inadequate clothing and pitiful food rations were also the norm. People were often beaten, terrorized and shot out of hand for the smallest infractions, or occasionally for the mere amusement of the guards. Such is life in the Archipelago!

Although some have accused Solzhenitsyn of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, i.e. condemning communism as a whole because of Stalinism, he is absolutely right when he claims that the brutality and terror were started under Lenin and Trotsky. While one can split hairs and argue that things might have turned out differently without Stalin, I see no reason to believe that things would have been THAT different. He also makes a consistent point of comparing the Soviet state to that of the Tsars, claiming that whatever their faults, life in Imperial Russia was never even close to this harsh. I specifically appreciated how he pointed out how easy the Bolshevik revolutionaries had it when they were arrested under the Tsar. Two, maybe three years in lenient exile for trying to overthrow the state! Yet under the Soviets, you would get 10, maybe 25 years of hard labor for practically nothing, which you would probably not survive anyway. All in all, this is a disturbing but brilliant and essential read for understanding the Soviet state. 5 stars.

The stuff that makes this book amazing:

1) Searing portrayal of the horror and corruptness of Stalin's Soviet Union
2) Top-notch prison vignettes and descriptions of human hope (and hopelessness) in the face of atrocity
3) Moments of great psychological insight
4) A million snapshots into a time and place so unlike any I know. If you want to read a true insanity nightmare, this is your book!

But the big weakness:

Solzhenitsyn throws out the baby (The Russian Revolution, Lenin, and the ideals of true socialism) with the bathwater (Stalinism and reaction to the Revolution). He builds a long, tangential, and overall stilted case for lumping them all in together and pasting on top the label of evil - Evil Communism. If he'd only stuck with writing about his own experiences and those of his fellows, and not been so heavy-handed with the historical background information, this book would have been a knockout. Funnily enough, I think a modern editor could easily tease out this wheat (60% of the book) from the chaff (40%).

But in part I let Solzhenitsyn off the hook, because he was a tortured, innocent Soviet prisoner in the 1940s, and clearly has residual bitterness. To use an imperfect analogy, can I understand why a raped woman might hate all men? Yes. But do I agree with her assessment of my gender? No.

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 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.

vol. 2 of the Gulag Archipelago takes us d-i-r-e-c-t-l-y into hell.
however, it is not just an accusation and catalog of unbelievable, unheard of cruelty, but a cry for truth, spiritual awakening and self-discovery. literally changed my life (thanks to the friend who insisted i read it). plus, Solzhenitsyn's sarcastic manner can be funny as heck, despite the subject matter. i found the work highly entertaining and even addictive. AS is a giant among writers, God bless him! read all three books-you'll be glad you did. j

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.

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.

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)

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.

Often when one reads about an outrage of history the account is dry, numerical, and one sided. What is truly unique about Gulag is that it takes us inside the the minds of the victims and the perpetrators, revealing the central yet unspoken theme of the book. This is a story of human nature, revealed in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. As you read ask yourself, "What would I have done?" The answers may horrify you.

On the political side of things Gulag reveals that the Soviet system elucidated the evil in people. Gulag is a call for us to see politics in a different way. Beware of those advancing class envy/warfare. The Soviets adjusted their definition of "rich" down as the people became poorer. The freedom possessed does not seem near as valuable as freedom lost.

Gulag demonstrates that faith is the only useful possession that can not be taken. Gulag cites many examples of superhuman courage, toughness, and triumph by those of deep religious devotion. An unspoken theme is that the Soviet system could not exist amongst nation of the faithful.

Read this book.

I would recommend these books a well for the reader interested in Communism.
The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedon to Overcome Tyranny And Terror
The Road to Serfdom Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

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?

As I read "Gulag. . . " I kept thinking of the old cliche, "those who do not study history, are doomed to repeat it." It has been difficult to read of a society so evil, so base that it views human beings as mere things--disposable assets. It is an amazing story that any human being has experienced this and lived, and smiled. I find it incredible that Solzhenitsyn still loved his Russia despite his imprisonment. This is an excellent book, difficult to read at times, but well worth the effort. It should be on the required reading list for every high school-aged child. It should be required reading by every senator, congressman, etc. This book is too valuable to simply be placed on the back of a shelf.

What an eye opener! It describes the dispair and horror of stalin's russia. If you want an insight as to why the USA is so staunchly and fanatically anti-communist, read this book! Stalin and his communists tried to build their workers paradise through slavery. Millions were arrested and sent to labor camps because the commies needed slaves, so they arrested them and condemned them for at least 10 years ('a tenner').

A stunning, very well written, page turner that shows there are things worse than death! They crammed 40 people into cells designed for 2 people. Torture, arbitrary doubling of your sentence (from 10 to 20 years), sadistic guards, all for no crime whatsoever! Makes the West look like heaven on earth.

And Solzhenitsyn keeps it interesting, even humorous. Like when a crowd was applauding Stalin, and everyone was afraid to be the first one to stop applauding because they knew they would be arrested! So the applause went on for 1/2 hour, with nobody daring to stop! Finally, a brave soul stopped, and he was arrested and sent away the next day.

It's a great book. I highly recommend it, especially to lefties who need to see what marxism turns into.

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.

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.

The Gulag Archipelago should be required reading in every school in America. It details the terrifying prison system in the Soviet Union and puts the lie to the Leftist academics that praised the alleged "worker's paradise" in that country. In reality, Soviet communism oppressed its people mightily, arrested them on a whim and kept them confined and working in Siberian temperatures and work conditions. Above its historical importance, Solzhenitsyn's epic shows how the power of the state can so easily terrorize the citizens if not adequately controlled. This powerful book should make all free peoples fall on their knees and thank God that such tyranny was not their fate and then we should strive to make sure of our liberties and thus prevent this from happening to us.

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.

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.

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.

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 via anecdotes like the one about a party gathering when none dared be first to stop applauding after Stalin's name was mentioned - naturally, the first guy that finally did so 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. Awarded the Nobel prize in 1970, Solzhenitsyn lived in the USA from 1974-1994 and then returned to Russia after the fall of communism a critic of Western pop culture - but appreciating its freedom of expression. Sadly, too many people that condemn communist oppression are blind to oppression from the right - and vice versa.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote this revealing account of the vast network of Soviet political prisons from on his experiences as an inmate. The author was a Red Army soldier during World War II when the secret police (NKVD) arrested him because he dared criticize Soviet dictator Stalin in a private letter. Such expression earned Solzhenitsyn 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 at a party gathering when none dared be first to stop applauding after Stalin's name was mentioned - naturally, the first guy that finally did so 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 maintain their authority 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 was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970; he lived in the USA from 1974-1994, then returned to his homeland after the fall of communism a critic of Western pop culture - but appreciating its freedom of expression. Sadly, too many people that condemn communist oppression are blind to oppression from the right - and vice versa.

This is a book of the kind of testimonies that pushed the Reagan Revolution into Europe. It's 100% pure reaganaut political propaganda, of the same brand that the neocons sold us on Iraq. It's sweet and silly and full of touching fables. Of course, every event depicted was either totally fabricated or distorted beyond recognition. Now that the USSR has been dismantled, plenty of government archives are now available. Will anyone fact-check this book? No. The wall is down, and there is no further need of it. It served its purpose. There are 66 million lies in this book.

This is a boring book about a guy who goes to prison in the Soviet Union. Throughout the book, he (the author) whines incessantly about getting a bum rap. Surprise, surprise; he believes that he was wrongfully imprisoned. That's a new one.
Does any prisoner believe that he was rightfully imprisoned?
According to the author, he was imprisoned for criticizing the Soviet government in a letter that he wrote to a friend. But his story is not believable to me. I'm sure there is something that he isn't telling us.
He also complains a lot about the unpleasant conditions in prison.
Newsflash: Prison isn't supposed to be fun. People who are in prison should do their time and not complain about it.

There are three huge volumes in The Gulag Archipelago saga. I only read the first (unabridged) volume. Maybe the abridged version is better. I don't know. The abridged version probably cut out a lot of the author's whining, which would definitely be a plus.

This is a boring book about a guy who goes to prison in the Soviet Union. Throughout the book, the author whines incessantly about getting a bum rap. Surprise, surprise; he believes that he was wrongfully imprisoned. That's a new one. Does any prisoner believe that he was rightfully imprisoned?
According to the author, he was imprisoned for criticizing the Soviet government in a letter that he wrote to a friend. But his story is not believable to me. I'm sure there is something that he isn't telling us.
He also complains a lot about the unpleasant conditions in prison.
Newsflash: Prison isn't supposed to be fun. People who are in prison should do their time and not complain about it.

There are three huge volumes in The Gulag Archipelago saga. I only read the first (unabridged) volume. Maybe the abridged version is better. I don't know. The abridged version probably cut out a lot of the author's whining, which would definitely be a plus.

This is a fantastic piece of scholarship. Applebaum has provided a huge service to the historiography of the Soviet genocide. It is both gruesome and horrifying but these are stories that need to be told not merely for the sake of history but for the sake of Russia today. It is all the more important however because there still remain Western scholars who attempt to downplay or even deny the very existence of the Soviet slave labor camps and the number of victims. Those theories are firmly discredited by
Applebaum, who relies on survivor memoirs and official Soviet government documents to demonstrate the extent and brutality of the Russian regime. The fact that Moscow did not have extermination camps has by many been used as an argument that they were not as bad as the Nazis. Of course comparison of genocides is nothing more than an exercise in futility. The difference one could argue was that if you were to be executed in the Soviet Union they didn't bother with camps. Instead they, much like Nazi Einsatzgruppen, executed you on the spot. Unfortunately points like that have been used by deniers to claim that the Soviet Union was not an evil regime. Applebaum has done a fantastic job at destroying that final leftist fantasy.

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.

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...)"

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 Amazon refunded my money as I wish to read The Gulag in all its glory.

The Gulag Archipilego by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a sweeping indictment of Soviet totalitarianism and was the culmination innumerable eyewitness accounts and years of research. This book is prominent among the body of work that earned Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.

An estimated 20 million prisoners went through the GULAG prison system, with 8-10 million killed. The USSR slave state and concentration camp system were based on designs from Lenin, and refined by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. This book is by far the most influential in bringing the mass murder to the attention of the western world.

This is an important book, and was fascinating to read.

I'm usually among the first in line to complain about the NSA, COINTELPRO, the modern surveillance-state, the PATRIOT ACT, etc. In spite of this (or, perhaps because of this) it is deeply insightful to read this first-hand account about life in a genuine police-state. Although ponderous and sometimes outright dull, The Gulag Archipelago is an important record of one of the darkest chapters of modern history. Without books like this, who will remember once all the survivors are gone?

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.

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. Replace the terms "anti-Soviet" with "anti-American," "counter-revolutionary" with "terrorist," "Gulag" with "Gitmo," throw in Abu Ghraib and "extraordinary rendition" for good measure, and you may see what I mean. The potential for something like Gulag in the age of the eternal "war on terror" is terrifying. (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.

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.

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.

1. This book is an artifact of the cold war, so you can't trust everything what is said in it. Moreover, the author is not a professional scientist, he is simply one of ex-prisoners and a writer. This means, he had no access whatsoever to the facts, and his book is based on his reflections and fantasies.
2. If you want to "open your eyers" and believe that the bad guy Stalin asassinated millions of people without any reason then you should read this book. However, if you want to know the truth or something close to the truth, you should read professional research (e.g. Zemskov) or spend your time with the archives, which are open now.
3. There are plenty of lies in this book, indeed. For example, Solzshenitzyn claims that the number of victims is counted in tens of millions. This is certainly not the case (i.e., Gulag has never had more than 2 million people even in the years of s.c. purging; compare this to the number of prisoners per capita in the USA or modern Russia and be ready to get surprised).
The total number of those sentenced to death is near 700,000 over 25 years, many of them were murderers or terrorists, and some of the sentences were not executed, while Solzshenitzyn names 15, 43, 60, and even more than 100 million in his various speeches and books. This is certainly nonsense, because it does not fit any demographic data.
4. The fact that Solzshenitzyn received a Nobel prize does not mean that he is a good writer (there is political agenda behind his nomination). Only a few of his books are worth reading. Judging by a translated work is not sound anyway.
5. Solzshenitzyn is not sincere as well. He is not a "freedom fighter", the reason why he ended in Gulag is that he was escaping the military service. He knew that political convicts were not send to the front, so he did it. At that time, Russia was facing the Nazi Germany in a few kilometers from Moscow.

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.

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.

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.

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 always knew about the Nazi camps and knew that Stalin had been hoarding prisoners, but the Gulag Archipelago opens your eyes to the crimes that most of us ignore or don't ever even learn about. Many comparisons can be made between Stalin and the mass genocides in the Baltic states, and even Iraq. It's very well written and informative, if you like history pick it up.

It is hard to measure how profound a book like this is, because it covers such a wide range of subjects almost subtlely. The things that you are likely to remember are the descriptions of torture, the small amounts of food, and so forth. What you remember is the things that made you cringe, and realise that you probably would have given up had you been placed in the same situation.

But as Solzhenitsyn tried repeatedly to bring out, it was the so-called "little" things that really either killed you, or gave you hope. As an example, many people might recall the sticking of hot metal up certain areas of the human anatomy; but as Solzehnitsyn said, this was most often not necessary. Seemingly mundane (relatively speaking) things like sleep deprivation was enough to drive even the most stable men insane. It was not the hot flash of pain that would get most people, but the exhaustion of wakefulness. Monotony could be every bit as much your enemy as freezing temperatures; and it was just as likely to send you to your death. These are but two examples, Solzehnitsyn gives up many more.

If there is any book that can and should be read by everyone, it is this book. One need not be interested in communism, political theory, or such things for this book to have meaning. This book is above all about the human condition. It is a biograpy and autobiography about every man who has ever suffered greatly, and it is a lesson to every man who has never suffered greatly.

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.

"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!

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.