Rating: 
Summary: Read the other reviews
Review: This book is not a novel. It is an unusually constructed history in three volumes, written by a word-class writer. It is a heavy read. In this volume, Solzhenitsyn describes arrests, interrogations, tortures, trials, prisons, and methods of transporatation from the prisons to the labour camps. He gives a brief history of the genesis of Gulag, its principles and its expansion, in the chapter "A Brief History of Our Sewage Disposal System." Solzhenitysn marshalls an impressive range of facts and first hand anecdotes in addition to his own experiences, usually relating them in a straightforward manner, sometimes with bitter, vicious sarcasm, sometimes with passionate anger. The book is an astounding achievement, especially when one considers that he wrote it in sections, hiding each as it was completed; he was never able to refer back to what he had previously written, yet I noticed no repetitions. The book is an astounding achievement, immensely powerful, but very depressing, sometimes heart-breaking. Nonetheless, anyone who wishes to be well-informed in general, or about history in particular, must read it.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most important books about our times
Review: It is very interesting to compare The Gulag Archipelago, the true story of a horrible and real dystopia, with George Orwell's 1984, the story of an imaginary dystopia, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, another imaginary dystopia.The difference between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book and the others is his more convincing, more concrete detail. Solzhenitsyn describes the gritty details of the arrests, tortures, kangaroo court trials and murders or imprisonments that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union inflicted on countless millions of people while Lenin or Stalin were in power. He gives exact details about the coarse criminality and ingenious cruelty of Communist prison officials whom he watched while he was in prison. He also weighed and sifted evidence that he gathered from other prisoners and he reports it here. Solzhenitsyn entered prison a convinced Marxist. He gradually lost his Communist faith only after many years of physical and emotional abuse by other Marxists. The hope of a free lunch in a Communist paradise dies hard.
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Summary: One of the Best!
Review: Review by Mike, Age 13 Solzhenitsyn does an excellent job of retelling the story of the atrocities of the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is a disturbing account of what happened inside the Gulag prisons. This is an account about the things hidden from the public and the things the Marxists wanted to keep hidden. And how he gave a first person account of prison life, well that was just amazing! His vivid descriptions about the kinds of arrests that took place I thought was very interesting and an amazing brainchild of a distorted Soviet Union! How Stalin could turn an innocent gesture of two long lost friends being reunited into an arrest is beyond me. The Gulag Archipelago is an excellent book that unveiled an entirely new side of the Soviet Union and its perverted system of justice. It's a great book for historians and World War II buffs, or even if you are trying to find out more about the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is quite possibly one of the best books I've ever read! I would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in the Soviet Union. (Content will be confusing for younger readers.)
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Summary: The Most Important Nonfiction Work of the 20th Century
Review: 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.
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Summary: magisterial
Review: 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+
Rating:
Summary: An Incredible Work of Non-Fiction
Review: This is an amazing book. It is long, but well written, despite the translation. It shows the pattern of injustices and tortures to the point of the reader's acceptance and perhaps understanding. For those of us who have never experienced such, it is a peak at something that seems important to understand.
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Summary: Holy smoke!
Review: After I read this book I bought a rifle!
Rating:
Summary: A readable classic - let us never forget!
Review: I expected this to be hard reading, since it was translated from Russian. I was wrong. It is very readable. The crimes against humanity committed in the Soviet Union must never be forgotten!
Rating:
Summary: A book that demanded to be written
Review: What HAS happened to the gulags, those notorious Soviet prison camps? Did their brutal conditions and horribly abused prisoners just evaporate with the downfall of the Soviet Union? This has not been answered to my satisfaction. Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner himself at one time, puts his considerable literary skills to work in documenting, in sometimes excrutiating detail, the vastness of the Soviet prison system and its atrocities. From his earlier work ("Ivan Denisovitch") to "The First Circle" which was the first installment to this work, to the completed volumes, we are given a tour of living hell. It's interesting to note that the officer who befriended pianist Szpilman ("The Pianist) died as a POW in a Soviet prison camp in 1952--well after the war was over and long after treaties decreed that POW's should be released. Solzhenitsyn documents the evils of the system so we not only know what happened, but that, like the Holocaust, we can never forget. This was a book that demanded to be written, and despite its great length, it is surprisingly readable, though horrifying in detail and scope.
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Summary: this book changed my life
Review: It is a marvel to flip through this book again, though the abridged version is nothing compared to the original 3-volume trilogy. Though it is very difficult to get into - in the original v1 there is a long abstract section on gulags as a sewage system in turbid prose - once the reader gets swept into thos narrative of suffering there is no other reading experience like it. Solzhenitsyn spent his youth as a gulag prisoner for having criticized Stalin on a postcard. V1 covers his arrest and interrogation and transport into despair and disillusionment. What he experienced, from his start as a strong and idealistic young war leader, can only be described as hell on earth. Only Hitler's death factories could compare, and yet Stalin's slave labor camps were being held up as marvels of social policy and redemption. The cruelty of treatment, the insights into the astonishing characters around him, and the compilation of other people's stories - Solzhenitsyn describes his experience as only one gulp from an ocean of bitterness and shattered lives - are unequalled in the modern literature on totalitarianism. My experience was to be utterly transported into this realm, to look at my life and values and think about what mattered most to develop within myself. No other book ever had a deeper impact on me. That makes this, in my opinion, essential reading to understand the last century at its very very worst. The second volume follows Solzhenitsyn as he becomes a hardened and grief-stricken prison slave, indifferent to whether he is killed by a stray bullet during riots and abandoning his faith in communism. A central pert of the book is his religious conversion - the only one I ever read about that I truly understood on an emotional level - at the deathbed of perhaps his greatest freind. V3 covers his relesase from prison and his attempts to rebuild his life. All three volumes offered to me the experience of living totally outside of myself and in the reality of a totalitarian state. I first read these in EUrope when they appeared, and the debates on the merits of the communist sytem were very much alive at the time. Now they are only of historical interest, but I still think they are must reading for anyone who wants to understand the worst of one of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of mankind. Highest recommendation.
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