The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

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Summary: Fills in the historical blanks left from public education
Review: 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.

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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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Summary: Monumental Account of Institutionalised Inhumanity
Review: One of the most monumental accounts of one of the cruellest ideologies of history,this book should be read by all
Layer by layer Solzhenitsyn exposes the hideous system of imprisonment ,death and torture that he refers to as the 'Gulag Archipelago'
He strips away that the misconception of the good Tsar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs and exposes how it was Lenin and his henchmen who put into place the brutal totalitarianism , which would be inherited and continued by Stalin
In fact the only thing that Stalin really did differently was to introduce a more personalised ,Imperial style of rule but otherwise carried on the evil work of Lenin
It was Lenin who imprisoned the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) , Mensheviks,Social Democrats,Social Revolutionaries Anarchists and independent intelligentsia and had many killed
In this way he completely destroyed all opposition to Bolshevik hegemony
Under Lenin the persecution started of anybody convicted of religious activity and the complete destruction of the church in Russia
And it was Lenin who began the genocide of whole ethnic groups that would later gain momentum under Stalin
Under the Communist system all that is spiritual or not purely material in nature is destroyed.And we discover what a horror Marx's idea of 'dialectic materialism ' really is
But I cannot describe the horrors which Solzhenitsyn outlines in this book :the hideous torutres,the slave markets selling of young women into sexual slavery

Solzhenitsyn describes how the prison system of the Tsarist system was compassionate by comparison but the mild abuses of Tsarist imprisonment where reacted to with a shrill outcry that never greeted the horrors of Bolshevism and Communism
As he says in his ever present biting sarcasm "Its just not fashionable,just not fashionable
And even today,even after the fall of Communism in Europe (though its iron grip remains strong in parts of Asia,Africa and in Cuba) its still not regarded as fashionable to highlight the horrors of Communism as it is to do so for other human rights abuses of this and other centuries

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Summary: Solzhenitsyn's Gulag: Well Done, But What Is It?
Review: Reading Solzhenitsyn's GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is a daunting task, not simply because of its excessive length, but because at the conclusion, the reader is left with judging it and comprehending just what it was that he read. Solzhenitsyn sub-titles his book 'An Experiment in Literary Investigation.' As the reader plows through the author's strange mixture of compelling narrative in parts and excessive fascination with names, dates, and places in others, the reader begins to see that this investigation is a new genre. It is part autobiography, part novel, part polemic. Solzhenitsyn tries to guide the reader through a half century of the evolution of the Soviet prison system, the Gulag, by using his sewage disposal metaphor. A good idea, but the wrong metaphor. Since his work so often uses bodily phrases like 'cancer' and 'metastasizing', perhaps he might have switched to an organic one. He describes the very beginnings of the Gulag system as the core foundation for post-Revolutionary communism. It was to the gulags that waves of multi-generational opponents of first Lenin, then Stalin, were sent. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear early on the very first leaders of communism saw in the gulags a long term solution to reshaping a multi-stranded Russian society into a mono-stranded Soviet one. No one knew it then, but such an effort was doomed to fail. It is remarkable that it lasted as long as it did when Yeltsin stood atop a tank to topple the communist regime. The gulag system was a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, swallowing in huge gulps entire waves of segments of Soviet society. What is astonishing is that he reveals that most often there was no logic to the call to rounding up the usual suspects. In Soviet Russia, everyone was a usual suspect. Even members of the secret police, first called the Cheka, then the NKVD, finally morphing to the KGB, were expected to place their necks on the chopping blocks when called to do so. It was routinely assumed that if the police did not come for you today, well, tomorrow was another day. At the start of the book, 'today' occurs for Solzhenitsyn, when he is arrested for writing subversive letters. He is accosted by security officers and hustled off to a gulag where he remained for decades. While incarcerated, he learns, he thinks, he remembers a vast waterfall of details that later goes into the writing of this book. A minor criticism I have is that I wonder how, without detailed notes, he was able to retain accurately this overwhelming flow of data.
He calls Part II 'Perpetual Motion.' By this he means that Russias gulags were constantly on the prowl, ever seeking new victims. Perhaps an unspoken assumption is the circular direction of this movement. It began in lawlessness in 1918 and ends the same in 1991. Evil seems to exist for as long as it takes good men like Solzhenitsyn to be able to cry out in the night to stop the madness.

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Summary: A Personal Perspective
Review: Solzhenitsyn's three-volume record (although I read only the first) is deeply moving for the description of its intensity. Having won the author a Nobel prize for Literature, I half expected some unapproachably haughty Kunderesque crypto-novel, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Archipelag Gulag is the 'island chain' of the concentration camps that streched throughout the most remote and uninhabitable regions of the Soviet Union. Through his own eyes, and those of 227 fellow survivors, he relates in a deeply sarcastic yet sympathetic way the movement and experience of the individual through the system with such beauty and so completely that one feels one can almost begin to understand. One suspects that his sense for black humor must have helped him survive. I was relieved not to find here any simpering gushy 'forgiveness' of his opressors-- Solzhenitsyn knows them and understands how they were able to exact such terror, and he fully holds them accountable.

I would most emphatically persuade you to read this.

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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: Bombastic Brilliant Unforgetable
Review: What ever faults "Gulag Archipelago" may have, it is a monumental and important work. For anyone who does not know the meaning of the title, "Gulag" is the Russian word for prison, and an archipelago is, of course, a chain of islands. The idea behind this is that the Soviet concentration camp system under Lenin and Stalin were like an island of prisons spread all over the Soviet Union.

The content of "Gulag Archipelago" is quite extraordinary. Solzhenitsyn includes countless anecdotes of prisoners and their families in various phases of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, slave labor, death, or release. He buttresses these stories with statistics, and with his own personal narrative of his years in the Gulag. The information in this book is simply staggering, not only for the cruelty and evil it describes but also the folly. The Soviet government murdered indiscriminately across all lines of race, class, and gender. In many cases, it murdered the most brilliant and productive members of its society--the very people who could have built it into something great.

Many people take umbrage with Solzhenitsyn's style, which involves a lot of ranting and run-on footnotes. Personally, I find his narrative interesting and invigorating. Solzhenitsyn's narrative is vigorous, untrammeled and loaded with sarcasm. While many find this gimmicky or uncultured, it helped buoy me through the unbearable sadness of the book's subject matter.

Obviously this book isn't for everybody and it requires a considerable degree of fortitude to get through it. But I think it is essential in all our lives to read this book or one similar to it.