Rating: 
Summary: A voyage through hell
Review: "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!
Rating:
Summary: An Incredible Work of Non-Fiction
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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
Rating:
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.
Rating:
Summary: Communism exposed
Review: 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.
Rating: 
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.
Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest works of twentieth century writing
Review: This book is a courageous act of witnessing. It is one of the outstanding works of twentieth century writing. It is a description in tremendous detail of a world which did everything to keep itself being described. The writing of it was the heroic act done at risk to his own life of a former inmate of the Gulag who told the truth of Stalin's nightmare world and portrayed the suffering of millions. This ' breaking of silence' had historical as well as literary significance and may have been a key element in the fall of the Soviet Empire.
There is a point where Solzhenitsyn apprehended by the KGB and taken to the Gulag asks himself why he did not scream out. He says that he wanted to scream not so that one or two would hear. But that he wanted to scream for the millions so the millions would hear.
In this tremendously moving work he does this.
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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