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.
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: Testament to Humanity
Review: This is a time and place that except for the courage, bravery and sacrifice of a few souls would still be unknown to the West today. One can fault Solzhenitsyn's monarchial views but his courage and stamina cannot be disputed. He has given us a penetrating portrait of another time and another place - somewhere unimaginable to those of us accustomed to freedom. Remarkably, he has enfused it with a humanity that shines brighter than the frozen landscape or the continual cruelty. In the pages of this book (written and secreted out in parts) the inmates lose their anonymity and take on a life of their own as we find ourselves shivering, crying, rejoicing and even laughing with them. Tears in a Hades of Ice. Solzhenitsyn is more than a national treasure, a historian or an author. He is the modern-day reflection of the ancient Jewish prophet, preaching to the unbelievers. The portraits of his beloved Russia reflect the greatness that he feels Russia is not only worth but due. This should be required reading for all high school students.
Rating: 
Summary: a CLASSIC but not accurate
Review: Applebaums recent work 'Gulag' has used much more recent data and 'the Black Book of CUmmunism" is a good resource as a compendium to reading this classic book on the horrors of communism. Solzhenitsyn(a russian nationalist) was onbe oft he first to write on the Soviet Gulag, a system that had 10-20% of the country in camps throughout Siberia, crimea and northenr russia, building all manner of projects like the White Sea Canal. Communism enslaved its own people, worse then the Tsar had done, and used them to create a 'socialist paradise'. Aleksandr lived through the Gulag and worte this classis work on the camp strucrure and the shear mass of the cmaps across russia. A neccesary read for anyone interested in Russia and the crimes of communism.
Rating:
Summary: A Moden Classic In Literature!
Review: With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking fictional work, still the author writes with stunning clarity and unimpeachable style about the many horrors for the Soviet everyman caught in the unbelievable grips of this brutal nightmare world. The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. He lovingly and yet unsparingly looks at the prisoners themselves, caught up in an insane world, and how they attempted to cope and survive, to interact with each other, and what the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned were like. What forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats. The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas. One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its expose of the existence of the Gulag itself by detailing the ways in which it was operating, albeit it fictionally. Yet both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag have been greeted with something short of horror by the West. Compared to the much more extensively and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, until the publication of this masterful work almost nothing was known or published about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work of fiction will remain the standard in understanding the moving and horrible experience the Gulag posed for ordinary Russians. This is a terrific book, and although it is a work of fiction, it is one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: A Miraculous Moder-Day Classic by a Brilliant Man!
Review: Solzhenitsyn is an extraordinary man of courage, depth, and insight! This book is his all-time best and will challenge every mortal with his look at the horrors and brutality of Communism. A better book on the state of Russia from 1918-1956 has ever been written-period! This book takes time and patience to get through but it is well worth the effort. If you are interested in the history of Russian Communism, seen through the eyes of a staunch-supporter-political-prisoner-turned-dissident, then this is the book for you! You will not regret reading this amazing, extraordinary, fascinating, heart-breaking book. It has all the elements of the world's greatest novel but it is FACT!
Rating:
Summary: Death to Communism!
Review: It is a rare occurrence in the history of the human race when a truly great man rises up from the masses and passes on to the rest of us an eternal truth or knowledge that will serve as a testament against the forces of evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn must certainly rank as one of these great men. All people who live in freedom should speak his name with reverence, and all should read the unabridged edition of 'The Gulag Archipelago,' the author's indictment against the most evil creation mankind ever fashioned: Marxist-Leninist Communism. Like other great men, Solzhenitsyn's early life gave little indication of the monumental importance he would one day achieve. But one day, while serving as an officer in the Soviet army during WWII, something happened to our author that happened to so many others under the Soviet regime: Solzhenitsyn was arrested for insubordination, sentenced to eight years, and thrown into the gaping maw of the Gulag prison system. Unfortunately for the memory of the 'Great Father' (read Joey Stalin), this obscure army officer lived to tell the tale of all he saw and heard during his imprisonment. The result is the voluminous three volume series presented here in translation. 'The Gulag Archipelago' serves as both an indictment of the evil Soviet regime and as a memorial for the untold millions who died in the camps. The overarching theme of this book is the process, from start to finish, of internment in the Gulag system. Starting with the dreaded 'knock in the middle of the night,' the author traces the nightmare of incarceration through the interrogation, the sentencing, the transportation to the prison camps, the grinding work conditions of the camps, and the eventual release into eternal exile or tentative freedom. Solzhenitsyn repeatedly delves into historical analysis, biography, journalism, philosophical musings, and literature to present his account. What emerges is page after page of heartrending suffering that is nearly incomprehensible to any sane human mind. The endless accounts of cruelty sicken the soul and should strike anyone who thinks communism is a great system of government deaf and dumb. Volume one begins the harrowing odyssey into madness, outlining Solzhenitsyn's own arrest, the endless waves of people that fed the prison system, the interrogation procedures used to elicit false confessions to meaningless crimes, the dreaded Soviet criminal code containing the notorious 'Article 58' under which millions went to jail as political prisoners, the disintegration of the Soviet legal system to what basically amounted to a rubber stamp type of sentencing, and the transportation of prisoners via train to the eastern reaches of the Soviet empire. Volume two deals mainly with camp life, with all of the trials and travails a person faced and how people struggled to survive. It is here we learn about Stalin's canal building projects and the thousands who died to fulfill the sick dreams of a ruthless sociopath. We see the horrible rations prisoners were forced to survive upon while having their ears filled with disgusting propaganda about how their work was important in helping to create the worker's paradise. The second volume also contains a history about how the gulag system emerged and how it spread, a discussion about loyal communists who so internalized the party belief system that they refused to believe Stalin sold them out, and chapters about the different types of people confined to the gulag (trusties, thieves, kids, women, and politicals). Volume three focuses mostly on prisoner defiance of the terrible conditions in the prisons, discussing escape attempts (especially Georgi Tenno, a hero to the human race and indefatigable in his disobedience of the Soviet authorities), and outright prison revolts where the entire population of a prison banded together against the common evil. We then see Solzhenitsyn's release into exile and his ultimate 'rehabilitation' after the death of Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev and his 'moderate' reforms. The series ends with a call for more investigations into Soviet atrocities committed in the gulags. No summary could completely outline the scope of this book; so enormous is the amount of detail held in these pages. The reader is tirelessly assailed with the names of those butchered under the hammer and sickle. Predictably, most of the blame for these murders falls on Comrade Stalin, author of the kulakization pogroms, the endless political purges, and the continuous sufferings inflicted on the various peoples under his control. Always referring to this beast in the most insolent and sarcastic tones imaginable, Solzhenitsyn rightly calls Stalin 'Satan.' Hitler was a mere schoolboy when held up to the unholy terror of the 'great' Dzhugashvili. Still, one gets the sense of the majesty and power of the great Russian people in these accounts. Nothing will keep these people down for long. Everything the camps threw at these many of these wondrous creatures failed to break their spirit. They figured out how to lessen the back breaking labor of the camps, learned how to stay alive on rations barely fit for a dog, struggled to escape the chains that bound them to the death camps. Although the author laments the docility of those serving sentences, there are enough tales of bravery and defiance to warm the most cynical heart. I highly recommend reading the unabridged version of 'The Gulag Archipelago.' There used to be an abridged version of some 900 pages floating around, but only the 2000-page edition brings home the full scope of the evils of communism. Accessibility is a problem, but stare into the eyes of Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova on page 488 in the first volume and tell me her memory does not deserve an effort on your part to read every page of one of the most important books ever written.
Rating:
Summary: What a gift
Review: This book allows a view into the realities of the Soviet Union, hidden for so long from the rest of the world. The author is nothing short of brilliant. He is able to paint a clear picture of the suffering and evil treatment that went on, both to himself and others. It is a remarkably compelling story of survival that is written so cleanly and smoothly that it is difficult to put down.
Rating:
Summary: Prophetic Witness
Review: The Gulag Archipelago is more than complete. It's downright exhaustive and extensive. Make no mistake about it- it certainly is a massive tome of a work, packed to the brim with autobiographical and biographical anecdotes, political commentary, and social critique, spoken in a voice that switches from wrath to sadness to bitter, biting irony and wit. Although it may take a long time to read, those who do read it will be richly rewarded. It provides in- depth information about the Russian penal system and how it operates, demonstrating that it lay upon the foundations of self- interest, greed, hate, social control, and masked motives. The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of five is that it truly is a long book which takes a true devotion to the subject to read. I found it a book to be as much studied as read, so as to better understand the main tenets of the work and to come closer to its emotional, spiritual, and psychological core. It is, however, a powerful statement on the human response to captivity, the corrupt ways of people consumed by power, and a work to be treasured and read for years to come.
Rating:
Summary: This zany ride to the gulag will leave you in stitches!!!!!
Review: This kooky off the wall comedy about Solzhenitsyn's journey to and ultimately through the Gulag system is a must for all you "Schindler's List" and "Hogan's Heroes" fans out there. His hilarious descriptions of NKVD torture techniques will touch your funny bone and his moving stories of people confessing to crimes they didn't commit and implicating innocent acquaintances so that their daughters don't get raped and murdered will touch your heart. This story really touched me a lot. While it does tend to brood on some of the more negative aspects of Soviet society anyone with an open mind and a sense of humor should be able to appreciate this ligh-hearted romp through the pogroms. A must read for anyone who has ever cried or laughed.
| 
