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: THIS WORK IS A MONUMENT TO THOSE WHO WERE MURDERED
Review: The Communist system, built on lies, secrecy and deception was exposed forever with this book. Solzhenitsyn made it his goal to make sure that the real history of the prison camps was told, in detail. While in prison camp, he vowed to recall it all (in his memoirs [The Oak and the Calf] he tells HOW he was able to remember all the thousands of details that he learned in the camps. He often spent as much as 3 weeks out of each month just reciting all that he had previously committed to memory, just to make sure that his memory of it remained clear). Some of the [many] things that I found interesting were the tactics of deception used by the Soviets to cover up all the torture that was going on in the camps. In fact, Solzhenitsyn at one point listed 26 different tortures that don't leave marks or scars. Solzhenitsyn validated the truth of this work by putting his life on the line just to get it to us. --George Stancliffe
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: The Evil Empire, Revealed
Review: So Ronald Reagan was right all along, I thought as I put down Volume III of Arkipelag GULag -- along with my simpering little liberal pieties and lofty disdain for the crewcut anti-communist right. Thank God the imperfect Western democracies won that particular battle of ideologies. Solzhenitsyn's anger and deep religious faith, and his sense of mission to place a marker for the 60 million killed by the Bolsheviks -- not the least of whom are his fellow Red Army soldiers, captured thanks to the ineptitude of Stalin's generals in 1941 then sent to the Gulag on their release from Hitler's camps in 1945 -- make this probably the greatest literary work of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of all time. And a warning against complacency and weary humanist platitudes when other enemies declare war upon the west. An absolutely necessary read.
Rating:
Summary: The Anatomy of Evil
Review: ... Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an Army officer and war hero of the Soviet Union condemned to spend a large portion of his life laboring away in Stalin's gulags. Rather than wither away as so many of his fellow prisoners did, Solzhenitsyn's moral outrage sustained him, and he began collecting scraps of stories from the unfortunates condemned alongside him, eventually weaving these pieces into an epic narrative worthy of Tolstoy. I will herein paraphrase one haunting anecdote, one of many which are strewn across each page of this gigantic work. It is to my mind indicative of the true nature of Communist regimes everywhere. Solzhenitsyn tells us of a Party official who attended one of the endless memorial get-togethers. Someone mentions the name of Stalin (not present), thus prompting everyone in the audience to "spontaneously" stand and applaud, for fear of appearing to be less enthusiastic in their support of the dictator than their fellows. The applause goes on and on. Old men sweat and grow pale as the minutes drag on. Yet no one dares be the first to stop applauding and sit down, for they will immediately be marked as being less supportive of the regime. It becomes a tragic comedy---one wonders who will be the first to collapse from sheer exhaustion. Yet the applause continues in the sweaty, gasping throng. Finally, one brave soul ceases to applaud and sit down, giving the audience implicit permission to do the same. The relief is palpable as everyone sits and the business of the gathering resumes. This tale was told to Solzhenitsyn by the man who first sat down, who was arrested this very night and thrown in the gulag for this "crime." This is the ugly truth of totalitarianism: one must ever appear to be more lunatic in their support for the madmen at the head of the regime to stave off the knock on the door in the middle of the night. Solzhenitsyn's greatest work is rife with these truths, told compelling with a white-hot fire of outrage undimmed by passing decades.
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Summary: The TRUTH, and no lie!
Review: Solzhenitsyn wrote the TRUTH as he knew it, and reviews calling him a liar (and there's at least one that I saw) are just wishful thinking. This book is a chilling documentary of the TRUE nature of Marxism-Leninism.
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: Should Be Mandatory Reading for Everyone
Review: First, I gave this a 4 Star rating because of the style of its writing. Content-wise, this book is far beyond even a 5 Star rating. As my title says, it should be mandatory reading for everyone in this country. Regarding the style, the best I can say is it's very Russian. Solzhenitsyn uses tons of well-researched details to present his thesis. The only problem is that after a while it gets depressing. Also, he uses a heck of a lot of scathing sarcasm throughout the book. So much so, that you start to become numb to it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you should be aware that this is NOT a novel. Also, it's not really a history. As the subtitle on the title page says, it's "An Experiment in Literary Investigation." Personally, I'd have been more satisfied with a history. The content of this book is simply inconceivable and far outweighs my minor criticisms of the style. It describes how the Communists in the Soviet Union consciously tortured and murdered millions (if not tens of millions) of their own people. With this book in print, I can't understand how anyone could ever say anything good about Communism. It's a long book, but READ IT.
Rating:
Summary: Says more to us than we realize
Review: As someone who actually read the entire unabridged version, I recommend that you do so. This book is primarily known as the Soviet Union's literary tombstone. A righteous yet determined anger shouts from every page. As such, it is seen primarily as offering historical interest. This is a shame, because it's a book of the present as much as of the past. And thus the future. I reread it a couple of years ago after having been in modern Russia for a couple of weeks. I needed it to sort out, partially, what I'd been through. And I needed to reread all three volumes. If you stop at Volume I, you'll have gotten an excellent overview of the history of Soviet repression and how it worked. By itself, the contribution to history and the cause of human rights is immeasurable. But it still doesn't make it a book. Solzhenitsyn wrote three volumes for reasons other than that he's Russian. This may have been the biggest seller in the West, but to reduce his work to a tool of anti-Communist propaganda efforts is to greatly diminish it. (I also find it interesting that the same righties who embraced Solzhenitsyn when he wrote this are DK'ing him now that he is back in Russia, speaking out against the privatization of land and sipping tea on his porch with Vladimir Putin. Funny how times change). Volumes II and III go a long way to explaining contemporary Russia - yes, even today, after both Stalin and the USSR are gone. You learn a lot about the culture of the camps and their daily operation. How much the Russian people were implicated in and collaborated with their own oppression. It's horrifying in some spots and almost laugh-out loud funny in others (best chapter is on the "true believer" types who got swept up in 1937 and went to absurd lengths to differentiate themselves from all the other prisoners and/or suck up). But, in the culture and role of the thieves (common criminals) that Solzhenitsyn describes in so much detail, you can see the genesis of the present-day Russian mafia (As he aptly observes, the NKVD/KGB did not so much re-educate the thieves as the other way around). Little has changed except that now they are dressed better and have a lot more money. And lastly there is the disturbing picture, completed in Volume III where he writes about his post-camp exile in what is now independent Kazakhstan, of the gradual spread of prison culture and prisoner values throughout the entire society as a result of such mass, reckless imprisonment of so many. One has to ask: Are we in America not subtly doing the same thing courtesy of the So-Called War on Some Drugs? Entire communities in some areas are being ripped to shreds through mandatory minimums for drug possession (how like the Stalinist decrees Solzhenitsyn mentions!) and gangsta rap music and the more thuggish aspects of hip-hop culture begin to transmit the coarsening jailhouse sensibility even to those who have never been to jail (much as one of Solznehitsyn's fellow prisoners found his students knew all the Gulag slang terms, even though they were too young to have been to prison). Can we really stand by and read this so smugly? Is this really all in the past? There are lessons here for right and left.
Rating:
Summary: Not a novel, an indictment
Review: The point can't be made forcefully enough: this book is *not* a novel! It is not even literature, in any meaningful sense. It is a 2,000 page indictment for crimes against humanity. Chief among the accused is of course Stalin who, if justice exists, is currently serving 60 million consecutive life sentences in Hell. But as Solzhenitsyn abundantly documents, the Gulag death-camps were part of Lenin's vision from the very beginning. (In January 1918, he stated his ambition of "purging the land of all kinds of harmful insects", in which group he included "workers malingering at their work".) But it is not only the architects of Bolshevism who stand accused. It is also all the collaborators with oppression, from the camp guards who summarily executed prisoners too exhausted to stand to the people who informed on their neighbors. Complicit even are the passive victims of the Terror who, as Solzhenitsyn says, "didn't love freedom enough" to fight for it from the beginning. Needless to say, "The Gulag Archipelago" is not beach reading. (Although Solzhenitsyn's searingly sarcastic style makes it anything but a dry collection of facts.) The evil that it obsessively documents is so dark that even reading about it is often difficult to bear. But anyone with pretentions of understanding the world we live in needs to go through it from first page to last. But if you aren't willing to make the effort, here's the lesson boiled down for you: Totalitarianism doesn't begin with a Stalin or a Hitler. It begins with *you*, on the day that you let a government become more powerful than the people it governs. Remember that or someday it might not be the Russians or the Jews or the Serbs that the men with guns come for. It just might be you...
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