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Summary: It change my life
Review: hello,i am just 18 years old and this book have change my life. I am a french canadian, so i read it in french. Sorry for my bad engligh but READ THIS BOOK !
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Summary: End of the trilogy
Review: Volume 3. I found this the most accessible of the volumes: it is the most autobiographical of the three, and thus succeeds in bringing home to the reader the effect of the Gulag system on each of the inmates - this even extends to the after-effects felt by former inmates following their release. It is tempting to believe that release meant the end of the horror story for such people: not so - see also Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward". Solzhenitsyn also recounts a series of escape stories. At the end of reading "The Gulag", I felt an enormous sense of achievement in finishing it, but began to appreciate the author's achievement in writing it under oppressive conditions - as Sozhenitsyn points out, its imperfections have to be judged against that background. Also, a need to reflect on what Solzhenitsyn calls the central failing of the twentieth century - the willingness to obey orders and abdicate the moral consequences of that willingness to the "consciences" of others.
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Summary: Detailed examination
Review: Volume 2 moves Solzhenitsyn's massive description of the Gulags on from Volume 1's concentration on the Soviet criminal "justice" system, to the camps themselves, their set-up, inmates and jailors. The story of the work details are mind-boggling - how canals were dug with essentially stone-age equipment in appalling conditions. As importantly, Solzhenitsyn describes how the cancer of the Gulags infected the rest of Soviet society. A much more controlled and scholarly work than Volume 1.
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Summary: Avert your eyes, Richard Rorty.
Review: Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book explores the forced collectivism of the gulags, which were established under Lenin's regime and remained through Stalin's reign of terror, until he died in 1953. Solzhenitsyn, unlike most "literary" authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Martin Amis, doesn't allow the plot in his novels to become secondary to the prose. Emphasis is placed solely on plot and character development alone, leaving the prose to complete the rest of the job. (In that sense, he reminds me of Philip K Dick, another writer who never sacrificed plot for prose.) Because of this method, the reader is intimately privy to the thoughts and emotions of the "non-fictional" political and religious dissenters who slaved in these camps, building Siberia's highways, railways, and hydroelectric plants. It still amazes me that after all the expositions of genocide that took place under Soviet totalitarianism have been uncovered, left-wingers, in their typically off-balanced condescension, continue to erect phoney moral high grounds over the alleged "greed" of the free marketplace. The "greed" defense is the refuge of the coward, who strenuously denies (or tries to evade) what brave men like Solzhenitsyn and Paul Johnson have written about, and, in Solzhenitsyn's case, lived through.
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Summary: Drawing the message
Review: I have just finished reading Volume 1, and was going to refrain from writing a review until I completed the whole work, but having read the previous reviews, I felt a need to write now, for two reasons: (a) to advise prospective readers of the style of the book; and (b) to take issue with the messages drawn by earlier reviewers. Firstly, the book is not a flowing narrative. It is immensely detailed, yet at the same time can be harrowing and moving. At times, the author's anger (understandably, given the subject matter) overflows - I found that this jarred on me (rather like the distortion effect when music is played too loudly). What saves it is Solzhenitsyn's illustrations of his main points by descriptions of his personal experiences. Secondly, like the other reviewers, I count myself immensely lucky to live in the West, and my admiration for Solzhenitsyn knows no bounds. However, before we let ourselves wallow in self-congratulation, let's try to reflect on the actual message contained in the book. The Soviet regime did not appear suddenly from outer space. It was (as the author says) made in Russia, by Russians. Accordingly, all Russians share guilt for it, not just those active agents of the regime. (Compare this with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners"). The author's point surely is, that in any society, we all are guilty when we ignore, tolerate, or condone injustice. And before we get too comfortable, let's do an incomplete tour of what we in the West have or continue to condone: exploitation of races (whether by direct enslavement, imperialism, or denial of civil rights); denial of equal rights for women (not to mention lesbians and gay men); overt and covert support of regimes in Africa, Asia and South America every bit as brutal as Stalin's; persecution of minorities on religious grounds; etc etc. So, be moved by this book. It's worth the effort. But try to use it as a stimulus to look at our own societies and attitudes in a more criticial way. Solzhenitsyn's message was a universal one.
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Summary: A superb exposition on Soviet Gulags and Atrocities...
Review: Your media, publishing houses and education system were apparently to busy raving about the horrors of McCarthyism and sculpting Stalin into Time Magazine's Man of the year for 1943- they didn't have time to tell you how the communists got by with liquidating over 100,000,000 people in the 20th century. Well now the dead have a voice... Out of the evil empire, a voice emerged to tell the story that academia and the media didn't care to hear. This book is haunting, because it brings historic fact to the table from someone that lived firsthand in the Soviet Gulag state. The accounts of life (and death) in the gulag are vivid and engrossing. What I find most disturbing is how so many dogmatic leftists still play apologists for the Soviet Union.
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Summary: Hearing Voices
Review: As opposed to the copiousness of this and the other sacred volumes of Gulag, this review will be brief: the voice of God is in this work and that voice preaches justice. For these reasons, this great book must be read now and it will be read as long as just civilizations exist. Anyone who believes they are civilized and humane and has not read Gulag, has much they can learn from this great artist's work. It is a mandatory read for Russian history students.
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Summary: The bravest act of literary generosity since Tyndale's Bible
Review: This is the book that sobered the French up after the follies of 1968. This is the book that prevented the New York literary cognoscenti from completely dismissing Solzhenitsyn as a ranting bumpkin. This is the book that gave hope to Russians that the mass graves of zeks would not be unaccounted for, after all. And, this is the book that inoculated me against my college education. It is the literary equivalent of that famous photo of the lone man facing down a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.
As Solzhenitsyn is at pains to impress upon us, it is not a political expose'. Rather, it is an effort to collect victims' testimonies to the savage early decades of Soviet rule. It is also, and more importantly, an exploration of the human soul under all-out assault by the state. As Western leftists, complicit in the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, innocently glided from "It never happened" to "Who cares? It can never happen again", this book brought all the evil of Soviet communism into the light. That light was the moral vision of arguably the 20th century's greatest prophet, without honor in the putative homelands of liberty, and in perpetual mortal danger at home. The first book of _The Gulag Archipelago_ takes the reader from arrest through interrogation, transport, and transit camp, up to the gates of the labor camps themselves. Along the way, there are many asides about prison life, its denizens and customs, and the spiritual deformations they inflicted. There were whole waves, entire cycles, of specifically targeted repressions. Hundreds of thousands of people were disposed of without a trace, either by bullets or by exile above the arctic circle. The repressions of 1937, the _Yezhovschina_, made Western intellectuals gulp only because, for a change, the victims were communists. We also, through Solzhenitsyn's account of his spiritual awakening, get an up close view of how a strong religious faith can sustain a person in the face of this faceless evil (though this aspect is more fully developed in volume 2) What makes this "huge, loose, baggy monster" of a book more remarkable is that Solzhenitsyn never once had it all on his desk at the same time, for a proper editing. Parts of it were always stashed away somewhere, while he was working on another part, always under official surveillance. No pampered western academic radical could last ten days under those conditions, let alone produce such a powerful witness. Read this for a bellyful of what it is like not to be free, what it costs to try to become free. You'll never take your loony left professor seriously again.
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Summary: Don't expect a novel
Review: I was originally refered this book by a freind, who said "it's too depressing, don't read it". I found it an amazing insight of rage, frustration and humilty. He speaks for a nation that allowed itself to be subjected to such barbarity, and only to become resigned to it because of the generations the reign of terror it covered. To a police officer in a democrocy, to hear that such barbartiy took place (no, not isolated incidents)on a scale so vast (16,000,000) persons imprisoned) as slave labour is so hard to imagine. I do not think anyone could have conveyed its' truth so powerfully. If you read one book of intelect in you life, let it be this
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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.
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