Book summary

Considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century non-fiction, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO was a massive and searing expose of the Soviet Union's brutal labor camp system, a system in which millions died in freezing and sickeningly inhumane conditions. Solzhenitsyn's book introduced the term "Gulag" (GULAG is a Russian acronym) into the international consciousness and forced the world to come to terms with the atrocities of the Soviet experiment. Using his own experiences (Solzhenitsyn spent 11 years in the camp system after describing Stalin in mildly disparaging terms in one of his private letters) and the testimony of scores of other survivors, Solzhenitsyn created a vast and appalling testament to what he felt was the evil backbone of not only Stalinism, but the entire Soviet Union. More than merely a historical document, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is a work of great art. Like Primo Levi's SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ, Solzhenitsyn uses terrible insight, brilliant pathos, and the darkest imaginable sense of humor, to allow readers to conceive of the inconceivable, and to experience the experiences of people being crushed by machinations of the State.

Media reviews

"Others have written brilliantly and courageously about their own experience of the Soviet terror and of the ordeals of those close to them. But it is Solzhenitsyn, above all, who has made it possible to imagine the criminal horrors of the Soviet regime both in the magnitude of their history and in their terrible particularity. He is virtually alone among the major writers of the 20th century in having found a form, in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, capable of encompassing the awful moral history of our time."