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List Price: $26.95 |
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Customer Ratings: 5.0 (from 47 reviews) |
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Product Description
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labor camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin from 1924 to 1953. Various sections of the three volumes describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims by Soviet authorities over four decades. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn’s own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment.Upon publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on February 12, 1974, and was exiled from the Soviet Union the following day. |
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| Product Details |
| Author: |
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn |
| Binding: |
Paperback |
| Dewey Decimal Number: |
365.450947 |
| EAN: |
9780813332895 |
| ISBN: |
0813332893 |
| Label: |
Basic Books |
| Languages: |
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| List Price: |
| Amount: |
2695 |
| Currency Code: |
USD |
| Formatted Price: |
$26.95 |
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| Manufacturer: |
Basic Books |
| Number Of Items: |
1 |
| Number Of Pages: |
672 |
| Package Dimensions: |
| Height: |
153 |
| Length: |
802 |
| Weight: |
170 |
| Width: |
530 |
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| Product Group: |
Book |
| Publication Date: |
1997-01-30 |
| Publisher: |
Basic Books |
| Studio: |
Basic Books |
| Title: |
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) |
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| Customer Reviews |
Customer Rating: 4
Review Date: 2008-03-14
2 out of 2 found this review helpful.
Summary: slightly boring at times
It takes some effort to read this book, as it is very detailed, with lots of names of people and places, forcing you to refer to the glossary often, but worth going to the trouble for. I say this at the risk of sounding blasé, but my only complaint is that there were unexciting stretches in the book, especially the descriptions of the trials in the chapter "The Law Becomes a Man". The writing is sometimes haphazard. Even so, it is an important book, and well worth the read, and I enjoyed it for the most part. |
Customer Rating: 4
Review Date: 2006-06-06
5 out of 8 found this review helpful.
Summary: A sobering adjustment of perspective
I'm usually among the first in line to complain about the NSA, COINTELPRO, the modern surveillance-state, the PATRIOT ACT, etc. In spite of this (or, perhaps because of this) it is deeply insightful to read this first-hand account about life in a genuine police-state. Although ponderous and sometimes outright dull, The Gulag Archipelago is an important record of one of the darkest chapters of modern history. Without books like this, who will remember once all the survivors are gone? |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2005-10-03
5 out of 6 found this review helpful.
Summary: An amazing document of an almost unknown chapter of history
When I was younger, I would occasionally read communist books, hang out at "Revolution Books"--the communist bookstore in Boston--and naively bash capitalism with some of my snobbier friends.
If I had read this book though, none of that would have ever happened. This book, although it takes place almost entirely in Russia, and is about Russians and about communism, is among the most pro-American, pro-capitalism, pro-freedom and democracy things I've ever read. It's an amazing document of just what can happen when idealism and revolution give way to dictatorship, and when dictatorship gives way to an entire country enslaving and being enslaved, an entire country of millions of lives lived in fear that AT ANY MOMENT and FOR ANY REASON, ANYONE could be arrested, taken away to prison for decades, tortured, and/or shot.
This book is an examination and an investigation of the long period of Russian history when the Soviet government just went nuts arresting everyone, out of cruelty, and out of fear that the people would rise up and overthrow Stalin's dictatorship unless opressed to the point of no possible resistance, to a point of extreme grief and weakness.
The book details the sudden and violent arrests of millions of USSR citizens for little or no reason, the rough and hateful ways used to interrogate them, the inhuman treatment the prisoners faced in (and being transported to) the Soviet prisons, and the USSR's frenzied overuse of capital punishment (a.k.a. killing people).
You aren't working in the fields hard enough? Ten years in prison for you!
You suggest we do something that might increase the fields' crops? Are you saying the Soviet Union needs to change? Twenty-five years!
The book's author was a Gulag prisoner himself, but he never lets his own story overshadow the story of the country and the merciless prison system as a whole.
The book is by no means perfect, but it is shocking, and well-written, and incredibly brave considering that this senseless system was still taking place when the book was written, and he could have been killed for it.
I highly, highly recommend reading it, and the next time some beatnik kid tries to tell you how much better communism is, you'll have some passages to quote to him. And the next time you feel like taking our freedoms for granted, you'll something to make yu feel lucky. |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2004-05-28
2 out of 4 found this review helpful.
Summary: An Incredible Work of Non-Fiction
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. |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2003-04-07
157 out of 189 found this review helpful.
Summary: Death to Communism!
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. |
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