The Gulag Archipelago

1918-1956

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Hardcover, 832 pages

Spanish language

Published June 18, 1998 by Tusquets.

ISBN:: 978-84-8310-046-2
OCLC Number:: 40759006

(24 reviews)

Drawing on his own experiences before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its creation by Lenin in 1918. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims-this man, that woman, that child-we encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the “welcome” that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness astounding moral courage, the incorruptibility with which the occasional individual or a few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. And Solzhenitsyn’s genius has transmuted this grisly indictment into a literary miracle.

76 editions

Eduardo Santiago reviewed gulag archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Review of 'gulag archipelago' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Painful in so many ways. Not entirely comprehensible to a Western reader, but the rest is gut-wrenching and horrifying; possibly even a warning about what may be coming for the U.S. if the republicans have their way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the lost humanity of the torturers and guards. How did they get that way? What happens to such monsters? And are we breeding a new set of those in our U.S. southern border?

I don’t know if I’ll be able to read Volume 2: “And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be ... worse.” (Spoiler alert: Volume 1—this one—is an unrelenting catalog of atrocities and cruelty; “worse” is hard to imagine.)