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A review by athousandgreatbooks
The Gulag Archipelago, Abridged Edition by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5.0
Camps, secret police, prisons, spies, transit centers, interrogations, the freezing cold of the Siberian tundra and taiga, the degradation and destruction of millions of souls, the betrayal of a whole nation, and an unrelenting State that benefits from the exploitation and slavery of whole peoples deceived, denounced, and eliminated methodically.
Of the blackest chapter in the history of the 20th century, The Gulag Archipelago is a tour de force compiled from the bravery of some 200 inhabitants of the Gulags who put their life (and much more!) on the line to reveal what the State took pains to conceal, and what the rest of the world so conveniently wanted to overlook.
Solzhenitsyn, through his searing sarcasm, blows the lid off this carefully constructed lie of the so-called Liberal world looking to get to heaven by stepping over millions of corpses and the destruction of everything human.
I cannot, for the life of me, ever get over the stories of these people, sometimes satirical in its comedy, often inconceivable horrible, but always with the same ends - depredation, death, famine, disease, repression, regression, and the heart-wrenching tearing out of the Russian soul from the degrading Soviet body.
But the destruction is not complete, it could never be, and interspersed are feats of super-human will, faith, and moral integrity of those that survived, but more so of those who didn't.
Nothing that has come before, be it in Tsarist Russia, or the contemporaneous camps at Auschwitz or Dachau, could compare (though it seems unreasonable to compare suffering and death) to the sordid and moral vacuity of any number of the Gulag camps, whether one finds basis in the numbers or the conditions, or even in the ingenuity and deliberateness of the acts.
This is the cost of lies, remembering the first few words from Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries. Never look away. Remember.
Of the blackest chapter in the history of the 20th century, The Gulag Archipelago is a tour de force compiled from the bravery of some 200 inhabitants of the Gulags who put their life (and much more!) on the line to reveal what the State took pains to conceal, and what the rest of the world so conveniently wanted to overlook.
Solzhenitsyn, through his searing sarcasm, blows the lid off this carefully constructed lie of the so-called Liberal world looking to get to heaven by stepping over millions of corpses and the destruction of everything human.
I cannot, for the life of me, ever get over the stories of these people, sometimes satirical in its comedy, often inconceivable horrible, but always with the same ends - depredation, death, famine, disease, repression, regression, and the heart-wrenching tearing out of the Russian soul from the degrading Soviet body.
But the destruction is not complete, it could never be, and interspersed are feats of super-human will, faith, and moral integrity of those that survived, but more so of those who didn't.
Nothing that has come before, be it in Tsarist Russia, or the contemporaneous camps at Auschwitz or Dachau, could compare (though it seems unreasonable to compare suffering and death) to the sordid and moral vacuity of any number of the Gulag camps, whether one finds basis in the numbers or the conditions, or even in the ingenuity and deliberateness of the acts.
This is the cost of lies, remembering the first few words from Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries. Never look away. Remember.