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A review by screen_memory
The Gulag Archipelago, Abridged Edition by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5.0
I plowed through this first volume with a voraciousness I haven't felt since reading Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone months ago. It's not often I read well beyond my daily reading goal, but I could not help but make an exception for this book.
Anyone who has ever read through this book or will come to will in all probability find it absolutely absurd why the horrors of Communism are not denounced as fervently as those that occurred in the holocaust (if the question has not already given you pause). There are so many passages that will compel you to chuckle to yourself because the sheer absurdity of the number of arrests, the unbelievably loose interpretation of the criminal code (which will make you wonder why they even bothered drafting a code at all), and the multitude of unfathomable tortures will make you wonder why people still to this day advocate for an ideology with a proven body count in the tens of millions (not even counting the fifteen to twenty million Russians who were imprisoned in the Gulags). This book explodes every apologist's defense you could probably imagine, and I cannot help but feel that any claim that seeks to discredit what's been written in Gulag is similar to holocaust revisionism.
Despite Solzhenitsyn's comprehensive knowledge of the testimony of some 276 prisoners (not counting all of the assistance in all sorts of ways - testimonial, academic, fact-checking or otherwise) and his own personal experiences, there survives an indomitable undercurrent of bitter, ironic humor (how could he - and we, the readers, ourselves - not also laugh at the sheer stupidity of the Stalin regime as it's documented?). Beyond that, Solzhenitsyn describes an emotional record of reactions one would not expect when thrown into such a dreary situation; a feeling of pleasure after being moved to another prison, smiling to all of his cell mates after realizing Stalin's Amnesty 1945 meant another extension of his and countless other prisoners' sentences....
Solzhenitsyn's spirit was so powerful and unconquerable that all of the millions who died in the Gulags - all of those murdered prisoners whose bodies polluted the sewers of the Soviet prison system - his constant surveillance after his release from the gulag, and the continuance of the Soviet Union decades after Stalin's death (and after Solzhenitsyn's exile) could not bring him down. This one man, this single "dangerous element," as Sartre called him, has done more than any other single individual to bring down the Soviet Union and expose the horrors that occur within a Communist regime which to all outward appearances seems a utopia.
However, there exists a terrible historical inequity: why are so many students in high school introduced to Elie Wiesel's Night and educated about what occurred in Germany's concentration camps, yet none of them are ever introduced to Solzhenitsyn, and, if anything (as so many others including myself did), gravitate toward Communist sympathies and go on to read not the Gulag Archipelago, but the damn Communist Manifesto.
In Germany, certain concentration camps remain standing as a testament to the atrocities that occurred there; atrocities that were apologized for by all of Germany. In Russia, statues of Stalin and Lenin are still celebrated (and Mao Zedong's face is still printed on China's currency).
Anyone who has ever read through this book or will come to will in all probability find it absolutely absurd why the horrors of Communism are not denounced as fervently as those that occurred in the holocaust (if the question has not already given you pause). There are so many passages that will compel you to chuckle to yourself because the sheer absurdity of the number of arrests, the unbelievably loose interpretation of the criminal code (which will make you wonder why they even bothered drafting a code at all), and the multitude of unfathomable tortures will make you wonder why people still to this day advocate for an ideology with a proven body count in the tens of millions (not even counting the fifteen to twenty million Russians who were imprisoned in the Gulags). This book explodes every apologist's defense you could probably imagine, and I cannot help but feel that any claim that seeks to discredit what's been written in Gulag is similar to holocaust revisionism.
Despite Solzhenitsyn's comprehensive knowledge of the testimony of some 276 prisoners (not counting all of the assistance in all sorts of ways - testimonial, academic, fact-checking or otherwise) and his own personal experiences, there survives an indomitable undercurrent of bitter, ironic humor (how could he - and we, the readers, ourselves - not also laugh at the sheer stupidity of the Stalin regime as it's documented?). Beyond that, Solzhenitsyn describes an emotional record of reactions one would not expect when thrown into such a dreary situation; a feeling of pleasure after being moved to another prison, smiling to all of his cell mates after realizing Stalin's Amnesty 1945 meant another extension of his and countless other prisoners' sentences....
Solzhenitsyn's spirit was so powerful and unconquerable that all of the millions who died in the Gulags - all of those murdered prisoners whose bodies polluted the sewers of the Soviet prison system - his constant surveillance after his release from the gulag, and the continuance of the Soviet Union decades after Stalin's death (and after Solzhenitsyn's exile) could not bring him down. This one man, this single "dangerous element," as Sartre called him, has done more than any other single individual to bring down the Soviet Union and expose the horrors that occur within a Communist regime which to all outward appearances seems a utopia.
However, there exists a terrible historical inequity: why are so many students in high school introduced to Elie Wiesel's Night and educated about what occurred in Germany's concentration camps, yet none of them are ever introduced to Solzhenitsyn, and, if anything (as so many others including myself did), gravitate toward Communist sympathies and go on to read not the Gulag Archipelago, but the damn Communist Manifesto.
In Germany, certain concentration camps remain standing as a testament to the atrocities that occurred there; atrocities that were apologized for by all of Germany. In Russia, statues of Stalin and Lenin are still celebrated (and Mao Zedong's face is still printed on China's currency).