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A review by ben2then
The Gulag Archipelago, Abridged Edition by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5.0
This book is about the Soviet jail, gulag and exile system which the author experienced first hand. After returning from a German POW camp, rather than receiving a hero's welcome after his enormous sacrifice for the motherland, he was immediately thrown in jail, along with many other Russian war veterans.
His account of 'the archipelago', his metaphor for the soviet prison system, draws on his own experience as well as memoirs and letters he received from others after his release.
This book reminded me of 'This is a man' by Primo Levi in that both are accounts of the abject suffering and cruelty suffered and perpetrated by men in 20th century prison camps.
But the fates of Germany and Russia have been so divergent in the late 20th century and 21st century. This must be because Russia had no process of accountability whatsoever following the fall of the soviet union.
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."
This is another quotation which struck me:
"Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul."
His account of 'the archipelago', his metaphor for the soviet prison system, draws on his own experience as well as memoirs and letters he received from others after his release.
This book reminded me of 'This is a man' by Primo Levi in that both are accounts of the abject suffering and cruelty suffered and perpetrated by men in 20th century prison camps.
But the fates of Germany and Russia have been so divergent in the late 20th century and 21st century. This must be because Russia had no process of accountability whatsoever following the fall of the soviet union.
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."
This is another quotation which struck me:
"Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul."