A review by dwgradio
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

4.0

Soviet Russia under Stalin was a bizarro world where anyone could be arrested at anytime for anything. Solzhenitsyn pulls no punches in his exhaustive study of the prison camp system. The weight and seriousness one expects in Russian literature is here, peppered with biting sarcasm, moments of great descriptive beauty, and philosophy. Both literary and journalistic, this first volume covers Lenin's creation of the legal code allowing for the gulag system, the individuals who ran it, the show trials and purges that grew it, the randomness of how citizens found themselves caught up in it (metaphorically referred to as a game of solitaire), and their first experiences once inside. No detail is spared, whether bureaucratic and mundane or malevolent and violent. A fascinating portrait of a bleak and strange world.