The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nov 2018 · Random House

About this eBook

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile.

This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author.

'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph

'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON

THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III

Ratings and reviews

So far I've read to pg103 and the next page is missing. It just skips to pg105. There could be more pages missing ahead. I've deleted the file and re downloaded it but nothing changed. How can i submit a more direct complaint about this and hopefully get it fixed? This book is fascinating otherwise.

A story that must be told. His first hand account not only tells his personal journey, but pieces together an understanding of how people were able to create such a monster and keep it going. A gift to those of us willing to learn.

Why socialism is a bad idea. This book brought an end to the Soviet system. It's logic is inescapable. Gulags were not an aberration of the ideas of the left. They are in the DNA of socialism. Solzhenitsyn bears witness to it's horror. And when you read it, you share his clarity. An amazing journey with some surprising hope and light. Who can not love the uplifting spirit of the incorrigible escaper? When you read this book that he held only in his memory for years, that the state also tried to erase...

About the author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied Literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.