The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (PDF)

Description

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn’s chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐If during the course of reading this book one does not get a tight ‘pit in the stomach’ feeling—mixed in with absolute ‘anguish and despair’ and a sense of complete hopelessness for the entire ‘human race,’ then surely, you are either not ‘human’ or do not fully comprehend the significance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ for all of ‘present-day’ humanity!!The interested reader must be made wholly aware that what is told and recapitulated in this book is not for the weak-minded or faint of heart. It will/should shock anyone who is caring/daring enough to read this tome (i.e., all three volumes)! Because, as posterity and the historical record will surely attest—this really did happen and could easily be repeated again—sometime in our lifetime?Solzhenitsyn’s very own ‘eyewitness account/lived experience’ is a brutally honest, sad ugly and very, very—powerful indictment and reminder of the ‘real state’ of so-called, ‘civilization’ (past and present/East and West), pure and simple. And he does it all with the great eloquence of his pen.Here are some excerpts to give everyone an idea of just how diabolical was the daily lived ‘terror/hell’ under the ‘totalitarianism’ of the former Soviet Union.Part I:Chapter 1ArrestFrom page 11:“For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact that people were arrested who were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever. There was a general feeling of being destined for destruction, a sense of having nowhere to escape from the GPU-NKVD (which, incidentally, given our internal passport system, was quite accurate). And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.”From page 13:Note 5: And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrest, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!If . . . if . . . We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!(Arthur Ransome describes a workers’ meeting in Yaroslavl in 1921. Delegates were sent to the workers from the Central Committee in Moscow to confer on the substance of the argument about trade unions. The representative of the opposition, Y. Larin, explained to the workers that their trade union must be their defense against the administration, that they possessed rights which they had won and upon which no else had any right to infringe. The workers, however, were completely indifferent, simply not comprehending whom they still needed to be defended against and why they still needed any rights. When the spokesman for the Party line rebuked them for their laziness and for getting out of hand, and demanded sacrifices from them—overtime work without pay, reductions in food, military discipline in the factory administration—this aroused great elation and applause.) We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”Chapter 2The History of Our Sewage Disposal SystemFrom page 24:“Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one nor even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting. Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good River Ob, which drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. No interrogators sweated out the night with them, nor did they bother to draw up formal indictments—it was enough to have a decree from the village soviet. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and I as well) committed no crime more heinous than this.”From page 37:“Men of religion were an inevitable part of every annual “catch,” and their silver locks gleamed in every cell and in every prisoner transport en route to the Solovetsky Islands. From the early twenties on, arrests were also made among groups of theosophists, mystics, spiritualists. (Count Palen’s group used to keep official transcripts of its communication with the spirit world.) Also, religious societies and philosophers of the Berdyayev circle. The so-called “Eastern Catholics”—followers of Vladimir Solovyev—were arrested and destroyed in passing, as was the group of A. I. Abrikosova. And, of course, ordinary Roman Catholics—Polish Catholic priests, etc.—were arrested, too, as part of the normal course of events. However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called “nuns” in transit prisons and in camps.”From page 85:“All during 1945 and 1946 a big wave of genuine, at-long-last, enemies of the Soviet government flowed into the Archipelago. (These were the Vlasov men, the Krasnov Cossacks, and Moslems from the national units created under Hitler.) Some of them had acted out of conviction; others had been merely involuntary participants. Along with them were seized not less than one million fugitives from the Soviet government—civilians of all ages and of both sexes who had been fortunate enough to find shelter on Allied territory, but who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by Allied authorities into Soviet hands. 45Note 45: It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot be kept long, since they inevitably come out in print or are disclosed, the secret of this particular act of betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British and American governments. This is truly the last secret, or one of the last, of the Second World War. Having often encountered these people in camps, I was unable to believe for a whole quarter-century that the public in the West knew nothing of this action of the Western governments, this massive handling over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. “After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise. . . . They did not realize they were being repatriated. . . .They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment “reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial.” They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. (Author’s note, dated 1973.)”Part II:Perpetual MotionChapter 3The Slave CaravansFrom page 586:“Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners’ barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complaints of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to within an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all . . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.”All told, Lenin and Stalin were probably responsible for the genocide (this is the greatest ‘holocaust’ in human history) of some one-hundred million souls—between 1918 through 1952!!Read it all and weep, and believe me, if you’re still human, you will weep and cry for a ‘justice’ (for all the victims) that is surely not to be found here on the Earth!The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: (1918 – 1956) An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1973 by Aleksndr I Solzhenitsyn. Translated from the Russian by Thomas P Whitney. First Harper Perennial edition published 1991. This review is for the paperback edition by Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007.BTW: I found it both ironic and amusing that the foreword (for the 2007 edition), was written by a warmongering ‘neocon stooge!’ In other words, by an individual that is beholden to an evil nefarious ‘movement/ideology’ that is more than willing to carry out/revisit the very ‘horrors’ that were all recounted in this polemical work of non-fiction (i.e., get yourselves acquainted with the Wolfowitz Doctrine).Love and Peace,Carlos E Romero

⭐This book talks about the past horrors that took place in history. It also warns the reader that there’s a thin line between a man and a monster and every man has to chose which side of that line he’ll stand on. Will he chose to be a man or a monster? Will he chose to hold faith or give up? I recommend this book.

⭐This is one of the best books I’ve read. It really puts things in perspective. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone; especially those looking to gain a new appreciation for life.

⭐I have just started reading this book and it is one in which I can only read a few pages at at time because of the intensity, depravity and lack of understanding on my part as to how a human being can be so wickedly cruel to other human beings. I guess there is just no value to human life that is believed by some people. Or, perhaps it is fear for oneself to participate in something so incredibly evil hoping that it won’t happen to them. The sad part is that millions of people were killed for no reason; denied of what their life could have been. With what we are seeing in the world today it makes you think of the possibility of it happening again if we don’t put a stop to the tyranny, division and hostility that is being perpetuated by global elitists of our time. I encourage everyone to read this book so that we are mobilized to stop this demonic spread of communism, socialism and Marxism wherever we see it.

⭐I love this product

⭐I bought this after I heard how many people risked their lives to see that it was published. I felt I owed it to the author. Not long after buying it, I found that a relative had a copy in his personal library and I could just have borrowed it. But I’m actually not sorry I bought my own, because the more copies of this book there are in the world, the better.Though written by a Russian, though sprawling, this book is not dense or hard to read or boring. It’s not even depressing in the way that we expect from Russian fiction (this is nonfiction), except of course you have to go into it expecting that you are going to read about the gulags, which include some of the most horrifying conditions, both physical and mental, in modern history. A lot of what is contained in this book are stories of experiences had by people who didn’t make it out. There was so much suffering, drama, and heroism that happened in Soviet Russia, which just went down the memory hole forever. Solzhenitsyn records some of these stories, those he personally happened to have access to, for posterity.Get it, read it slow steps, however much you can stand to read at a time, and meditate on the lessons. Then keep it on your shelf to return to as needed.

⭐Read this book. Then, READ IT AGAIN. Then, teach the meaning of it to at least three people. Live not by lies. Live to live. A beautiful book that will engage your soul.

⭐Solzhenitsyn’s recounting of the construction and implementation of the labor camps in the Soviet Union lays out how marxism was allowed to turn a superpower against its farmers, its war heroes, its classroom teachers, and even parents or children. The ruthlessness with which the archipelago went about dehumanizing prisoners and making monsters of the civilians which operated and fueled the camps is staggering and yet his writing somehow weaves a thin golden line of hope through it all. Solzhenitsyn recounts on rare occasion those who were swallowed by the gulags but retained at great cost their humanity, and prescribes that purity in mankind’s hearts to cure the malevolence that tried to smother it.

⭐This is the book I’ve spent a great deal of my life avoiding reading. I thought this was because the dire nature of the subject-matter was off-putting, but I have discovered that what Solzhenitsyn describes as the cultural mix underpinning so much atrocity and injustice is a phenomenon which has become progressively embedded in our own Western culture. The problem with what we encounter in ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ is that it seems so extreme that we almost cannot identify with it. We think that it cannot possibly have any direct relevance to the West, and what is happening here.But what Solzhenitsyn diagnoses is the pathology of a culture in self-destruct mode, one which allows the Lenins and the Stalins of this world just enough credence and space to perpetrate their evils. Whilst he uses Russian or Soviet terminology to describe this phenomenon, what we see are the kinds of sentiment, intellectual dishonesty and absence of accountability that are now prevalent within left-leaning secular western culture. Time and time again, as he describes the disingenuous self-justifications of the communist leadership in pre and post-war Russia, I was reminded that I have encountered the very same kinds of prevarication within our own regulatory bodies in the UK, the same lines of reasoning, based upon the same set of values and beliefs about human nature and civilisation.This is a beautifully-written book. It is full of righteous anger at the phenomenal human waste perpetrated by the communist ideologues, and humour too. It is not written according to a modern, western discipline of analysis, but then much of it was composed within Solzhenitsyn’s head whilst he served his time within the Gulags. We encounter many thinkers, at that time, who were unable to write anything down – and so they memorised their entire oeuvre, in the hopes that one day they might be free to write it down. As the author observes, what Hitler got up to, in relation to the Jews, was a mere dress rehearsal compared to what Lenin and Stalin achieved between them, pre and post-WW2. Yet Hitler’s evils feature prominently within our self-awareness because he was a fascist, yet Stalin’s predations seem to get a free pass, because Western thinkers were fawning over the wonderful advances of socialism, and turning a blind eye to its very obvious evils.A slight frustration with this edition is the number of chapters summarised only by a title and a couple of explanatory lines – but this was, originally, a massive three-volume work. It is nothing short of a miracle that we have this – and in my opinion, it should be required reading on every booklist before it is too late.

⭐This book looks daunting. It appears like an impossible task; like a marathon that only seasoned and avid readers can overcome. As one who’s read it, I must shout from the highest rooftops: PLEASE READ THIS NOVEL!I have heard so little about Stalin’s Soviet Union. I read things in this book that I had never heard from my teachers or the news media at any time in my 40+ years on this Earth. What I learned about Man’s inhumanity to his fellow Man as I paged through this literary masterpiece was unsettling and downright frightening. What was happening behind the scenes in Stalin’s “Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics” for over 50 years, while Stalin was preaching “equality” and “justice for the working man”, is both disgusting and immoral. To understand anything about our present and our future, we must study the past. By reading this work, composed by an actual prisoner of the Soviet Gulags, we begin to see a darker side of the Socialist promises made by past and present politicians in the name of social justice and equality of the classes.This novel is the historical record of the embodiment of the cliché: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.I encourage ALL who are free citizens in this world: Thank your maker, that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America had the wisdom and the foresight to recognize the Inalienable Rights, granted by God, to speak freely; to defend yourself and your loved ones; and to enjoy Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.~Dave, from Canada~

⭐If you’re prone to retching on hearing stories of gruel being served up in washbasins, human corpses being shoved under beds, prisoners eating the remains of a dead horse and 80 prisoners crammed into a transit train being left to wet themselves because visits to the toilet took too long to supervise, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is not for you. But if your stomach can stand such tales, and many far worse, the book is quite simply a masterpiece. Written in the spirit of the Star Trekkers, its Nobel Prize-winning author boldly going, like Captain Kirk and his crew, where no man had gone before, it was the first-ever true exposé of the brutality that occurred in the Stalin-era labour camps, or GULAGs as they were known. Predictably its publication in the West resulted in serious consequences for Solzhenitsyn – he was deported to the USA in 1974 – but thank God it was published.I first became acquainted with Solzhenitsyn’s writings whilst a pupil at a well-regarded grammar school in the Home Counties in the 1970s. My third-year class studied ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, which documents a typical day in the life of a prisoner in the “special” camps in which Solzhenitsyn served eight years as an “Article 58er” (basically an anti-Soviet agitator). It interested me sufficiently follow it up with GULAG, to which IVAN DENISOVICH is effectively a prequel. So I purchased a copy in Foyles Bookshop back in late 1976 and read it over the subsequent six months. It really does make IVAN DENISOVICH seem rather tame. Unfortunately, I gave the book away some years after reading it, but the invention of e-books and my recent retirement gave me the money and time to purchase it and re-read it.What struck me in the ‘70s, and now, were the similarities between the attitudes and mindsets of the GULAGs and those which I encountered daily at my school. Was this surprising? Not really, when you consider that many of the parents and teachers of the time had served in prisoner of war camps, albeit more likely German rather than Russian ones. Let’s look at just two examples. The main weapon of torture against GULAG prisoners was the cold. Prisoners working in mine shafts had to strip naked, have cold water poured over them and run naked to their compound. This evokes memories of the compulsory showers that pupils had to endure after compulsory games three days a week, even in midwinter. Not only was the water freezing, the teachers would walk round the changing rooms, obviously “checking out” the naked teenage bodies of their pupils. In Stalinist Russia, the state was always right and its subjects always wrong. Every complaint ever made to a camp chief was somehow proven wrong. This sounds like a parallel to my school experience, where a succession of complaints about sex abuse by a “Jimmy Saville” teacher were dismissed for alleged “lack of evidence” even though they had been well documented with dates and times. The offender was caught, pleaded guilty and jailed – 20 years later. Sexual abuse of women prisoners was commonplace in GULAGs ; many women got favourable treatment in return for granting sexual favours to male guards.The GULAG experience stayed in prisoners’ minds for many years afterwards. Solzhenitsyn deserves kudos for recognising that the human defence mechanism does not allow such experiences to be forgotten. In Volume 3, he appeals to fellow writers not to write that people discharged from camps have forgotten it all and are happy. Absolutely true, and a parallel to some of my unfortunate classmates who were on anti-depressants for a long time after leaving the school,With free speech now under serious threat from moral totalitarianism, GULAG is actually more relevant now than it has ever been. In Volume 1, Solzhenitsyn recalls a case of a university lecturer losing his job for quoting Lenin, but not Stalin, in a lecture. The parallels with what is happening now, with academics losing their jobs and receiving death threats for questioning the wisdom of gender self-identification, and stating the biologically provable fact that only women can get pregnant, are alarming. A central message of GULAG is that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Now, it would seem, is a good time to reiterate that message and read this book, to which I award five well-deserved stars.

⭐The full Gulag Archipelago is over 1,400 pages. The abridged version is 1/3 that lengths. Frankly, I think the abridged version covers most of the major themes, without getting bogged down in the details of the trials, and so forth. Interestingly, Western schools don’t teach about the atrocities of the Socialists in Russia, even though Stalin and his henchmen killed upwards of 25 million citizens. That same criticism could be about Mao’s purge (perhaps 45 million dead), or even Pol Pot’s killing fields (around 2 million casualties). For this reason, Socialism is now cheerfully endorsed by the people who teach our kids. It is important that we learn from history, lest we be condemned to make the same mistakes, over and over. This is a good read, though not for the faint-of-heart.

⭐Previously I heard the name of the book, and the writer as well, mentioned here and there. But reading Jordan B Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” made me realize the true importance of this one of a kind literary achievement. The writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature but that aside, this is perhaps the singular important documented example of human determination and courage of the bloody twentieth century. Soviet Gulags (similar to nazi concentration camps) are one of the most inhuman experiments executed by “civilized” human beings and the writer himself was a first-hand victim of the experiment. He not only has provided an elaborate description of those man-made hells, but where lies the actual brilliance of this book is: he tries to explore the Significance and Meaning of his anguished experience. Why did he suffer so much without any tangible reason?What is the significance of being horribly tortured by a fellow human being? Read this book with utmost seriousness because make no mistake, history never repeats itself without giving any hint beforehand.PS- This Vintage Classic edition is an one-volume abridged version of the three-volume original one. And the abridgement is sanctioned by the author himself. Given the sheer volume of the original version (though not at all avoidable, if interest permits), this is very much suitable to read for a general reader.

Keywords

Free Download The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation in PDF format
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation PDF Free Download
Download The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation 2020 PDF Free
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation 2020 PDF Free Download
Download The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation PDF
Free Download Ebook The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation