The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 | Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 | Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn | Marxism: Dormant, but not dead

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The Gulag Archipel...

	The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 108 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS WORK YET, YOU REALLY SHOULD!

So much has been written about this particular work that little I say here will have any great meaning nor any great insight. When finishing the reading of a work such as this, it is tempting to go into line after line of pontificates..this I won't do. I will say though that this work is important. Not only do we learn, as if we did not already know, the horrible things men can do to other men, it also gives us a great insight to the cold war, why it was fought, and what the outcome could have been if the wrong side had won. For me, and I have given this work several readings over the years, this is one of the more important books written in the past 100 years. I is some comfort to me to know that I and my family were able to live in a relatively free society and while that society might not be perfect, it is certainly better that that delt some people in this world. Unlike some of the reviewers here, I would recommend that the statistics quoted in the book be ignored. They are somewhat meaningless. Rather focus on the writer, his thoughts, his feelings and focus on his countrymen who lived through these times. Highly recommend this one.

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Marxism: Dormant, but not dead

I can think of no other book, fiction or nonfiction, that has so captured the evil we faced from the Soviet Union. Orwell accomplished much with 1984 and Animal Farm, but here we have something much more valuable: genuine life experience. Solzhenitsyn doesn't just pen an autobiography with the Gulag Archipelago. He recounts, examines, and criticizes the entire Communist/Socialist/Marxist worldview, and the reality that came from the theory. The last century cannot be properly understood without reading this book. It is my belief that socialism will rise again - not in our lifetimes, but somewhere down the road when intellectuals agree that "Well, mistakes were made, but we're so much more advanced now." The movement will return under another name. This book is the cure.

There are so many anecdotes, statistics, personal experiences, and cited resources in the Gulag Archipelago that a single review cannot hope to capture the breadth of this work. The saying is correct: great atrocities have been committed in the name of social justice. So it was with the Marxist worldview. The Soviet Union once shot 40,000 of its own citizens in a month of peacetime for 'counter-revolutionary' actions. They would herd thousands onto aging, floating barges and tow it out to the middle of the ocean, where they would sink the barge to kill the people. Some (Western intellectuals, mainly), try to forget this sort of thing happened, but Solzhenitsyn shows this was a logical progression of Marxist and socialistic philosophies. The entire worldview is wrong and malignant, and history has shown it to the dustbin for now. What remains are the fumes of Marxism. One example is political correctness, which is Soviet propaganda writ small. The intention of PC is not to persuade, but to humiliate dissenters into silence. It's a brilliant ploy, really, because by keeping your mouth shut and going along, everyone becomes 'just a little guilty'.

Anyway, the Gulag Archipelago should be buried in every time capsule, recommended to friends, and airlifted to every university in this country. The reason? I'll let Solzhenitsyn explain. "Everyone knew, of course, that arrests were being made every day and every hour, but no one was to be horrified by the sight of large numbers of [prisoners] together. In Orel in 1938, you could hardly hide the fact that there was no home in the city where there hadn't been arrests, and weeping women in their peasant carts blocked the square in front of the Orel Prison just as in Surikov's painting The Execution of Streltsy. (Oh, who one day will paint this latter-day tragedy for us? But no one will. It's not fashionable, not fashionable...)"

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The Reference in Gulag History

If you read this reference book and then a day in the life of.....you will have dived deep enough....if you want to get a women's perspective, check out "Till my Tale is Told" or the amazing account from Verlam Shalamov and you will be all set to fight any discourse trying to prove that those times were happy times (I have heard it, as amazing as this can seem!).

This is not a light reading. Cannot be read at the pool or on the beach....living room with a fire on is a better setting.

Clarification

This is just to clarify that this is an Abridgement. I wish it had been more clear in the description that this edition was an abridgement and not the entire work. Fortunately, I Amazon refunded my money as I wish to read The Gulag in all its glory.

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A sobering adjustment of perspective

I'm usually among the first in line to complain about the NSA, COINTELPRO, the modern surveillance-state, the PATRIOT ACT, etc. In spite of this (or, perhaps because of this) it is deeply insightful to read this first-hand account about life in a genuine police-state. Although ponderous and sometimes outright dull, The Gulag Archipelago is an important record of one of the darkest chapters of modern history. Without books like this, who will remember once all the survivors are gone?

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

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