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Cover of The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  • 577 pages · about 10 hours
  • First published 1970
  • 88 editions
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1 About this book

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.

Good for readers who want: history, a classic, politics, and a long read.

  • Political prisoners
  • History
  • Classics
  • Politics and government
  • Politics
  • Social science
  • Sociology
  • Authors, biography

2 About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1918–2008

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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