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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  TadAD | May 28, 2008 |  Didn't finish. Very plain styling, almost reads like a timeline or a list. The first third is tragic, and recounts the jailings and reasons for the purges but doesn't delve to deeply into Gulag life. Tragic, but to laborious to finish the book. tkraft | Apr 9, 2008 | Solzhenitsyn's most ambitious and daring book, the one which cinched his Nobel Prize and got him expelled from the Soviet Union. It is a history of the Soviet prison system (which consisted mostly of political prisoners) from 1918 to 1956. This is a massive and depressing book; reading it at the time made me despair for the Russian people, and glad now that this brutal system is no more - not that things are so great there yet. (  )1  burnit99 | Feb 20, 2007 | The first and by far best volume of Solzhenitsyn's three volume prison camp memiors. Should be read. Smiley | Feb 18, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully.
Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)
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Absolutely mesmerizing. (