Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104990 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Its importance can hardly be exaggerated," said Doris Lessing. "It helped to bring down an empire." For those who doubt that literature can change the world, here is evidence to the contrary. Solzhenitsyn's scorching, brilliant, part-autobiographical expose of the dreary oppressiveness and institutionalised cruelty of the Soviet regime, really did contribute to the final collapse of the Union in 1989. It also exposed how, if Hitler had the deaths of well over 6 million on his hands, the figure for Stalin might be nearer 60 million. This is not only history-in-the-making, but also an absolutely compulsive read (especially in this 400-page version abridged from the 1800 pages of the three-volume original.) From the breathtaking opening page, when Solzhenitsyn depicts starving prisoners of the Kolyma gulags, discovering a deep-frozen, prehistoric salamander in an icy stream and devouring it on the spot, "with relish," he holds you rapt, like the Ancient Mariner, with his "skinny hand" and "glittering eye." You have no choice but to listen to him, especially when he derides those who say "It would not happen here". "Alas," he says, "all the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth." One of the very few undeniable books of the century. --Christopher Hart

Customer Reviews

Monumental Account of Institutionalised Inhumanity
One of the most monumental accounts of one of the cruellest ideologies of history,this book should be read by all
Layer by layer Solzhenitsyn exposes the hideous system of imprisonment ,death and torture that he refers to as the 'Gulag Archipelago'
He strips away that the misconception of the good Tsar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs and exposes how it was Lenin and his henchmen who put into place the brutal totalitarianism , which would be inherited and continued by Stalin
In fact the only thing that Stalin really did differently was to introduce a more personalised ,Imperial style of rule but otherwise carried on the evil work of Lenin
It was Lenin who imprisoned the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) , Mensheviks,Social Democrats,Social Revolutionaries Anarchists and independent intelligentsia and had many killed
In this way he completely destroyed all opposition to Bolshevik hegemony
Under Lenin the persecution started of anybody convicted of religious activity and the complete destruction of the church in Russia
And it was Lenin who began the genocide of whole ethnic groups that would later gain momentum under Stalin
Under the Communist system all that is spiritual or not purely material in nature is destroyed.And we discover what a horror Marx's idea of 'dialectic materialism ' really is
But I cannot describe the horrors which Solzhenitsyn outlines in this book :the hideous torutres,the slave markets selling of young women into sexual slavery
Solzhenitsyn describes how the prison system of the Tsarist system was compassionate by comparison but the mild abuses of Tsarist imprisonment where reacted to with a shrill outcry that never greeted the horrors of Bolshevism and Communism
As he says in his ever present biting sarcasm "Its just not fashionable,just not fashionable
And even today,even after the fall of Communism in Europe (though its iron grip remains strong in parts of Asia,Africa and in Cuba) its still not regarded as fashionable to highlight the horrors of Communism as it is to do so for other human rights abuses of this and other centuries

One of the first glimpses into Stalin's nightmare universe.
This circulated in samizdat form for a few years,until a reader,after being arrested with a copy,committed suicide.Solzhenitsyn then sent the manuscript to the West.In 1974,after it was published (I think in France),the Soviet goverment put him on a plane to Frankfurt and stripped Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship.He didn't return to his homeland till the 1990s.
After this was published in the West,nobody had any excuse to be blind to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin.It was the vogue amongst leftists to blame the monstrosities of the USSR's history exclusively on Stalin,but the Soviet system of state terror,concentration camps and mass murder began with Lenin,as this book makes extremely clear.
Solzhenitsyn explores the history of the camps,their monstrous conditions,the total disregard for the lives of the prisoners(the zeks)and pulls together a suprising amount of eyewitness testimonies from survivors-the suprise is that there were any.
There's even some humour,of the blackest sort.An example;
"What's your name?"
"Ivan Ivanovitch,comrade guard"
"How long is your sentance?"
"10 years"
"What did you get that for?"
"Nothing at all"
"You're lying.You get five years for nothing at all".
One of the most important books of the late 20th century.If you really want to appreciate the mass terror that dominated so much of the world in this time period,you really have to read this.If you can get hold of the three-volume version printed in the 1970s,you're extra lucky.

Sometimes there's just not enough stars
This is unquestionably the best non fiction book I have ever read. It is at once profound, intelligent, affecting, exquisitely readable (excepting some of the more factual chapters, perhaps), terrifying, uplifting and occaionally - unexpectedly - very humourous. Solzhenitsyn manages to convey the details of the most outrageous atrocities without ever losing a sense of what is good about the human race and without ever losing an acutely righteous anger about what is bad about it.

Personally I have spent the last two months since reading this book all but beating everyone I know into reading it; some books, after all, should be reccomended highly, but this book should be mandatory, a rite of passage for anyone who has any opinion on history or morality - hell, for anyone who has the ability to read.