Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85768 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 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

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.

Already we have begun to forget
Recently i went into a large and well known bookstore in Glasgow because I wanted to buy this truly great book as a gift. The store was overrun by children and their parents who were buying the "new Harry Potter" When I asked an assisstant to find out if I could still buy this book in the original three volume edition she was unable to tell me. She had heard neither of The Gulag nor of Solzhenitsyn. She had to leave our conversation here as she had more Harry Potters' to attend to. Somehow this difficulty acted as a spur and made me more determined than ever to find the three volume set as a gift for my friend.... This truly great and historic book should be required reading. It is a matter of National Importance tha works like this are always available in print and always there when required. Totalatarianism has not gone away. It has changed it's clothes, hired some PR and now wears a little tasteful jewellery but it is still with us, still very much alive. The weight of Solzhenitsyns' experience and his extraordinary ability to wite seriously, in a way that is now qite uncommon in the west, makes these volumes vital literature and a compelling vision of a past coming to life again in Central Europe and elsewhere. One of the truly great artistic achievements of the 20th Century and one of the most powerful episodes of defiance and courage in the face of terror you will ever read. `it's true greatness, however, might lie in it's warmth and it's love for fellow prisoners. An essential life affirming testament to courage and decency.

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.