A Book Review: Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

(posted by John)

I have always enjoyed reading the Russian novelists -- e.g. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn. However, since their writings often resemble phonebooks instead of novels, perhaps it is simply a disguised form of masochism. :-)

Whatever the case may be, recently I've really gotten into Solzhenitsyn, first reading The First Circle and now am working through The Gulag Archipelago. Both of these novels deal with Stalinist Russia and the islands of forced labor camps littered throughout the former Eastern Bloc. There millions of innocent people were either sent away for decades to perform hard labor and/or were executed.

One of the most shocking aspects of Stalin's terror was the self-propelling nature of the viscious cycle he created. Because of his own policies of massive imprisonment and murder (esp. of the working classes) that inevitably led to food shortages and economic devastation, Stalin blamed these problems on the continuing actions of ever-increasing "enemies of the State," and therefore arrested and sentenced/executed even more innocent people, torturing them until they signed false confessions, in order to prove the government's argument that the continuing economic problems of the Soviet Union were the product of saboteurs and not the result of a tyrannical government.

My interest in these books stems from desiring to understand--at least in part--what Eastern Europeans experienced as a result of living under Stalin's essentially malevolent dictatorship. For me, the difficulty with reading The Gulag Archipelago isn't due to its length, rather it is from the fact that it isn't really a "novel." As Solzhenitsyn notes on the first page,

"In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names... If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described."

And because of the horrible reality of the events described in the book, I've found that I can only take in so many pages before it becomes too much to deal with emotionally.

If you have ever read (or decide to pick up this book and read it sometime!), I would enjoy hearing your thoughts as well.