by Edward E. Ericson Jr., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
bookshelves: autumn-2012, slavic, nonfiction, ouch, nobel-laureate, fraudio, epic-proportions, autobiography-memoir, boo-scary, bullies, execution, gangsters, holocaust-genocide, lifestyles-deathstyles, philosophy, politics, published-1958, racism, recreational-homicide, true-grime Read from Septe...
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is a history of the Soviet Russian system of forced labor concentration camps from 1918 to 1956. The preface by Anne Applebaum says it destroyed the prestige of the Soviet Union and the belief that its version of communism, at least, had any moral legitimacy and as s...
blurb - The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin from 1924...
This is a book I think everyone must read, and the surprising thing about it is that it's easy to read and extremely involving. It's not just facts and dates and paper outrage. Very very enlightening book that makes you want to learn more about Russia in this period. I read Kolyma Tales soon afterwa...
One of my all time favorites.One of the accounts from the book that still makes me laugh (you read that right, though I shouldn't really) is:A political meeting was going on with about 1000 - 2000 people present in the hall somewhere in USSR (I can't recall the exact location and time of the event)....
Solzhenitsyn systematically goes through the horrors of the Soviet slave labour camps, one of the blackest chapters in world history. I read this book as a teenager, not long after it came out, and I was appalled that my parents had presented the Soviet Union as anything other than a monstrosity. Fo...
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