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A review by mj470
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5.0
Nothing in this is for the faint of heart. I started reading it years ago and it filled my head with terrible dreams. It's maybe the most graphic book I've ever read, but it's the most excellent condemnation of communism ever written. Solzhenitsyn lays out chapter by chapter topics like interrogations and gives a detailed and cold accounting of terror after terror. It's very difficult to stomach. Then his personal thoughts on the reliance of the human spirit and the testaments of faith shines through in truly excellent prose.
These books are required reading for every school in Russia. It should be everywhere. He lays out exactly where ideologies lead to violent authoritarianism. He has a very interesting chapter on how the smartest engineers were rounded up and sent to the Gulag because they criticized the regime. It's his opinion that Russia never recovered technologically from that. The scale of death that went through Russia and Eastern Europe during this time is clearly one of the longest and bloodiest periods in our modern age. The West was sadly very complicit in letting the "meat grinder" (as they call the Soviet run areas of Eastern Europe and Russia) destroy so many people. Solzhenitsyn makes that point from his perspective as a soldier who was sent to the Gulag after the war.
It's a heavy read but very based and worth the challenge.
These books are required reading for every school in Russia. It should be everywhere. He lays out exactly where ideologies lead to violent authoritarianism. He has a very interesting chapter on how the smartest engineers were rounded up and sent to the Gulag because they criticized the regime. It's his opinion that Russia never recovered technologically from that. The scale of death that went through Russia and Eastern Europe during this time is clearly one of the longest and bloodiest periods in our modern age. The West was sadly very complicit in letting the "meat grinder" (as they call the Soviet run areas of Eastern Europe and Russia) destroy so many people. Solzhenitsyn makes that point from his perspective as a soldier who was sent to the Gulag after the war.
It's a heavy read but very based and worth the challenge.