The Gulag Archipelago Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.)

I LOVE history, but was surprised I had such little knowledge of the events that transpired in Russia during this time period. I am just stupified as to why this is not taught in schools...well maybe not these days. While it is a somewhat difficult to read book, you will still get the idea as to what is happening. I accidentally bought 2 of these books when I made my purchase. It will certainly go to someone who also enjoys history. I do not regret my purchase at all!!! And it is just too good of a price to pass up. Even if you don't finish it, you will at least get an idea as to what was going on. And honestly, those who don't learn from history, are bound to repeat it. I could see this sort of thing happening again...in one way or another. Thanks to the great Jordan Peterson for recommending this book!!!

Solzhenitsyn's autobiography of his experience in the Soviet slave labor camps, an "experiment in literary investigation", stands as a thundering condemnation of the entire rotten enterprise of Bolshevik-Soviet Communism. A great book, which opened tsunamis of controversy and adulation when it was first published, it was abridged magnificently in the 1980s, with the author's full endorsement, losing none of its original titanic force. Anyone and everyone today who would like to understand how and, maybe why a government that promised human liberation, equality and emancipation would begin to enslave its own people, and to consign them to the nothingness of savage internment in remote slave camps where human life was worth nothing at all should read, and re-read this magnificent book.

This book is arguably the most important book of the 20th Century. I had put off reading it, but wish I had not. This is a description of the Russian prison system, developed due to the Soviet system of political injustice, which flowed naturally out of its adoption of naturalistic and materialistic atheism. How far are we in America from this sort of thing? It happened in modern Russia and in modern Germany, and it is still happening around the world. When the government is the supplier of our needs, and when average people lose their moral courage to speak, to suffer, and even to die for what is right, this is the result. Does not matter what the geographical location is, this book tells us about ourselves. True Christianity in America holds this at bay, but as we walk away from Christ as a nation, this book reveals what our future could be.

The author won the Nobel Peace prize for this landmark literary work, the one book more responsible for the end of the ex-Soviet system of brutality in Russia under Lenin and Stalin. After HEARING about the horrors of Siberia, after reading this tome, you'll feel like you've LIVED in it. It was a tough read, but a brutal and true morality tale to remind us of what can happen when freedom is replaced by a monstrous and repressive governmental system.

Already knew a lot of this history but Gulag is on Jordan Peterson's reading list so.... Gulag is not the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsy, nor is it a history book- it is much more than that. The real value, and I think a main reason its on JP's list, is in the underlying message that this is not the story of Russia, or the Russian people, or Stalin- or anyone- but of everyone. Every single one of us, every day, in ways big and small, acts in ways that serve to bring forth either a better world, or the hell of the Gulag Archipelago. Be warned, this is some very unpleasant reading. No one wants to think of being imprisoned indefinitely in a "cell" too small even to sit or lie down in, let alone in one with so many bedbugs they are falling off the ceiling and crawling from everywhere, so many you cannot kill them all even if you could stomach the stench. But it will be worth it to absorb the lesson that this is the cost and end result of lies. Speak the truth. At whatever cost. If you want to know how high the cost of lies can be, read the Gulag Archipelago.

What communists did to Russians was as bad or worse than what Nazis did to Jews. I would add this practical piece of advice: Solzyenitsyn points out that almost all the people hauled away to the Gulag were done so not via forced round-ups of many people at once, but by being picked off by the security forces one by one. In other words, you, the victim, would be stopped in the street, the office, school or in his apartment/flat by one or two men with a car waiting nearby and told, sometimes even politely asked, to "come with us" (remember the scene in Godfather I when Tom Hagen was stopped by "the Turk" while exiting a store after X-Mass shopping and quietly told to "get in the car"?). And you'd go. This method has the virtue of being relatively quiet and hard to notice so that no would be rescuers really noticed the incident and no crowd would ever gather. You went quietly into the night. So, the advice? Always make a BIG stink if anyone tries to take you away. A crowd will gather or someone will record the incident with a phone, perhaps even intervene. Thats your best hope. Someone has to see and bear witness.

A difficult but important read. Probably one of the most important and necessary nonfiction works ever. Sometimes I felt like beating my chest at the madness recounted in this tragic omnibus. If people were honest, and if they read this book, there is no way society would countenance socialism and the political left’s love affair with Marxist ideology. It would treated the same as Nazism is treated on the right. The abridged version also makes it easier to go through. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. And here’s how.

Worth a read. Mr Solzhenitsyn bears witness to the view that communism cannot exist at scale without totalitarianism or other authoritarianism.

TLDR.

Si queremos preservar y alquilatar la libertad, este libro es obligado. ¡Cuánta crueldad y destrucción de un pueblo hacia su propio pueblo! La genialidad de Solzhenitsyn de recordar lo que vivió, nombres, fechas, incidentes, detalles, y salir a escribirlos, buscar testimonios y dar a conocer la mons

The book is well written, detailing the most important parts and happenings of the arrests, trials and days in the gulag where people where treated as bad as the jews in the concentracion camps or even worse in some cases. The book also details how even the exiles didn't find any peace and weren't treated any better. Pointless executions and killings, including children (who were also arrested and put into gulags) are written in the book in a painstakingly and heart bending manner for the writer who seems to write with an anguish, anger and an heart full of pain for all the unnecessary killings, arrests and persecutions aimed at groups, sometimes purely, sorely and entirely because certain individuals belonged to a certain group (kulaks). Reccomended to read if you don't or can't read the three original volumes, that are also reccomended and that display the whole communist dealings in full detail.

Mandatory reading for understanding the danger of collectivist ideologies. The book is challenging but rewarding.