The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago, history and memoir of life in the Soviet Union’s prison camp system by Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in Paris as Arkhipelag GULag in three volumes (1973–75). The word Gulag is a Russian acronym for the Soviet government agency that supervised the vast network of labour camps. Solzhenitsyn used the word archipelago as a metaphor for the camps, which were scattered through the sea of civil society like a chain of islands extending “from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus.”

The Gulag Archipelago is an exhaustive and compelling account based on Solzhenitsyn’s own eight years in Soviet prison camps, on other prisoners’ stories committed to his photographic memory while in detention, and on letters and historical sources. The work represents the author’s attempt to compile a literary and historical record of the Soviet regime’s comprehensive but deeply irrational use of terror against its own population. A testimonial to Stalinist atrocities, The Gulag Archipelago devastated readers outside the Soviet Union with its descriptions of the brutality of the Soviet regime. The book gave new impetus to critics of the Soviet system and caused many sympathizers to question their position.

The first two volumes describe the arrest, conviction, transport, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims from 1918 to 1956. Solzhenitsyn alternates dispassionate historical exposition with harrowing personal accounts from prison life. The third volume documents attempted escapes and subversions from within the system.

After the first volume was published in Paris in 1973, the official Soviet press virulently denounced Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested and exiled from the country in February 1974. He dedicated the book “to all those who did not live to tell it” and donated the proceeds from its sale to the Russian Social Fund for Persecuted Persons and Their Families.