The Gulag Archipelago

What The Gulag Archipelago is about

Solzhenitsyn called the book "an experiment in literary investigation". In three volumes and seven parts, it describes the Soviet system of forced-labour camps, the Gulag, from the Revolution to the 1950s: how people were arrested, interrogated and sentenced; how they were transported; how the camps worked and how prisoners died in them; the special camps for political prisoners; uprisings; and exile. The "archipelago" of the title is the network of camps scattered across the country like islands, invisible to ordinary citizens. The book draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the accounts of more than 200 former prisoners, combining history, testimony, argument and bitter irony.

The ban, in full

Solzhenitsyn wrote the book in secret between 1958 and 1968, hiding parts of the manuscript with friends; very few people saw it whole. In 1973 the KGB interrogated one of his typists, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and seized a hidden copy; she died soon afterwards. Knowing the secret was out, Solzhenitsyn authorised publication abroad, and the first volume appeared in Russian from the YMCA-Press in Paris in December 1973.

The Soviet press attacked him as a traitor. On 12 February 1974 he was arrested and charged with treason, and the next day he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a plane to West Germany. Possessing the book in the USSR was dangerous; it circulated in smuggled copies and as samizdat. It was published in the Soviet Union only in 1989, in Novy Mir, during glasnost.

About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was an artillery officer in the Red Army when he was arrested in 1945 for criticising Stalin in letters to a friend. He spent eight years in camps and then internal exile in Kazakhstan. In 1962, with Khrushchev's personal approval, Novy Mir published his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first Soviet publication about the camps. As the political climate tightened his later work was banned, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 but did not travel to receive it. After his expulsion he lived in Zurich and then in Cavendish, Vermont, and returned to Russia in 1994.

Which edition to read

The full work is about 1,800 pages. Many readers start with the one-volume abridgement that Solzhenitsyn authorised, edited by Edward Ericson; recent editions include a foreword by Jordan Peterson. The complete three-volume English translation, by Thomas Whitney and Harry Willetts, is also in print.

Reception and legacy

The book's publication in the West had a large effect on public opinion, particularly in France, where it led many on the left to rethink their view of the Soviet Union. In 2009 an abridged version was added to the Russian school curriculum.

Questions

Why was The Gulag Archipelago banned?

Because it documented the Soviet camp system and blamed it on the Soviet state itself, not only on Stalin.

Is it still banned in Russia?

No; it has been published in Russia since 1989. More: books banned in the Soviet Union, Doctor Zhivago.