The Gulag Archipelago

21 hrs. 30 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Narrator Sergey Garmash

Description

“The Archipelago Rises from the Sea”—that is how the chapter about the legendary early Soviet Solovki is titled. What do the outlines of the surfaced Archipelago look like? Following the author, we step into a boat on which we will sail from island to island—sometimes squeezing through narrow channels, sometimes rushing along straight canals, sometimes drowning in the waves of the open sea. Such is the power of his art that from casual spectators we quickly turn into participants in the journey: we flinch at the hiss of “You are arrested!”, spend the entire sleepless first night in a cell, with a pounding heart walk to the first interrogation, helplessly thrash in the mill of the investigation, glance next door into the cells of condemned prisoners—and through the comedy of the “trial,” or even without it, we are thrown onto the islands of the Archipelago.

Day after day we ride in the overcrowded “wagon-train” packed with prisoners, tormented by thirst; on transfers we are robbed by the criminals in charge; in the camps on Kolyma and in Siberia, exhausted by hunger, we freeze on “general work details.” If we still have enough strength, we look around and listen to stories—by peasants and priests, by intellectuals and workers, by former party members and soldiers, by informers and “oddballs,” by criminals and juvenile delinquents, people of all faiths and peoples who lived in the Soviet Union.
This book is about the ascent of the human Spirit, about his one-on-one struggle with evil. That is why, when the reader closes it, besides pain and anger, they feel a surge of strength and light.

Read from the abridged 2010 edition.