The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 1

What It Is

Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, out of Solzhenitsyn's own eight years in the camps and the testimony of 227 other prisoners who found ways to get their accounts to him. He kept sections buried and scattered. He memorised what he could not risk writing down.

He subtitled it An Experiment in Literary Investigation, and the phrase is exact rather than grand. It is not a history, not a memoir, and not a novel, because none of those forms could carry what he had. So he made a form: documentary evidence, other people's testimony, his own experience, and a narrating voice that argues, mocks, remembers and accuses.

The tone is the shock. Readers expecting a solemn martyrology find sarcasm, black jokes, fury, direct address, and a persistent, unnerving use of the word we. Volume One covers the machinery: how a person was taken, what was done to them next, and the apparatus that made all of it routine.

The KGB seized a copy in 1973. He gave the order to print in Paris. He was arrested, stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the country in February 1974.

Why It Matters

No book has done more political damage to a state. Its effect was greatest in France, where a large Communist party and a generation of intellectuals had spent decades explaining the camps away. The book did not persuade them. It made their position embarrassing, which is more powerful.

Solzhenitsyn's central claim is the one that still causes arguments. He does not let the camps be filed away as one man's aberration, and where he does locate their origin is what the arguing has always been about.

And it is not finally a political book. The famous sentence in it — the one that readers who care nothing for Soviet history carry around for the rest of their lives — is not about politics at all, and you should come on it where he puts it. He is writing about the camps. He is also writing about you.

Before You Read

Volume One runs to some six hundred and sixty pages, twenty-five to thirty hours. It is not intellectually difficult. It is hard in a different way, and the difficulty is that of staying in the room.

Do not binge it. Read it in daylight, in stretches, over weeks or months.

A little Soviet history helps enormously: 1917, the civil war, collectivisation, the show trials of the 1930s. Without that scaffolding some of Solzhenitsyn's sarcasm will pass you by, because he assumes a reader who knows exactly which lie he is skewering.

Which Translation to Read

• Thomas P. Whitney (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), with a foreword by Anne Applebaum — recommended. The original English translation, made under pressure and at speed in the 1970s, and still the one that carries the voice: the irony, the sudden switches from evidence to invective. This edition gives you the complete Parts I and II with a foreword by the best living historian of the camps. The cost: it is long, the footnotes assume a reader who knows the Soviet cast list, and Whitney's English is unmistakably of its decade. View on Amazon →
• The authorised abridgement (Whitney and Harry Willetts, abridged by Edward E. Ericson Jr., Harper Perennial). One volume, about a third of the length, covering all three parts. The sane choice for a reader who is never going to read two thousand pages. The cost: what it cuts is repetition and accumulation, and the accumulation is the argument.
• Vintage Classics (2018), the same abridgement with a foreword by Jordan Peterson. Widely available, and responsible for a large new readership. The cost: the same abridged text, and a foreword that frames the book as a weapon in a contemporary argument rather than letting Solzhenitsyn set his terms.

If you will read one book, read the abridgement; it is a good book. If you will read three, read Whitney unabridged, and understand that the difference is not length but effect.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the footnotes; some of his sharpest material is down there.

Notice how often he turns on the reader, and on himself. He was an artillery officer before he was a prisoner, and he does not exempt himself from the question of what he might have become.

Keep a note of the names. These are real people, and he went to considerable risk to record them; treating them as data is the one response the book cannot survive.

Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich first if you want a way in. It takes an evening, it was published legally in the Soviet Union in 1962, and it is the small door into the largest building in this batch.