A Literary-Historical Account of The Gulag Archipelago

Gulag
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University student Mathew Matt Kafker loves reading. One of the books Matt Kafker is reading in 2019 is “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

The Gulag Archipelago is a historically vivid description of the horrors committed by the Soviet Union government on its own people held in labor camps following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 through all the way into Stalin’s rule. Gulag is an acronym for the Soviet Union’s governing agency for labor camps, while archipelago is a metaphor that aptly captures how these labor camps were spread out, like a chain of islands.

The book draws heavily from the experiences of the author, himself a survivor of the prison camps, and those of other prisoners. It also borrows from historical sources, including letters. The book gives readers outside the Soviet Union a picture into the regime’s brutality, describing how camps that only held a few people in 1917 saw their numbers swell to 15 million in the 1940s, many of whom were “politicals.” It chronicles how these people were transferred from camp to camp all the while being subjected to starvation, rape, torture, and inhuman living conditions.

The first volume of the book was published in 1973 in Paris, France. Afterward, the Soviet press denounced Solzhenitsyn. He was arrested a year later, charged with treason, and exiled from the Soviet Union.