Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was one of the most notable Russian authors of the 20th century, having written perhaps the greatest nonfiction book of his time. His magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago (1973) is a riveting chronicle of Solzhenitsyn’s enduring punishment by Soviet Communism in the harshest prison system on the planet. It contains records of 227 other individuals who suffered in the Gulag and provides interviews, reports, letters and memoirs that vividly describe the horrors endured by prisoners. Most prisoners, including Solzhenitsyn were branded as enemies of the state, with many having been former Soviet government officials or military. Solzhenitsyn was himself a decorated captain in the Soviet Army, detained in prison for his outspoken criticism of the evils of the Soviet Union and criticism of Stalin sent to friends via private letters. Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in the Gulag was a transformative experience that enabled him to account for not only his own monumental sufferings behind bars, but revealed a rare record of 40 years of unjust Soviet terror and subjugation over Russia. Prior to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, most citizens in Russia were content with Communist propaganda – blaming Stalin for the creating the horrible prison and various concentration camps to torture his political dissidents. However, Solzhenitsyn points out that it was Lenin, not Stalin, who created the Gulag, while the first concentration camps emerged during the 1920s under the Leninist government. Solzhenitsyn’s work also reveals that the great purge that saw the execution of many leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution was merely one of the many waves of mass death, with far more people having been killed by the end of the 1940s and into the early 1950s.
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