Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago

The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 to 1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation was published in Russian by the YMCA Press in Paris on December 28, 1973. Two more volumes followed in 1974 and 1975. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's work traces the Soviet system of prisons, transports and labor camps from Lenin's first camps to the death of Stalin, and it names the Gulag, the state camp administration, as an 'archipelago' of islands scattered across the country.¹²

Solzhenitsyn, himself a prisoner from 1945 to 1953, wrote it in secret from 1958 to 1968, using his own experience and the testimony of 227 former prisoners, many of whom contacted him after Ivan Denisovich appeared in 1962. In 1973 the KGB seized a copy of the manuscript from a typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, who died after interrogation. Solzhenitsyn then authorized publication in the West. In February 1974 he was arrested, stripped of Soviet citizenship and expelled to West Germany.¹²³

The book was a sensation in the West and changed how many readers, including many on the political left in Europe, saw the Soviet Union. Historians have since revised some of his figures with archival evidence, but the basic account is supported. Anne Applebaum estimates that about 18 million people passed through the camps and colonies. The book was first published in the Soviet Union in 1989, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and died in 2008.¹²