The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grand masterwork and winner of The Nobel Prize In Literature 1970.

A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author’s wish and with his full co-operation.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, a year after the Bolsheviks stormed to power throughout Russia. He studied at the University of Rostov and served with distinction in the Russian Army during World War II. In 1945, he was arrested and imprisoned in a labor camp because he had allegedly made a derogatory remark about Stalin.