Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2782042 in Books
• Published on: 1975
• Format: Import
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Hardcover
• 712 pages

Customer Reviews

A Literary Mount Everest
The wit and wisdom of this book is almost beyond comprehension. I defy anyone to read the chapter, "The Ascent", and then tell me they have read a better twenty pages of literature....from any era.

From the Back Cover
"...may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning acheivement." --Time

In "The Destructive-Labor Camps," the first part of this volume, we experience the terrible plight of the working prisoners, the cruelty and caprice of camp authorities, and the tragic fate of the women prisoners and the luckless children born to them.

This chronicle of inhumanity is made bearable by the vitality and emotional range of Solzhenitsyn's writing that make his work on the "Archipelago" of Soviet repression one of the extraordinary literary events of our age.

"The Soul and Barbed Wire," the second part of this volume, is a magnificent statement on the possibilities of purification and redemption through suffering.

It was at the threshold of the camps that the first volume of GULAG left us. GULAG TWO takes us inside them.

A Gulag Mini-Encyclopedia. Debunks Gulag Whitewashes
This review is based on the original 1970's English-language Harper & Row edition.

There is so much here about Russian history, Soviet thinking and policies, and the situation inside the Gulags. Because there are so many topics and issues raised in this combined volume, I will elaborate on only a few of them.

Solzhenitsyn rarely mentions Gulag Poles in this set of volumes. In one year, 2,100 Zolotisty Polish inmates had been reduced to 168 survivors (p. 131).

The Soviet concentration camps have sometimes been favorably compared to the Nazi German ones by western liberals. We hear, for instance, that at least the children were well treated. Tell that to the Gulag children, some imprisoned for political crimes at the dangerous age of six! (p. 463). Besides physical suffering, Gulag children underwent severe de-moralization, in effect becoming amoral beasts (e. g., p. 452). Finally: "They didn't hesitate to liquidate the `kulak' families right down to tiny children, and they even wrote about it proudly in the newspapers." (pp. 370-371).

Communist apologists have claimed that Gulag deaths were caused largely by passive negligence, Soviet-system inefficiencies, wartime disruptions and privations, etc. This is nonsense. To illustrate: "...police dogs are fed better than prisoners..." (p. 534).

Well, at least there were no gas chambers in the Gulags. But so what? They weren't needed. Referring to the primitive state of Gulag life, labor, and death, Solzhenitsyn quipped: "That's what our gas execution van consisted of. We didn't have any gas for the gas chamber." (p. 91). In describing the Belomor Canal project, Solzhenitsyn commented: "Stalin simply needed a great construction project SOMEWHERE which would devour many working hands and many lives (the surplus of people as a result of the liquidation of the kulaks), with the reliability of the gas execution van but more cheaply, and which would at the same time leave a great monument to his reign of the same general sort as the pyramids." (p. 86. Emphasis his).

Some have argued that there was no Gulag equivalent to the Nazi death camps--no camps to which admission absolutely guaranteed death. In fact, there were. "Certain work brigades (Ogurtsov) died off totally, including the brigadiers." (p. 221). Also: "The real Solovki was in the logging operations, at the remote work sites. But it is precisely those distant backwoods that are most difficult to learn about nowadays, because THOSE people did not survive." (p. 54. Emphasis his). "During the war years (on war rations), the camp inmates called three weeks at logging `DRY EXECUTION.'" (p. 199. Emphasis his). "We are not able to enumerate the countless logging camps. They constituted half the Archipelago." (p. 593).

Solzhenitsyn cites 15 million Gulag inmates, at any one time, based on the ROSSIYA-SSSR encyclopedia--a figure also endorsed by former inmates (p. 205). According to émigré Professor of Statistics Kurganov, the Gulag claimed 66,000,000 lives from 1917 to 1959 (p. 10).