The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ) is a book in three volumes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The gulags were the forced labour camps in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s.

The Gulag Archipelago

Italian cover
Author	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Original title	Архипела́г ГУЛА́Г
Translator	Geneviève Johannet, José Johannet, Nikita Struve (French) Thomas P. Whitney (English)
Country	France
Language	Russian
Publisher	Éditions du Seuil
Published in English	1974
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	0-06-013914-5
OCLC	802879

The narrative relies on accounts from people who experienced the events, including the author himself, who was a prisoner in one of the labour camps. The book was written between 1958 and 1968. It was published in the West in 1973. In the Soviet Union, the book circulated in samizdat until its official publication in 1989.

The word "archipelago" compares the network of labor camps to a vast chain of islands.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, The Gulag Archipelago is included in the high-school curriculum in Russia. It has been compulsory reading for high-school students since 2009.

Literary criticism

• "It is a warning to us all of what it means to lose freedom, but it is a warning to tyrants as well, that they can never hope to win in the end".
• "To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age".

The Gulag Archipelago Media

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  Cover of the 1973 Penguin Edition (1st) of A. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, printed in Paris in Russian.

Related pages

• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

Other websites

Quotations related to The Gulag Archipelago at Wikiquote

• The Gulag Archipelago in English, Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.