Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn) reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state, that ruled the lives of millions.
Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims, men, women, and children, we encounter secret police operations, labour camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the ‘welcome’ that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenceless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (1973-1978) – a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle – has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn’s move back to Russia. Unmissable.
Available in paperback at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gulag-Archipelago-Abridged-Harvill-Editions/dp/1843430851/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389703878&sr=8-1&keywords=gulag+archipelago
496 pages in Harvill Press
ISBN 978-1843430858
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn