This is the book that sobered the French up after the follies of 1968. This is the book that prevented the New York literary cognoscenti from completely dismissing Solzhenitsyn as a ranting bumpkin. This is the book that gave hope to Russians that the mass graves of zeks would not be unaccounted for, after all. And, this is the book that inoculated me against my college education. It is the literary equivalent of that famous photo of the lone man facing down a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.
As Solzhenitsyn is at pains to impress upon us, it is not a political expose'. Rather, it is an effort to collect victims' testimonies to the savage early decades of Soviet rule. It is also, and more importantly, an exploration of the human soul under all-out assault by the state. As Western leftists, complicit in the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, innocently glided from "It never happened" to "Who cares? It can never happen again", this book brought all the evil of Soviet communism into the light. That light was the moral vision of arguably the 20th century's greatest prophet, without honor in the putative homelands of liberty, and in perpetual mortal danger at home.
The first book of _The Gulag Archipelago_ takes the reader from arrest through interrogation, transport, and transit camp, up to the gates of the labor camps themselves. Along the way, there are many asides about prison life, its denizens and customs, and the spiritual deformations they inflicted. There were whole waves, entire cycles, of specifically targeted repressions. Hundreds of thousands of people were disposed of without a trace, either by bullets or by exile above the arctic circle. The repressions of 1937, the _Yezhovschina_, made Western intellectuals gulp only because, for a change, the victims were communists. We also, through Solzhenitsyn's account of his spiritual awakening, get an up close view of how a strong religious faith can sustain a person in the face of this faceless evil (though this aspect is more fully developed in volume 2)
What makes this "huge, loose, baggy monster" of a book more remarkable is that Solzhenitsyn never once had it all on his desk at the same time, for a proper editing. Parts of it were always stashed away somewhere, while he was working on another part, always under official surveillance. No pampered western academic radical could last ten days under those conditions, let alone produce such a powerful witness. Read this for a bellyful of what it is like not to be free, what it costs to try to become free. You'll never take your loony left professor seriously again.
