This is Solzhenitsyn's massive indictment of the former Soviet Union's system of justice as told from the author's personal experiences and from the oral and written accounts of survivors and others familiar with many of the incidents related in the book. While reading "The Gulag Archipelago" I had to keep reminding myself that this is not the product of the author's imagination but that of events that really happened. Solzhenitzyn writes with a poisoned pen steeped in anger and bitterness, albeit with God guiding his hand. Stalin's system, born under Lenin, resulted in the deaths of millions of patriotic Soviet citizens, many of them loyal Communists and earlier supporters of Lenin, and many of whom were directly involved in the events leading to the overthrow of the tsarist regime. Many of the accusers (as the government prosecutors were called in the Lenin era), interrogators, prison officials, and even judges were themselves later swept up under Stalin.

It was Article 58 of the broad-sweeping Soviet Criminal Code that resulted in the execution or imprisonment of the millions whom Stalin called counterrevolutionaries. Article 58 included acts ranging from crimes against the state (e.g. a prisoner weakened from illness or malnutrition could be shot for being unable to work), to consorting with foreigners to economic sabotage, called "wrecking." Examples of wrecking included a peasant's making a bad decision that resulted in crop failure or a factory employee's machine accidentally catching on fire.

Aptly referred to by Solzhenitsyn as the Soviet Union's "sewerage disposal system," some of the horrifying methods utilized by the Stalin regime to rid itself of "undesirables" include those of a suspect being arrested while undergoing surgery for repair of an ulcer, men and women under interrogation being beaten and tortured and deprived of sleep for days on end, camp internees' dying from being deprived of food and water, and contracting typhus and other diseases from massive overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Prisoners, denied bathroom facilities or even buckets, were forced to lay in their own urine and excrement or to eat their meager rations from unwashed pails which previously contained coal or human waste. Solzhenitsyn recounts the bizarre but true history of a man, mistakenly believing he was Tsar Mikhail (the successor to Nicholas II), who was given a long prison sentence for having composed and then having read a proclamation to the Soviet citizenry promising better times under his own reign. Most sickening of all, at least to me, were those Russian soldiers who became German POWs and who were imprisoned after the allied victory by their own government for allegedly humiliating their motherland by failing to elude their German captors.

Considering the millions who disappeared during the Stalin regime, it is amazing that there was anyone left, especially someone as gifted a writer as Solzhenitsyn, to chronicle these horrors.

It is very interesting to compare The Gulag Archipelago, the true story of a horrible and real dystopia, with George Orwell's 1984, the story of an imaginary dystopia, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, another imaginary dystopia.

The difference between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book and the others is his more convincing, more concrete detail. Solzhenitsyn describes the gritty details of the arrests, tortures, kangaroo court trials and murders or imprisonments that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union inflicted on countless millions of people while Lenin or Stalin were in power. He gives exact details about the coarse criminality and ingenious cruelty of Communist prison officials whom he watched while he was in prison. He also weighed and sifted evidence that he gathered from other prisoners and he reports it here.

Solzhenitsyn entered prison a convinced Marxist. He gradually lost his Communist faith only after many years of physical and emotional abuse by other Marxists. The hope of a free lunch in a Communist paradise dies hard.

Gulag provided for me a powerful and shocking history lesson I had never been taught in high school or college. So much has been taught on Hitler, but barely anything of substance on Soviet Communism. After reading this book, you'll understand the reasons for the so-called paranoia of McCarthyism. Ronald Reagan had it right when he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." I found this book so compelling, though heart wrenching, that I went on to read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" as well as a recent biography on Solzhenitsyn by D. M. Thomas called "Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life." I have come to the conclusion that nobody but a man like Solzhenitsyn could ever have written Gulag.