When I was in 7th-grade English, Kory Warr did his book report on The Count of Monte Cristo. He gave it a rave review, but everyone else in the class just thought he was nuts for reading a book over a thousand pages on purpose when it wasn't necessary. Years later, I finally read The Count of Monte Cristo and found it one of the best novels I've ever read. A few more years passed, and I happened to be in touch with Kory Warr again for the first time since high school. I reminded him about his book report in Mr. Gould's class and thanked him for the recommendation I belatedly took him up on. In reply, he suggested that I should read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Mentally, I added it to my list, but it's been out of print for some time now. When I found a copy on the clearance rack at Half Price Books, I picked it up.
However ... I still haven't read The Gulag Archipelago. The first book I read in 2016 was only volume one of three, despite being over 600 pages. I now need to be on the lookout for the other two books.
Much like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Gulag Archipelago was not what I was expecting. I was expecting something like The Hiding Place, a personal memoir of misery and privation: I was arrested, I was beaten, I was starved, I was tortured. That's not what The Gulag Archipelago is (at least, the first volume). Yes, Solzhenitsyn touches briefly on his own arrest and experience in prison, but the book is much more journalistic, a heavily-annotated collection of statistics and of anecdotes of multiple dissidents over a period of decades.
This first volume deals only with Soviet prisons and with the transport system which moved prisoners from camp to camp; the actual camp experience is left to the later volumes. Solzhenitsyn compares the experience of dissidents in Soviet prisons to that of the early socialists suffered under the Tsars and finds that the system which they denounced as inhuman was immeasurably more humane than the system they put in place to crush their own enemies.
The heartbreaking insanity of the Soviet system, in which the people who actually knew how to manage the infrastructure, be it agriculture, transport, manufacturing, or what-have-you, were denounced as enemies of the people and replaced with people who had no experience or training and thus inevitably ran the sector into the ground, to the detriment of the public, is all the more frustrating because it has been repeated so many times since then, in China, Cambodia, North Korea, and many countries in Africa even today. Then, of course, when famine or shortage resulted, the people thrust into jobs they weren't trained for were in turn denounced as "wreckers" and followed their predecessors into prison, execution, or slave labor.
Solzhenitsyn describes the trial of a certain group of engineers in charge of a factory: They were simultaneously accused of wasting the country's capital by using more expensive building materials that would extend the working life of the factory and of retarding the country's progress by not purchasing top-of-the-line equipment for said factory. Transcripts of trials in which both prosecution and defense lawyers denounced the accused (because any defense lawyer who contradicted the prosecution's story would find himself next in the dock) reveal what a farce justice was in those days.
The translator provides notes at the end of the book in the edition I read, and I wish it had been in the beginning. He provides definitions and explanations for some of the Russian slang which is otherwise impenetrable, but I didn't realize the resource was even there until I was well into the book. There is also a glossary of names and another of institutions and terms. Names and terms that were widely-known in the Cold War days when the work was first published are not included, but at this point in time, there are doubtless new readers who don't know who Krushchev was or what samizdat means; an updated glossary would be handy, but I suppose Google and Wikipedia work as well.
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