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The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation. 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 -- W.L. Webb * Guardian * The ferocious testimony of a man of genius -- Stephen Spender * London Magazine * What gives the book its value is the sound it gives out; the harsh roar give out by a wise and experienced animal as a warning that the herd is in danger -- Rebecca West * Sunday Telegraph * He is one of the towering figures of the age as a writer, as moralist, as hero... in The Gulag Archipelago he has acheived the impossible -- Edward Crankshaw * Observer *

The Gulag Archipelago