Is this book worth the read? Does it hold merit outside of pure documentation? Best English translation? Abridged or no?

Solzenytsin is very salty and funny at the same time, his descriptions of Soviet incompetence and insluts to various Western communists like Russell and Sartre are absolutely hilarious.

Read it. It will make you cry tears of horror.

He is very dry, and uses massive amounts of sarcasm and irony.

Its a great book, very enjoyable.

>Abridged.

nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html

Absolutely correct.

inb4 REMEMBER THE 50 TRILLION THAT DIED UNDER STALIN, PROLE! COMMUNISM WILL NEVER WORK!

Fuck off tankies. Read Bookchin. 9 times out of 10, you're an impotent idPol fag who doesn't even read.

>In 1974, when Mr. Solzhenitsyn was living in exile in the United States and preparing to publish ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' the Soviet authorities persuaded Miss Reshetovskaya to intervene with her former husband to try to get him to stop publication.
really make you think

Take this!

No, vile, scientistic bureaucrat... Take this!

>State led violence happens
>is documented
>anonymous posters call it revision
>Except Rwanda because niggers

so fucking predictable, especially holodomor deniers.

...

Solzhenistsin was a reactionary, religious piece of shit that greatly exaggerated what was going on.

This is an article from an American source, so it can hardly be biased in favor of the Soviets: nps.gov/malu/learn/news/upload/Gulag_Fact_Sheet.pdf

>It is important to remember, however, that in most years more people were
amnestied from the Gulag than died in it. Excepting the brutal war years, the most common
experience of the Gulag was surviving it.

Not to mention that the number of people incarcerated is always greatly inflated: at most, 18 million people passed through the gulag, out of a population of 160 million.

so, read it as an entertaining piece of fiction. got it.

>weird upload directory of the US National Park Service has a plain two page PDF 'fact sheet' about the Soviet gulag system

wtf.jpg

Are you one of those dissident anti-Trump US park rangers? And have you taken up Marxism as well?

see no one cares about stalin's crimes, but u mention the so-called holocaust and the thread is covered with shills like flies on shit, hmm

>Pure documentation

Get ready for all the commies to tell you that Alyosha lied his ass off to paint the Soviets in a bad light.

Wow look at all those amazing sources in the pdf! If the National Park Service organization isn't THE go-to source for info on the Gulag, I don't know what is

fuck yourself

It holds no merits as documentation.

It's literally, and I mean in the objective sense, 'literary fiction'.

There are no citations in the Gulag Archipelago though so how is this fair to say?

>ywn live a life of pure contemplation at peace with yourself while you burn out your life digging gold in siberia

I'm reading the abridged version at the moment.

The accounts of the gulag are truly horrific. They can evoke disgust, pity and rage all in one paragraph. There is just enough dry humour interspersed to make it an enjoyable read. I would say you would benefit from knowing a bit of Russian history before delving into it. The unabridged version is very long and I would say requires a great deal of interest on the part of the reader to get through.

This. I'm not even a communist. If you can't tell the diference between a chronicle and an actual work of documentation you shouldn't be reading.