The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Up until the publication of Gulag, many in Russia and elsewhere were content to blame Stalin for Soviet terror, concentration camps, and mass arrests. Solzhenitsyn argued, and with real evidence, that Lenin, not Stalin, was responsible for creating the Gulag, and that the first Soviet concentration camps for political prisoners were built in the 1920s, not the 1930s.

“No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.” But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”

cataclysm?

As for me, I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.