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.