The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But even when all the main things about the Gulag Archipelago are written, read, and understood, will there be anyone even then who grasps what our freedom was like? What sort of a country it was that for whole decades dragged that Archipelago about inside itself? It was my fate to carry inside me a tumor the size of a large man’s fist. This tumor swelled and distorted my stomach, hindered my eating and sleeping, and I was always conscious of it (though it did not constitute even one-half of one percent of my body, whereas within the country as a whole the Archipelago constituted 8 percent). But the horrifying thing was not that this tumor pressed upon and displaced adjacent organs. What was most terrifying about it was that it exuded poisons and infected the whole body. And in this same way our whole country was infected by the poisons of the Archipelago. And whether it will ever be able to get rid of them someday, only God knows.