A Book to Topple a Regime

American diplomat George F. Kennan considered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation to be the “most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” In it, Solzhenitsyn exposed the vast underworld of forced labor camps stretching across the Soviet Union from Moscow to Magadan in Siberia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the book was instrumental in the implosion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. It remains essential reading for our understanding of not just the murderous Soviet regime but of the good and evil that runs, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “right through every human heart.”