Solzhenitsyn: Truth and Politics

Two and a half years after the publication in the West of the first volume of Gulag Archipelago, with the sensation that produced and the subsequent expulsion of the author from the U.S.S.R., the third volume of this monumental work has come out in Paris, in both Russian and French.

One might have thought the first two volumes would have exhausted the basic theme of Solzhenitsyn’s literary investigation. Not only the history and structure of Gulag but all aspects of the life of the prisoners and of their keepers, the types of concentration camps, and the character of the different “waves” of unfortunates who replenished the “population” of this fearsome Archipelago by the millions—all this was dealt...