Can there be a duty to read a work of literature? Most people I’ve met who are at least aware of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork The Gulag Archipelago know that they should read the book. They ...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in West Germany following his deportation from the Soviet Union in February 1974 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons By 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was already “Russia’s ...

Today the word “gulag” is often used figuratively, but in the Soviet Union the Gulag—an acronym designating the system of forced labor camps—was all too real. Millions of people lived and died in the ...

During the autumn of 1989 the director visited the territory of the USSR in search of the places where Polish citizens sent to labor camps had been executed. His route was marked out by diaries of ...

Echoes of Stalinist past as Russia silences its top human rights group The Kremlin's closing of Memorial, dedicated in part to chronicling Stalin-era crimes, says much about the Putin era and the ...

When the doorbell to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Moscow apartment rang on February 12, 1974, his wife, Natalia, cracked open the door to see who was outside. Realizing it was the KGB, she immediately ...

Excerpt from the introduction to the newly-abridged Russian version of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Sanya, as the boy was called at home, read a great deal and, strange to say, at ...