Gulag Archipelago
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · first published 2007
46% recommend48% neutral7% critical
Why HN recommends it
Harrowing, deeply human account of the Soviet camp system, valued for showing how communist terror and mistrust took hold and for its note of hope in humanity. Suits readers wanting to grasp totalitarianism.
Common criticism: Some historians call its figures and claims unreliable
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Literally destroyed left wing politics in my mind.
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗…book--insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument." > "So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance and that taught me a lot.…
on “Study Pinpoints Source of Banned Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China” ↗…(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zofia_Kossak-Szczucka) is another solid historical writer. I am aware however that my tastes in literature are somewhat eclectic. Russian Lit: Nikolai Gogol for the stories, Solzhenitsyn for the Gulag Archipelago, and of course War and Peace (Tolstoy) and Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky). Reserve some weeks for the last two though, heh ;) Any help you need, just shoot me an email (in the profile), but I'm not…
on “Ask HN: What are some great books that are relatively unknown in the US?” ↗I really enjoyed reading the The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the state of mind of the population during Stalin leadership. He relates the story of a conference of the party where nobody in the room dared to be the last one to stop…
on “The Kolmogorov option” ↗Kolyma Stories and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are an incredible pair. For Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag is deeply personal and his rage seeps through every page. Shalamov is the complete opposite, and his book is an inhumanly dispassionate sequence of…
on “Things I Learned in the Gulag” ↗This should keep you out of trouble for a while The Gulag Archipelago Audiobook by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1/7.5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zTwS1Xy0EM 2/7.5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSoJu1izRHU 3/7.5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kF7PEqZFso 4/7.5.…
on “Ask HN: Audio Book Recommendations” ↗I literally laughed out loud when I hit that line in Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn was brilliant.
on “Russia to punish ‘fake news’ about Ukraine war with 15 years’ jail” ↗"The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian." Really? I'd put Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago way ahead of anything else I've read from the past half-century for importance. Or do you not consider that literature because it's nonfiction? Either way, what was so important about the Satanic Verses…
on “America’s Real Dream Team” ↗DFW's short stories are great. But I found one huge hole in Infinite Jest: It was completely lacking hope. I'll take a long slog of a read any day if I'm not just going to walk away depressed. Gulag Archipelago was worth the read because Solzhenitsyn kept reminding the reader there was hope in humanity. DFW, well, not so much.
on “"This is water, this is water."” ↗…in the future." Do you want to live in a world like this? There are things in the world like free speech that are not free. People had to fight for it, and in some case they died for it. Read "The Gulag Archipelago". Solzhenitsyn talks about communism as a minority, that knew they were a minority. So when Stalin was going to incarcerate people, they used night, and police will take off their shoes so nobody hear…
on “WikiLeaks: The Spy Files” ↗I believe the roots of this mistrust between people in Russia and the whole Eastern Block can be found well explained in "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn (http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-Aleksandr-Solzhenits...)
on “Why Russians Are Not Smiling (2011)” ↗…on your first claim? I'm not your personal reference librarian, but you might start with a few of the more reader-friendly popular accounts and see where your interests take you. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is worthwhile; also Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, and perhaps Ma Bo's Blood Red Sunset. The idea behind recommending these particular books is that they helped me move past the special…
Seems like a good time to recommend people read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
on “Words Matter – Moving Beyond “Meritocracy”” ↗* Full time remote jobs * Conspicuous Signalling Theory * The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn * Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen R. C. Hicks * The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard e Hans-Hermann Hoppe…
on “Ask HN: What things do you wish you discovered earlier?” ↗I would say even poverty and chaos is preferable to the collective farms and gulags that killed over 100 million during the Soviet regime. Read Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" for context, even just the first chapter of his massive work is extremely eye opening. Update here since I am rate limited. Check wikipedia for non combatant death counts. Read the first chapter of…
on “1989 Tiananmen Square Protests” ↗