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Sometimes a book is more than its words and ideas. Sometimes it s an event, an artifact, a symbol. The Gulag Archipelago is like that, a triumph of truth over repression, the indomitable testimony of a man who found faith within the Soviet system of gulags, or prison camps.
In the USSR, information was a hot commodity. The state tried to control its flow, preventing citizens from criticizing their leaders or conditions in the country. As a result, the penal sys-tern remained mysterious—each gulag an island isolated from its surroundings. The collection of these "islands״ could be considered a kind of lost continent—a gulag archipelago—unknown to the outside world.
It was a crime of information that got Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the gulag, and a triumph of information that later kept him out. As a twenty-seven-year-old captain in the Soviet army, he was arrested in 1945 for making remarks critical of Stalin in a letter to a friend. That earned him eight years in labor camps. Though he began his military career as a devoted Marxist, these events turned him against the authorities. He fought back with the only weapon he had—information. In each gulag he gathered the stories of inmates, conditions, leaders, and the history of those facilities.
Released in 1953 because of his terminal cancer (from which he later recovered), he taught high school physics and mathematics- -but he also wrote. His novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The First Circle (1968) are both set in Soviet prison camps. But he was still working on something larger, a nonfiction collection of accounts from the prison camps. The stories needed to be told, but Solzhenitsyn feared that publishing such a book would endanger some of his friends from the gulag, so he held back the manuscript. "My obligation to those
still living outweighed my obligation to the dead; he wrote. Only when government agents began seizing his papers did he feel the need to rush the book to print in the Western world. Volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago came out in 1973, first in some installments in the New York Times and then in book form.
It was a worldwide sensation, light from a dark cave, word from a lost continent. Those inmates who had vanished from their communities were suddenly very visible. The institutionalized injustice of the entire gulag system was exposed. Of course the Soviet government was embarrassed to see their dirty laundry waved about like this, but what could they do? To send Solzhenitsyn back to the gulag would just confirm all his criticism. He was a worldwide celebrity now, so they had to treat him right.
Their solution was banishment. So in 1974 Solzhenitsyn headed west, first to Zurich and later to Vermont, living a rather reclusive life. Though various groups tried to use him for their own purposes, he didn't allow himself to be used. And his criticism has lashed out against the materialism and secularism of the Western world, just as it had attacked the Soviet system. In 1994 he returned to live in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn's masterwork was a courageous achievement and a significant event in the ongoing global conflict between Communism and democracy. But for Christians it has special significance, because Solzhenitsyn found faith during his gulag experience. He'd been deeply affected by some Christian inmates he encountered along the way. Somehow they could have joy in the midst of suffering, love in the midst of injustice. Solzhenitsyn put their stories in his book.
And so Christians could see this as a triumph of a special kind of information, the good news of Jesus Christ. Solzhenitsyn reminded us of the stmggles of Christians in the USSR, in China, and in other oppressive regimes, but he also gave us hope. Even in a powerful system that denies God's existence, committing itself to demeaning and destroying people, the truth cannot be squelched.