Russia is no longer the Soviet Union, but it has a long way to go to free itself once and for all from the residues of its Communist past. If there was one book responsible for the de-legitimization of the Soviet enterprise in the first place, it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. That work—well-described by the author’s widow Natalia Solzhenitsyn as different parts historical inquest, personal reminiscence, political treatise, and philosophical mediation (without being reducible to any one of these genres)—is, in the end, an “epic poem” chronicling the evils of ideology and the prospects for good and evil within the human soul. It is a cathartic work that conveys not only “pain and anger, but an upsurge of strength and light.” It is also the most powerful critique ever written of the ideological impulse to remake men and society at a stroke, and it will remain politically relevant as long as human beings are tempted, as perhaps they always will be, to put utopian schemes above a concrete engagement with politics and the human soul. While never losing sight of the prospects for “the ascent of the human spirit,” even under totalitarian despotism, it shows that the grim movement from “Lenin’s degrees to Stalin’s edicts” was “the inevitable outcome of the System itself,” an inhuman byproduct of the ideological war on human nature. The book provides an eternal indictment of Communism and all its works, even if it is much more than that.

An updated edition