ABSTRACT
The Gulag Archipelago is a work of autobiography as well as of biography, ethnography, sociology and history, it is impossible not to comment on Solzhenitsyn, although the efforts to lionize as well as to dismiss this extraordinary man are really quite independent of this latest publication. The Gulag Archipelago offers a special sort of Dostoy-evskian nightmare in which Russian spies upon Russian, Communist betrays Communist, Red Army officers destroy Red Army officers. The major problem in the final volume of The Gulag Archipelago is the rather weak empirics of concentration camp life between 1957 and their closings. The transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism in the final phases of Soviet life is left unexamined in favor of a vaguely stated premise that only a total overhaul in the Soviet system, indeed a counterrevolution, would change the internal dynamics of Russian life.
