The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 account of the Soviet prison camp system — reconstructed from hundreds of survivor testimonies and his own experience — the most comprehensive document of the gulag and the text that more than any other delegitimized Soviet communism in the Western left.

Creates the definitive document of Soviet totalitarianism — The Gulag Archipelago is not only historical testimony but a philosophical analysis of how ideology enables atrocity; Solzhenitsyn's line ('The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart') is the most quoted statement about the nature of evil in political philosophy.