NOVEMBER, 2021 – It was in 1974 that I first picked up a copy of The Gulag Archipelago. I didn’t finish reading it until this century. It is a very long book—seven books to be precise, published in three volumes that together run to roughly two thousand pages in English translation. But it shouldn’t take forty years to read a book, even a very long one. Why it took me four decades to finish reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s crowning achievement requires a little backstory and can serve as an entry point into the present book.
The above is the first paragraph of the preface to “Truth Behind Bars:” Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution.[1] The complete text can be found here.
[1] Paul Kellogg, “Truth Behind Bars:” Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2021).
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