The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner's towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan
“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker
“Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

After serving as a decorated captain in the Red Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced in 1945 to eight years of hard labor for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his long short story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1970. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, just weeks after The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet penal system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont, where he wrote The Red Wheel. In 1994 he returned home to Moscow, where he died in 2008.