The Gulag Archipelago
"Archipelago", as used by Foucault, refers to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, "The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation", about the Soviet carceral system of forced labor. The book described the Russian Gulag's vast network of dozens of camps and hundreds of labour colonies scattered across the Soviet Union. "The Gulag Archipelago", written between 1958 and 1968, was first published in English in 1974 and was based on Solzhenitsyn's own experience as prisoner. It has been described as the book that "brought down an empire", the most powerful indictment of a "political regime...in modern times", and "a head-on challenge to the Soviet state."