Talk:The Gulag Archipelago

message: Why is its Nobel Prize credentials not listed in the article?
:Because it wasn't yet published or even known when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Prize in 1970. The Academy had no idea of the existence of the book, nor had any of his Western publishers. The credentials do stress, however, S' sense of moral and human mission in his writing ("the ethical force with which he has rekindled  the priceless heritage of Russian literature")Strausszek August 24, 2006 13:50 (CET)
According to Solzhenitsyn's memoirs (The Oak and the Calf), the international publicity garnered by his winning of the Nobel Prize (and the further stir caused by his insistence that it be presented to him in Moscow) enabled him to speak out more boldly than ever during that period, and was a large part of why he was not simply executed. He held that if Gulag had been discovered by the Organs a few years sooner he would not have survived to see it published. Michael Isaiah Schmidt (talk) 04:59, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Question

message: The Gulag Archipelago contains two reference spoken dirently to the Russell War Crimes Tribunal.  They belong on the Russell Tribunal page. Any assisitance readers of this page can give on the Russell Talk page will would be appreciated.
:Directly to the Tribunal?  The Tribunal had long been disbanded before these comments were published; the Tribunal never saw them.  Your statement that these footnotes from The Gulag Archipelago belong on the Russell Tribunal page is incorrect.  They add nothing of value to that article.  Perhaps you can use them here, in The Gulag Archipelago article, to illustrate Solzhenitsyn's frustration at the lack of similar Tribunals examining the crimes of the Soviet Gulag system. -Rob 16:48, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would STRONGLY advise any 'concerned' users that nobs is referring to above hold their comments until the Russell Tribunal discussion page is cleaned up and an appropriate Request for comment on the article is issued.  Please see User_talk:Kc9cqj/Russell Tribunal for further details. KC9CQJ 05:36, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Russell Tribunal

message: "Tenno declined, and probably for the better. It is Solzhenitsyn's tightly focused, highly emotional prose, which moves this book from point to point smoothly and unifies the work as a whole. The impact of the book is not in any way diminished by translation, a testament to its writer's literary skills."  
This seems to be straying from 'pedia style to book review style, advocating the book directly.   Is there any documentary support for the statement that the translation doesn't diminish the impact?  Who, exactly, thinks that it's better that Tenno declined? -- Vonfraginoff 06:51, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree wholeheartedly, this needs an NPOV tag. The tone of this article is completely ga-ga for the book.
Dawson 06:37, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV issue 

message: It says early on that Lenin paved the way for a 'slave labor economy'.  This is totally untrue (if you've ever read Lenin). Theory expressed in writings is one thing, the reality another. I doubt if Stalin's writings openly promote slavery.--Constanz - Talk 14:21, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Slave Labor Economy" 

message: The sentence removed until sources presented.--Nixer 06:28, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "One third of the population of Leningrad was sent to Gulag" 

message: I've just revised mainly the latter part, about the influence and, in particular, the circumstances in which the Archipelago was published (new section). There's been a lot of unreliable or fake detail hanging around since this spring, some of it had been cleared out already, like the insane claim that the city censuses of Leningrad in the 1930s became top secret documents because half the population had dropped out (sent to Gulag or killed) by 1939, but the bits about the structure and publication of the book had a lot to do. Sources are Solzhenitsyn's own autobiography and writings by some people who helped him by bringing manuscripts out etc. i've tried reasonably to avoid POVs here. Strausszek August 27, 2006 19:02 (CET)
:Actually, Melanie Ilic of the University of Gloucestershire, in her article "The Great Terror: Leningrad--A Quantitative Analysis," published in Europe-Asia Studies (Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 2000), pp. 1515-1534) discusses the drop-off of the Leningrad population by about a third. In that same article, in passim, she confirms the suppression of the 1937 Leningrad census, ref'd above. The suppression of the '37 census is common knowledge in Soviet studies, and amply documented.--TallulahBelle 01:55, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revision of latter part 

message: The article claims the book is around 1800 pages long, but editions on amazon are rarly above around 600. Am I to believe these are only sections of the complete work, or there is no complete published edition? Robinoke 15:07, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, that explains it. Thanks! Robinoke 12:25, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Book Length 

message: In 1988, an abridged one-volume version of The Gulag Archipelago was published. It has been in print ever since and a 50th anniversary version of that edition was published last year, including, for the first time, the names of all 258 witnesses who supplied Solzhenitsyn with the testimony on which he based his book. Many got in touch with him after the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962).
John Crowfoot (talk) 03:56, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abridged (authorised) English edition since 1988 

message: Obviously repression, including political imprisonments, continued up to — and after — 1991. However, the Gulag system was disbanded between 1954-1960. Subsequent imprisonments were not under the auspices of GULAG and did not use the same methods. Also, statements of the form, "it is interesting to note that..." are rarely if ever appropriate, since they involve subjective judgments without attributing the opinion. <eleland/talkedits> 05:23, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've removed the relevant phrasing. <eleland/talkedits> 02:35, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious 

message: Please add dates to "The book was published" and "The KGB seized".  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Leafgreen (talk • contribs) 01:45, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: the book was published in 1974 not 1973! --91.19.217.27 (talk) 17:30, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

text: The Russian-language original (of Vol.1 anyway) appeared on 28 December 1973. Translations into dozens of languages followed during the first six months of 1974. 83.254.151.33 (talk) 08:50, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  dates please 

message: This year, Sen. John McCain has repeatedly used the story of his prison guard drawing a cross in the sand, very similar to a passage in this book.  Questions have arisen as to whether 1) Solzhenitsyn used McCain's story in the book or 2) whether McCain stole the story from the book or 3) if this was a common occurrence in prisons.  I know this is a topical issue, and the state of the original research may be lacking, but I think it is relevant and worth describing.  Has anyone seen research on this that they can link to? Bagsc  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.67.237.253 (talk) 01:33, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cross in the sand 

message: The two terms are both used in this article, and this should be cleaned up. I think that "gulag" (no caps) is better; it's certainly more commonly used, and it's as used by Solzhenitsyn in the book. QMarion II (talk) 19:18, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  GULag or Gulag? 

message: The correct transcription is GULag, since the term is an acronym, introduced in 1929: the Main Directorate of Camps. There is an illiterate and demeaning usage of a plural "gulags", applied to the Soviet Union and, even, to other countries (e.g. Indonesia): that is simply wrong -- would you say holocausts or shoahs about the 1941-1944 extermination of Europe's Jews by the Nazis? Of course, not.
To distinguish this as a unique historical phenomenon -- Solzhenitsyn offers the chronological limits 1918 to 1956 -- it would seem best to write Gulag with a capital G.
The existing English translation / edition of The Gulag Archipelago, unfortunately, is not necessarily a reliable guide on this or other matters. The first volume was produced in great haste by a non-professional translator and published in 1974; there was more time to work on the second volume which appeared in 1975; the third volume did not appear in English until 1978 and it was the work of a British academic who translated a number of other Solzhenitsyn works.
John Crowfoot (talk) 03:48, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better to use Gulag 

message: The language in the infobox is given as "French, originally Russian". Why not simply "Russian"? The text of the article says that it was originally published in Russian (in France), as well as being written in Russian. -    Robina Fox (talk) 18:08, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: No reason has been given, so I'll change it. Robina Fox (talk) 13:40, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language in infobox 

message: I added "Article 58", "Kulak" and "Seven-Eighths Rule" (Law of Spikelets) to the See Also section. While Solzhenitsyn does adequately explain all these concepts in the text, the terms are used so often throughout the text that a reader who misses the initial explanation may benefit from the information in those articles. The author also seems to presuppose some knowledge of Russian history, which is understandable as he was writing for a Russian audience, but most English speakers know little of Soviet history and personalities.
While, of course, a reader could simply look up the articles, it might be convenient to have the links here, as these were among the main sources of inmates in the Gulag (besides those who had committed non-political crimes). The book uniformly refers to the Seven-Eighths Rule/Law, not the "Law of Spikelets" as it is referred to in Wikipedia. Roches (talk) 23:57, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adding some terms to See Also 

message: Up until recently, this article (as well as Gulag) contained a claim that Natalya Reshetovskaya's criticism of The Gulag Archipelago was fabricated Soviet propaganda, but this has been removed by Special:Contributions/137.103.87.181.
The description of the edits is "Removed content that wasn't in the source cited", and "There's no such claim in the Mitrokhin Archive", but this is not the case.
"The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West" does contain this claim, so I do not believe that the reason for these removals is justified. Omcnoe (talk) 06:50, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Natalya Reshetovskaya's criticism of "The Gulag Archipelago" was Soviet propaganda? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article contains, for the last five years the claim that Solzhenitsyn "waxes philosophically".
Now, my understanding is that this expression has a definitive and negative connotation of idle and vain chatter. Is that intended here,  and if so, should it be? Wefa (talk) 22:57, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  waxes philosophically? Really? 

message: According to part 2 of his memoirs, Between Two Millstones, the microfilm of Gulag Archipelago was smuggled to the west by Olga Carlisle, who had promised Solzhenitzyn to get the work translated into English (she had previously obtained an English translation of The First Circle, which was hopelessly spoiled by amateurish editing. Between 1968 and 1973 Carlisle had not obtained an English translation, there existed only a first draft by Whitney. So Solzhenitzyn and his friends had to microfilm the manuscript again and get it smuggled to the west, because Carlisle would not deliver her copy but insisted of having world rights on the book. First foreign translations appeared in French, German and Swedish.Hpesch (talk) 19:38, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the English translation desaster, see author's text Between Two Millstones 

message: The accuracy of the book has been questioned by historians
Is this appropriate to include in the opening paragraph , considering it's the opinion of one historian? --Mikeroetto (talk) 00:50, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that this is out of place and WP:UNDUE. I've removed it.  CordialGreenery (talk) 18:42, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: IP was reverted and warned on their talk page. Get consensus and participate in the talk page before reverting things you dislike. CordialGreenery (talk) 18:58, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The onus is on you per WP:BRD. Now engage on the talk page.116.90.229.186 (talk) 19:07, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: What do you think this is? You have not achieved consensus to revert the changes. Stop edit warring and participate in the discussion.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by CordialGreenery (talk • contribs) 19:09, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: You have now broken the WP:3RR rule. Again see WP:BRD the onus is on you to gain consensus.116.90.229.186 (talk) 19:11, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  The current revision has consensus. You, as the vandal, have the onus to find consensus to delete it. Your constant deletionism without explanation or discussion is vandalism and has been treated as such. CordialGreenery (talk) 21:53, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historian, Historians? 

message: Solzhenitsyn includes everything concerning the crimes of the Soviet regime, from 1918 to 1956 and beyond -- from the show trials and executions of the Civil War period to the systematic peacetime repression of the peasantry (1929-1933), the Great Terror in 1937-1938, the wartime deportation of "traitor" nations, and even the post-Stalin 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk.
	
The book is NOT just about the Gulag (which should always be spelled with a capital G), the Soviet system of forced labour in the network of camps, that expanded rapidly between 1929 and 1953. It covers many other forms of persecution and repression, as listed above. In the very last section, Without Stalin, it even covers the use of the army in 1962 to suppress workers' protests in southern Russia. 
John Crowfoot (talk) 03:35, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  The contents of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (1973, 1980, 2006) 

message: Let it here be known that the publication details for The Gulag Archipelago, as presently listed in this entry, are incomplete.
It was first published on 28 December 1973 in Paris by the YMCA Press publishers, headed by Nikita Struve. Subsequently, the book was translated into French and English and appeared sometime in the spring of 1974. That was after Solzhenitsyn ahd been expelled from the USSR, on 13 February.
It is only fair and right to name the first three publishers of the Russian, French and English translations; the dates and translators of the subsequent two volumes. If someone disputes any of these details, let them raise the point here.
I shall wait for a day, and then restore the information I entered in the article on 8 May or thereabouts.
John Crowfoot (talk) 04:10, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Publication details, 1973-1978 

message: "A controversial work, authored by a historian suspected of working with British intelligence, claims that her memoirs were part of a KGB campaign"
WTF? Controversial to who? By what standard? The historian "suspected" of working with UK intelligence is in fact MI5's official historian. It's like saying Andy Murray is a suspected tennis player. This is a clear attempt to discredit material the overwhelming academic consensus is true.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:B083:1B00:90E3:75F1:7F4D:9E23 (talk) 13:52, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Loaded language 

message: I don't care how many adverbs you add  but listing an author's awards in the lede about an author's book is WP:PEACOCK regardless of context. Please remove from this section. This is material appropriate for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn where the word "Nobel" appears sixteen times. But the Nobel Prize is not awarded for specific books but rather for a body of work, so it's not appropriate here. Simonm223 (talk) 13:24, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm really sorry you feel that way. And I value your opinion. That fact that he earned the prize is really actually very important, more important than his nationality, and that's included. But your feelings on the matter are noted, even of they don't really matter in this instance. SkeletonFan1776 (talk) 14:37, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not a matter of my feelings. Simply put, the book didn't win that prize. The author did. As such that prize is not relevant to the book. It is relevant to the author. Simonm223 (talk) 15:05, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[WP:PEACOCK]] 

message: See . My very best wishes (talk) 18:27, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Natalia Svetlova