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''The Gulag Archipelago'' ((ロシア語:Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'')) is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet forced labour camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973 and thereafter circulated in ''samizdat'' (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the Russian literary journal, ''Novy Mir'', in 1989, in which a third of the work was published over three issues. ''GULag'' or ''Gulág'' is an acronym for the Russian term ''Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey'' (''Главное Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей''), or "Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps", the bureaucratic name of the governing board of the Soviet labour camp system, and by metonymy, the camp system itself. The original Russian title of the book is ''Arkhipelag GuLag'', the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor deployed throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast "chain of islands", known only to those who were fated to visit them. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, ''The Gulag Archipelago'' has been officially published, and it has been included in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading since 2009. == Structure and factual basis == Structurally, the text comprises seven sections divided (in most printed editions) into three volumes: parts 1–2, parts 3–4, and parts 5–7. At one level, the ''Gulag Archipelago'' traces the history of the system of forced labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956, starting with V.I. Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October Revolution establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor. It describes and discusses the waves of purges, assembling the show trials in context of the development of the greater Gulag system with particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic development. The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era. Though the speech was not published in the USSR for a long time, it was a break with the most atrocious practices of the Gulag system; Solzhenitsyn was aware, however, that the outlines of the system had survived and could be revived and expanded by future leaders. Despite the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront the legacy of the Gulag, the realities of the camps remained taboo into the 1980s. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union's supporters in the West viewed the Gulag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and many among the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture — an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project. Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a ''zek'' (a slang term for inmate), derived from the widely used abbreviation "z/k" for "''zakliuchennyi''" (prisoner) through the Gulag, starting with arrest, show trial, and initial internment; transport to the "archipelago"; treatment of prisoners and general living conditions; slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system; camp rebellions and strikes (see Kengir uprising); the practice of internal exile following completion of the original prison sentence; and the ultimate (but not guaranteed) release of the prisoner. Along the way, Solzhenitsyn's examination details the trivial and commonplace events of an average prisoner's life, as well as specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprisings. Solzhenitsyn also waxes philosophical: Aside from using his experiences as an inmate at a scientific prison (a ''sharashka''), the basis of the novel ''The First Circle'' (1968), Solzhenitsyn draws from the testimony of 227 fellow prisoners, the firsthand accounts which base the work. One chapter of the third volume of the book is written by a prisoner named Georg Tenno, whose exploits enraptured Solzhenitsyn to the extent that he offered to name Tenno as co-author of the book; Tenno declined. The sheer volume of firsthand testimony and primary documentation that Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble in ''The Gulag Archipelago'' made all subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work useless. Much of the impact of the treatise stems from the closely detailed stories of interrogation routines, prison indignities and (especially in section 3) camp massacres and inhuman practices. There had been works about the Soviet prison/camp system before, and its existence had been known to the Western public since the 1930s. However, never before had the general reading public been brought face to face with the horrors of the Gulag in this way. The controversy surrounding this text, in particular, was largely due to the way Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal, and practical origins of the Gulag system at Lenin's feet, not Stalin's. According to Solzhenitsyn's testimony, Stalin merely amplified a concentration camp system that was already in place. This is significant, as many Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet concentration camp system as a "Stalinist aberration". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Gulag Archipelago」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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