Two Hundred Twenty-Seven Witnesses to the Dark

Between 1958 and 1968, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly compiled one of the most devastating testimonies of the twentieth century. Working from hidden notebooks across the Soviet Union, he wove together the accounts of 227 former prisoners of the Soviet labor camp system — the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn himself had endured eight years in those camps after his 1945 arrest for privately criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend.…