Varvara’s Reviews > Архипелаг ГУЛАГ: 1918-1956 - Опыт художественного исследования > Status Update

A big heap of coal was piled. Two zeks were digging into it, eagerly seeking something there. When they found it, they tried it in their teeth. Then they sat themselves down and each ate a similar black-gray lump. "What are you eating there, fellows?" "It's sea clay. It doesn't do any good, but it doesn't do harm either. And if you add a kilo of it a day to your rations, it's as if you had really eaten.

Just found out that the English version of Gulag is like 500 pages, whilst the actual book includes six books and 2048 pages. Doing my part by sacrificing the reading challenge for this one. Please do not settle for the abridged version you see in dymocks!

I'm back to GULAG grind. In my defence, it's actually six separate books, so here we go (volume 3)

Volume I and II done, 1/3 there

"These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime."

“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.” Much to think about during one of the biggest prisoner swaps in our lifetime.

currently pairing it up with the series about the first HIV outbreak in soviet russia (to prevent a single positive thought being formed in my mind)