By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
Series: The Gulag Archipelago Book 2
Length: 27 hrs and 30 mins

In The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2, Solzhenitsyn continues his relentless indictment against the Soviet regime, much like a prosecutor building an irrefutable case with evidence of each transgression. As with any heinous crime, one death might be sufficient to condemn, but Solzhenitsyn insists on laying bare each tragedy, ensuring that the extent of suffering under totalitarianism is felt in full. Every page he dedicates to the cruel bureaucracy and the annihilation of human dignity becomes another piece of evidence recording the regime’s crimes against its own people. While the sheer number of bodies might blur together into a statistic, where a single death is a tragedy and a million become faceless, Solzhenitsyn insists on bringing each broken body forward to bear witness to its suffering and demise: lest we grow numb to the horrors and fail to grasp the profound and layered inhumanity of the Soviet system.

Note
Following up on a comment I made from my post on Volume 1, in Volume 2 Part III: The Rulers of the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn addresses how the Soviet state redefined “intelligentsia” to fit its purposes, targeting not just true intellectuals or thought leaders.
He critiques the new Soviet intelligentsia, contrasting it with the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, who were often idealistic and dedicated to truth. This context provides a better understanding of the discussion in Volume 1.