Russia makes Gulag horrors book required reading

By BEN JUDAH, Associated Press – Wed Sep 9, 2009

MOSCOW – Russia has made a once-banned book recounting the brutality
and despair of the Soviet Gulag required reading in the country's
schools.

The Education Ministry said excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973
epic "The Gulag Archipelago" have been added to the curriculum for
high-school students.

The three-volume book was banned by Soviet censors, sparking
Solzhenitsyn's retreat into exile.

The decision announced Wednesday was taken due to "the vital
historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century
domestic history" contained in Solzhenitsyn's work, the ministry said.

The move comes despite Russian moves over the past decade to restore
some Soviet symbols and, liberals say, glorify Soviet dictator Josef
Stalin.

It was not immediately clear whether the addition of the book would
apply to the current academic year, which began Sept. 1.

It is thought over a million Russians perished in the Gulag, a
sprawling secret network of prison and labor camps created by Soviet
founder Vladimir Lenin and expanded by Stalin.

"The Gulag Archipelago" was published in the West in 1973, and
circulated in the Soviet Union via amateur publishing houses
thereafter.

Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya, said in July that the work should be
included in the curriculum, though not in its multi-volume entirety.

It is not the dissident writer's debut in Russian schools, however.

Russians students have been studying "One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich," a graphic first-person account of life in a prison camp,
and "Matryona's Place," a novella written from the perspective of a
freed prisoner that angered Soviet authorities by comparing life on a
collective farm to serfdom.