By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag represents Solzhenitsyn's attempt to document nearly every phase of the Bolshevik's use of the police apparatus and prison camps for the suppression of dissent, or suspected dissent. Using a wide range of actual examples--many of them personal, others taken from fellow prisoners he might while he was detained--he takes the reader step-by-step through the process of arrest, interrogation, conviction (always conviction), transportation, and imprisonment. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished from the Soviet Union on February 13, 1974, just two months after portions of this work began appearing in print in the West, after the KGB had obtained a draft copy. In all likelihood, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's life was only spared because he was already a Nobel Laureate by then, having won the prize in 1970, though he was forbidden to travel outside the country at that time to accept it."