'Gulag,' once banned, now required reading in Russia

MOSCOW -- The book that made "Gulag" a synonym for the horrors of Soviet oppression will be taught in Russian high schools, a generation after the Kremlin banned it as destructive to the Communist cause and exiled its author.

The Education Ministry said Wednesday that excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," published in 1973, are to be required reading for students.

The government in recent years has tried to control how history is taught, getting rid of textbooks that deviate from the new official line. In 2003, authorities banned a history text that was critical of Josef Stalin, the dictator most readily identified with the horrors of the Gulag.

After publication, "The Gulag Archipelago" circulated underground and soon reached the West in translation. The Kremlin expelled Solzhenitsyn from his native country in 1974, and he spent the next 20 years in the U.S.

His three-volume book gave a detailed account of the systematic imprisonment and murder of hundreds of thousands of Russians in the nationwide "archipelago" of prisons and labor camps.

Solzhenitsyn, who had won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, drew on his own experiences in various labor camps in the 1940s and on the testimony of hundreds of other prisoners.

Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008 of a chronic heart condition. He was 89.