Alexander Solzhenitsyn has resumed his unrelenting chronicle of Soviet terror, which provoked the Kremlin into deporting him four months ago. From his home in exile in Zurich, the Russian writer gave the signal for the publication of the oft-postponed second volume of his trilogy, The Gulag Archipelago, by the Russian-language Y.M.C.A. Press in Paris.* An exhaustive, harrowing 657-page account of the forced-labor system under Lenin and Stalin, Gulag II may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning achievement to date.
Composed with the novelist's superb literary skill and his eye for compelling human detail,...