How long does it take to read The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956?
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn takes about 10 hours 35 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 35 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1970. 577 pages, about 158,675 words.
22 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 17 hours 38 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 35 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 37 minutes |
The page count is the median across 88 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.
Subjects: Political prisoners, Concentration camps, Prisons, Political prisoners, soviet union, Prisons, soviet union, GULag NKVD
