At that time the Russians knew very little about the disappearances of their neighbors in strange circumstances. Something was happening, but the Government refused to admit or clarify the situation; the international community refused to believe, they were just road stories, gossip, fiction. A man was given the task of dissipating the fog with the cry of many witnesses in the form of a book, from the bowels of evil: The Gulag Archipelago, how did he do it?

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Since long before Stalin took absolute power in 1928, most of his opponents had already been nullified by him, until "subjects" ran out and he began to manufacture enemies of the revolution. Cheap labor was needed to carry out the work of the State in the most precarious conditions. Far from everything, the disappeared had no way of letting their relatives know that they were still alive, unless by a "chance" of fate, someone who was transferred said that he had known a such person, or in the worst or best of the cases (?), were in the same place, crammed as animals and with animals: mosquitoes, crabs and lice were common. Thus, unable to communicate, they were made invisible by the OGPU and the NKVD, and those who returned after long years in the Gulag, kept silent for fear of being caught again "as if the words were erased" (1).

In 1956, almost three years after the death of Stalin, the politician Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes committed by the dictator and the cult around him, actions that went against "the spirit of Marxism-Leninism" (2). It was at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the Secret Report was released.

In 1962, Khrushchev himself gave permission for the Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to publish his first novel A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich in the magazine Novy Mir: he recounts the experience of being in a forced labor camp. It is a denunciation and at the same time a testimony, since the author was imprisoned for 8 years. Even at that time, "countless progressives from all over the world were still reluctant to accept that brutal denial of the chimera of socialist paradise. Khrushchev's speech was denied, attributed to maneuvers of imperialism and its agents. "(3)

How was such ignorance and such disbelief possible? Well, during his mandate, Stalin prevented the entry of American journalists to Russian soil. "[...] It is necessary to prohibit these gentlemen from traveling freely through the Soviet Union. There are already enough spies " (4) And the intellectuals? Well, neither "in 1990 could the horrors of 1932 and 1933 be published". (5). So, we must imagine how difficult it was to denounce by writing any injustice, when everyone was suspected of being a counterrevolutionary or an enemy of the people.

As for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in 1958, when he finished A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, he already had the structure of the Gulag Archipelago, because "[he] did not have the impression of having fulfilled my duty, of having managed to evoke those 40 years of terror of the innocent population, the deportation of entire classes like the peasants, the arrest of millions of innocents, the executions, and how that terrible Gulag was built ..., how it was edified, of all that, he had not said a word "(6) However, for himself, his experience was not enough, so he abandoned the idea of ​​writing it, until in 1963, due to the national reputation that his first book gave him, his readers send him thousands of letters telling him about the hardest experiences of the Gulag, but when he was already doing a good job in relative freedom, in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was deposed, and the repression came back to life with Leonid Brezhnev in charge, chasing the writers.

As recounted in the documentary The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago the writer continued to work on the book in secret, using the help of several women who were imprisoned too, all under strict rules, such as not telling anyone about what they were doing , not using the phone, not calling anyone by their real name, or speaking loudly of the plans and not recording what was said or where it was. In the apartment, the women helped him to verify bibliographical sources, the few that were left, since many of the books had been destroyed, and later to type.

Given the eminent risk that the manuscript in process were confiscated by the KGB, Solzhenitsyn asks Nadia Levitskaia to take it to Yordi Teno, who will take it from Moscow to Estonia. In Estonia, three former prisoners, gave him shelter to finish writing his book, traveling for three more years. He wrote the book having the chapters scattered in several cities, until in 1968, the manuscript was typed, compiled, and now it was only one.

How to hide a book of such informative and physical proportion? There was no e-mail, CD or USB, if some sheets were reason enough to condemn someone, what would a four-volume book cause? In the writer's house, the book was photographed page by page in microfilm format, taking them more than twelve hours, and then moved to Paris by Alexander Andreiev, who hid the negatives in a metallic box of caviar.

In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, without having published or even mentioned the book in question until, in 1973, when one of the writer's assistants, Yelizaveta Voroniánskaya, is interrogated by the KGB and seized a copy of the Gulag Archipelago, soon after, Yelizaveta Voroniánskaya was found under "strange" circumstances, hanged. This fact forces the author to publish the book hastily in Paris.

The book arrives in Russia practically as contraband, only a few copies are passed from hand to hand, at the risk of being arrested for having it. Close friends of Solzhenitsyn were persecuted and threatened, and the slander from the state intensified. On February 13, 1964, the author was expelled from Russia by the KGB. Heinrich Böll, German writer, receives him in Frankfurt.

But why such a stir for a text? In the book, Solzhenitsyn, along with the hundreds of testimonies, dissects with irony and coldness the reproductive and digestive system of that beast called Gulag, exposing the absurd ways and causes by which someone could be arrested, tried and shot; It also explains the conditions in which the less privileged prisoners were, how they had to eat, how little, and the isolation, to mention something of the "extensive" work, exposing and questioning the idyllic paradise of socialism that its spokesmen defended outside of borders (and continue to do so), because insolence is free and does not go out of style.

Gulag Archipelago, as the author says, is a monument that was raised together to [honor] all the tortured and murdered, but not only that, it is a warning that tells us that evil does not find substance, and if it is let loose, it can be worse, "we have the proof, we already live it".