Reading, Writing, Arithmetic - The Gulag Archipelago

This story just in from the Associated Press in Moscow and other sources:

Russia has made Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 epic, "The Gulag Archipelago," required reading in the country's schools.

The Education Ministry said excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 epic have been added to the curriculum for high-school students.

The three-volume book was banned by Soviet censors, sparking Solzhenitsyn's retreat into exile.

The decision announced September 9th was taken due to "the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history" contained in Solzhenitsyn's work, the ministry said.

Details revealed in a story at tvkultura.ru (TV Culture Russia) note the human impetus behind the scenes to this historic addition to the nation's education system.

Earlier "Gulag Archipelago" was optional for study at the secondary school. Now the novel has been included in the federal component of educational standards, and its study becomes compulsory for all Russian senior pupils.

It was the writer’s widow Natalia Solzhenitsyna, who offered to include several lessons on works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the school curriculum. 

Natalia Solzhenitsyna 

from 2008 interview

Previously schoolchildren had studied the short story Matryona’s Home and the famous story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Now they can read much more of the rest of the awful, honest, true story.

All of the "numbers," maybe, too?


*******

UPDATE

This clarification by the Associated Press, emphasizing those numbers was posted two days after the original report:

MOSCOW — In a story Sept. 9, The Associated Press reported that excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" will become required reading in Russian high schools. The story described it as an account of the systematic imprisonment and murder of hundreds of thousands of Russians in the Soviet-era labor camp system known as the Gulag. The passage should have been more detailed on the numbers of victims. Scholars estimate that tens of millions of people were imprisoned in the Gulag and that millions died as a result of the forced labor system.

Let no one ever forget.