Starting to get that feeling in the first 26 pages. It’s great and have wanted to read it for a while now. But wondering what the take is here on it overall.
The line he literally wrote about the population size of Russia being unsuitable for socialism is like verbatim RW criticism used today and typically repeated when saying that it while it may work in small European counties it won’t here.
Need also to brush up on the Russian Revolution, having only read some of John Reed’s account.
OP if you're looking for insight into Soviet history in English but maybe not from a Marxist source, there are some good historians who fit that bill. But Solzhenitsyn is definitely not one of them. He's not respected even by your standard historians. Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century is good, so anything by him, Sheila Fitzpatrick, or J Arch Getty I can recommend.
Basically, before the fall of the Soviet Union you had authors like Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest who could make up whatever they wanted about what was going on in the USSR and no one challenged it. The West would signal boost them of course (along with the Black Book of Communism) because it was great propaganda. Then when the Soviet archives opened up you had historians like the ones I mentioned above really dig into them and they found that what Solzhenitsyn et al had been peddling was complete bullshit.
I believe Getty also looks at average sentence length for various crimes, and from what I can recall it compares pretty favorably to the U.S. under mass incarceration policies (starting in the 70s-80s and only slightly tapering off in the last decade).