I listened to the full audio too. Some parts were just too far away for myself. I'm in the middle of recording the abridged myself and I promise it holds attention. As for the legitimacy, Solzhenitsyn himself was involved in it. **Foreword to the Abridgment** If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.” Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accepted Professor Ericson’s suggestion to create a one-volume abridgment of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago, in order to facilitate its reading for those who do not have much time in this hectic century of ours. I thank Professor Ericson for his generous initiative as well as for the tactfulness, the literary taste, and the understanding of Western readers which he displayed during the work on the abridgment. *ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN* *Cavendish, Vermont* *December 1983*