Donald Trump's reading assignment before he meets Putin again

An echo opinion letter published in The Intelligencer, a Buck's County, Pennsylvania newspaper.  

Although giving Donald Trump a copy of The Gulag Archipelago*, the gift might encourage him to read,  but the sender could find the book collecting dust near his circular file. Perhaps, the letter writer could send it, instead, to his spirit guide Paula White, a member of President Trump’s evangelical advisory committee, so she can read it to him and, together, they can think and pray about how to make Americans free again.  

After refreshing my own memory about the Solzhenitsyn classic, it occurred to me that Vladimir Putin has surely already read his own copy of the book. Indeed, it's likely he had it autographed by the author.  So....Trump needs to catch up on his reading....oooor, have somebody read the book to him, but please include pictures, too.

To the Editor:  I recall reading a book many years ago titled “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It chronicled the apparatus of Soviet repression, his own incarceration as a soldier and dissident including the evidence of hundreds of Soviet prisoners.

One chilling thought from his book was etched in my memory. “Russian Soviets believed in ’overthrow by disruption!″ “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

As Americans will we allow it or will we work together to “preserve the Union”? Since reportedly, our president is not an avid reader — maybe I should mail him a copy of this book prior to his next (secret!) Putin meeting.

Miriam Rush  from Warrington Pennsylvania

*The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипела́г ГУЛА́Г, Arkhipelág GULÁG) is a three-volume text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The book  describes and discusses the waves of purges and the assembling of show trials in the context of the development of the greater Soviet Gulag system; Solzhenitsyn gives particular attention to its purposive legal and bureaucratic development. Solzhenitsyn and many among the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture – an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project.

The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956 at the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech ("On the Personality Cult and its Consequences"). Khrushchev gave the speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era.