Will trees save the planet? That is the promise made by many public policies, timber companies, NGOs, and multinational corporations. With deforestation accelerating and CO2 emissions reaching record levels, planting trees is presented as a common-sense solution to the ecological disaster. But is it really that simple?

The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology.