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.

  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The relevance of this to your question is that the archive figures strongly challenge many elements of the Gulag narrative from the more literary/memoir sources used by Conquest. They reveal that approximately 14m Soviet citizens passed through the camps with a peak population of about 2m (1953). They also show that 'political' prisoners (and here we have to be careful about Soviet categories) were never a majority of the population and that sentences were often relatively short at 3-5 years. Basically, they paint a picture of a much more fluid camp system than had been assumed: people moved in an out of the Gulag on a regular basis and for a variety of reasons.

    This stands in contrast to Solzhenitsyn's picture of around 50m passing through the camps and a peak population of 12-15m. This was much more static picture of dissidents being sent to rot in Siberia for decades. This undoubtedly happened to some but Solzhenitsyn's intellectuals were not representative of the general population and their experience was not shared by all victims of the Gulag.

    From here. Generally yes, Solzhenitsyn was a dissident against the Soviets and explicity wrote The Gulag Archipelago as a political hit piece.