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.
The basic story is that he believed a Jewish cabal was behind the USSR as a means to suppress slavs and their culture, so he wrote this work of fiction based on accounts he heard from other inmates of various things that supposedly happened throughout the prison system, presenting them all as though he witnessed them or their aftermath firsthand and thus painting a very different picture of how often things happened (to say nothing of uncritically repeating hearsay).