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.
Solzhenitsyn is anti-Soviet, Romanov sucking, fascistic trash.
If you’re looking for a novel that genuinely and realistically reflects the struggles of building socialism after the Revolution, I recommend Gladkov’s Cement (there’s an English translation from the 90s), sort of the first exemplar of Socialist realism. It was published in 1924, right before Stalin took over, and it’s basically a novel on the contradictions of the New Economic Policy set in a post-Civil War factory town. It does a really good job presenting the pains, confusions, hypocrisies, and ironies of the Soviet world right before Stalin took over — it made me have a deep appreciation of what Stalin did in the end (collectivization, and even the purges).