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.
When assessing conditions in the Soviet penal system in the 1930's one should compare it to conditions in contemporary penal systems. Were inmates in gulags worse of than inmates in German, French or American prisons and prison camps at the same time.
I'm sure that if you changed a few names you could easily pass off an account of life in the US Angola prison in the 1930's as a Gulag horror story.