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.
gulag archipelago is a work of fiction with a clear political agenda, yes. we had to read excerpts in school. at some point i got halfway through maybe, but its just too damn long. anyway, it was a pretty effective anti-soviet propaganda piece, lots of people even in russia believe it as fact still. no actual historians worth their salt take it seriously though
The author's own ex-wife who helped him write it said it was a complete work of fiction. IIRC it's entirely just accounts from random people that Solzhenitsyn takes at face value as well as stuff he pulls out of his ass. He strikes me as a kindred spirit of Adrian Zenz, they share a similar approach.
I believe he was put in prison because he wrote a letter critical of Stalin and sympathetic to the Nazis (dude just loved fascists, especially Franco), though there is reasonable speculation that he did that with full knowledge of the consequences so he could avoid serving in the Red Army in WW2.
Solzhenitsyn's Ex‐Wife Says ‘Gulag’ Is ‘Folklore’, 1974:
PARIS, Feb. 5 (Reuters)—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today.
Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information:
She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced.
She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''
Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.
best Internet comment award, 2008:
Solzhenitsyn was a Nazi propagandist in the 1940's and affirmed that the war against Nazism was avoidable and a compromise with Hitler possible. That was why he was sent to a labor camp, for being a traitor.
His hatred for Jews that became public knowledge in recent years may explain his Nazi sympathies. Predictably, he was also a great fan of the Spanish fascist dictator Franco, whom he went to support when his regime began to totter. He appeared on Spanish TV to plead with Spaniards to remember the "freedom" they enjoyed under Franco while Soviet citizens were "enslaved" by socialism.
Solzhenitsyn was never a dissident but enjoyed the full support of Nikita Khruschev when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which Khrushchev used as propaganda material during his purge of Stalinists.
Nazi lover, Jew hater, monarchist: No wonder he became the darling of the West.
Part of me really wants to find triple citations of all of this to get this acquaintance of mine to finally shut the fuck up about "gulag archipelago". But part of me knows he'd never accept any of them and it'd only serve to hurt my own mental health.
You've got no fucking idea man.
I decided it wasn't even worth dealing with his disingenuous debate bro bullshit and just go full unapologetic "I dont care about gulags and you wont convince me otherwise".
i fall into arguments so easily and get far too invested and all I do is waste time with cryptofascists.
“I dont care about gulags and you wont convince me otherwise”.
I do care about gulags. I care so much I'LL FUCKING DO IT AGAIN. :twisted:
Oh he hated it when I suggested that yes, there are many chuds who are a legit danger to society and should be put away.
The first time I realized Taibi was sus was when he mentioned that he was reading Gulag archipelago _again
It is. I refuse to believe that this is serious (and the subsequent OP posts praising Christopher Hitchen). This is probably the first time Gulag Archipelago has been read in 10 years. OP was able to recognize how garbage the arguments in the book are.
I know a few anarchists who’ve read it. I kinda assumed it was still popular.
The book is 1 thousand pages, i highly doubt anyone in their free time reads it in the age of the internet. The only people now who own a copy are Peterson fans who were pressured into buying it so they dont have to say they get all their information from him. Also bizarre for anarchists to be reading it, i guess never underestimate their anti-communism and reactionary tendencies (like Solzhenitsyn, Bakunin was also deeply anti-semitic)
As usual, Parenti has a good read on the gulag system:
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976.3 At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as "the largest system of death camps in modern history."
...Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes ("counterrevolutionary offenses") numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.
At the beginning of that passage, when Parenti refers to historical reviews of Soviet archives in 1993, he cites historian J. Arch Getty. Getty's work is a good starting point for getting to the modern academic consensus on the Soviet penal system, instead of sensationalized horror stories.
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.
What the soviet penal system was actually like. Solzhenitsyn is but one of a few examples of how the Soviet penal system was too kind to enemies of the Revolution, seeing how antisemite liars like him, fascist traitors, opportunist rats, and descendants of kulaks that all served their sentences and were fully rehabilitated into Soviet society only to turn around and sing their snake fangs into the Republic.
His grandfather was a Kulak, he deserved to be shot. His father beaten his mother, he deserved to be shot, if not forcibly divorced and sent to far Siberia. Yeltsin would have had a significantly different childhood if every counter-revolutionary adult figure in his life was liquidated as enemies of the Revolution, as they should have, instead of receiving the kindness they did from the Soviet State.
It actually is since he "reformed" the Soviet penal system because Stalin bad.
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.
By dissident, we mean "Crypto-Fascist religious fundamentalist and anti-semite."
While serving his sentence in gulag Solzhenitsyn went to the hospital and had successful cancer surgery. That sounds like something that would happen in a prison, not in a death camp.
OP if you're looking for insight into Soviet history in English but maybe not from a Marxist source, there are some good historians who fit that bill. But Solzhenitsyn is definitely not one of them. He's not respected even by your standard historians. Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century is good, so anything by him, Sheila Fitzpatrick, or J Arch Getty I can recommend.
Basically, before the fall of the Soviet Union you had authors like Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest who could make up whatever they wanted about what was going on in the USSR and no one challenged it. The West would signal boost them of course (along with the Black Book of Communism) because it was great propaganda. Then when the Soviet archives opened up you had historians like the ones I mentioned above really dig into them and they found that what Solzhenitsyn et al had been peddling was complete bullshit.
I believe Getty also looks at average sentence length for various crimes, and from what I can recall it compares pretty favorably to the U.S. under mass incarceration policies (starting in the 70s-80s and only slightly tapering off in the last decade).
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).
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).
it's probably the most popular work against the USSR during the cold war.
Gulag Archipelago is my favourite Jimmy Buffett song
Solzhenitsyn was famously a big proponent of Marxism Leninism :galaxy-brain:
My high school reading list got me to swallow the first book completely. Took until the 2nd book to realize he was a raving lunatic and I was reading a street preacher rant. Still believed too much of it for a long time
did Marx write "The Communist Manifesto" as a hit on European capitalism?
