Putin Makes Solzhenitsyn Required Reading
“In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream — and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.” — Preface, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
“With the blessing of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the widow of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is unveiling an abridged version of his celebrated and once-banned “The Gulag Archipelago” as required reading for Russian high-school seniors about the crimes of the Soviet regime.” — Wall Street Journal, 10/28/10
Depending upon your perspective, it is the most or second-most horrific story ever told: the story of the multi-decade Soviet holocaust. It’s not banned in the United States, but it might as well be for all the attention it gets.
Now, in Russia, Vladimir Putin — who had once sought to rehabilitate Stalin — has recognized the need for at least an “abridged” version. (Better abridged than nothing.)
Although Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork runs well over 600 pages, densely footnoted, and unsparing in its detail of an attempted soul-murder of an entire people, its wry candor makes it droll at times. It is, nonetheless, a tall order for most students — presumably why it’s required in Russia.
The Wall Street Journal article notes that “[h]uman-rights advocates welcomed Mr. Putin’s support for the project. But it raises some questions about how public-school teachers, who also use government-authorized texts portraying Soviet ruler Josef Stalin mostly in a positive light, will integrate the work about the Soviet prison labor-camp system in which millions died.”
Even if much of the detail is deleted, there’s no escaping the book’s central point: This death-camp system was the inevitable outgrowth not only of the rule of a bloodthirsty paranoiac like Stalin but of the Soviet system itself — and of Lenin, who set it up.
It will be interesting to see how Russian teachers square the circle of the “good” Soviet years with the story of some of history’s greatest crimes.
But now that the Russians have apparently decided to face up to the legacy of Stalin and the system that produced him (and that massacred 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn, long denied but recently acknowledged by the Russian parliament), what about us? When will we fully come to grips with the argument that Stalin was worse than Hitler and that the Soviet Union, that paradise of social justice, has never received the full “credit” it deserves in the annals of infamy?
Here’s the short answer to your question: BECAUSE TOO MANY ON THE LEFT STILL ADMIRE THE SOVIET SYSTEM. And wish there was some way to grow it here. It’s always farcical when a leftie starts to slander his enemies with the epithet Hitler! as he is attempting to Leninize America. Stalin’s monstrosities will never be given equal time with Adolph’s because those making the rules are fellow travelers. I am sure when Glenn Beck aired his segments on the Holodomor, there were more than a few steaming with rage at the truth getting out. Stalin fans here in America always get a pass because they were the first ones to condemn Hitler when he turned against their idol. Hence the artificially created and propaganda motivated false dichotomy of right/left in describing Nazis and Commies. When they are both cut from the same template. Both evil murdering scum with socialism at their core. Don’t look for the left to start coming out against Stalin too soon. They can’t let go of their wet dreams.
Right on target.
One must ask this question: how could FDR be considered a “great President” by the left, while being a sympathizer of the Stalinist regime?
The left must be held accountable for that position espoused by one of its “greats.” Besides his lifelong sympathy to communism, during the Yalta Conference, FDR sold out Eastern Europe to Stalin’s communist hords. History won’t be kind to that commie on this side of the Atlantic.
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but you can easily purchase
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 in most any book store in NYC.
Solzhenitsyn’s works are popular. They get a lot of exposure on college campuses and high schools. The idea that his works are not receiving exposure in the US is not credible.
There may be six people in Berkeley, Ca. that might think that Stalin was a great leader and another six people in a nursing home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that think this. Nobody else on the “Left” believes this to be the case. The Left was never monolithic, except in the minds of the rightwingers. The history of the anti-Stalinist Left is excellent; exposed the crimes of Stalin early on and contributed mightily to the fall of so-called “real existing socialism.” Of course, the rightwingers will deny there ever was an “anti-Stalinist” Left. Like the Bolsheviks they detest, they also are capable of historical falsification.
A story told be Sidney Hook, about anti-communist garment union workers protesting a Communist rally at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s. An Irish cop asks the protesting workers to “move-along, now!” They reply to the cop, “But we are the anti-communists!” The cop replies, “I don’t care what kinda communists you are–move alone!”
Yes, of course, read Solzhenitsyn, but please stop with the crazy BS about Liberals, Democrats, Social Democrats, Progressives, trade unionists, public education, etc. etc. It wasn’t just the John Birch Society and the Conservatives that opposed Stalin and the USSR. “Move along-now,” LOL
Regardless of whether Democrats were against communists/socialists/marxists in the 40′s or 50′s, the left is clearly not against them now.
At any professional protest put on by the left you will find numerous communist/socialist/marxist groups as the co-organizers or participants. How many leftists do you know that have a Che shirt? If the left really did not agree with the policies and politics of the communists/socialists/marxists then they would not allow them to have such prominent roles at Democrat protests or in forming policies for the current administration.
Perhaps you need to spend some time online at http://zombietime.com/ or youtube watching protest videos.
Even MSNBC leans socialist. Here is a nice quote from Tingles http://media.eyeblast.org/newsbusters/static/2010/05/2010-05-17-MSNBC-Hardball-Matthews.mp3
Here is a story at huffpo about Laurence O’Donnel http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/06/lawrence-odonnell-calls-h_n_779909.html
The Gulag Archipelago should have been read in Congress before the Constitution was read. That book shows how truly dangerous to life and health that statists and bureaucracies, leftists that is, can be.
Now THAT would have taken a day or three.
In the early 1990s, I read all three volumes of the unabridged English translation. It took me awhile, but it was well worth it.
Never.
We forget how much the over-educated elitists of the 1930s loved not only Stalin, but Hitler. It took the utter defeat of Germany in World War II, and the public exposure — not through the media of the day, but to the eyes of millions of horrified GIs — of the Nazis’ crimes, for that love to become a career-ender in politics,in academia, in art, even in business.
The Soviets suffered no such defeat, no such exposure. The ideological heirs of Duranty and Shaw to this day do their considerable best to explain away, suppress, and ignore the crimes of Stalin and Lenin.
They ate prehistoric specimens???? ….. not the point of the article, surely, but just another piece of evidence into the destruction of civilization…. scientific grave robbers…
Just like the Egyptians destroying their own relics from the museums… vandalizing their own burial places in the Pyramids…
Loretta,
You are missing the point. The reason why Solzhenitsyn put this episode in his book is to illustrate the awfulness of the Gulag system. What kind of people would have eaten the pre-historic animals?! And not just ate them – they “devoured them with relish on the spot”. It was clear to him that only people who were starving would have done it – which means the workers who were doing the escavation had to be prisoners of the Gulag.
People miss alot when reading this book. For instance in the chapter that begins with him on a job site and how cold it was, was not the focus of the chapter (as almost all that review this book believe the focus is.) Instead it is the latter portion, of the chapter, that was about packages from home, for the prisoners, that he was more interested in. I believe he was trying to let love ones know how important these packages were to those still in prison. He tried to convey that for even those who were extremely poor, that, the sending of anything was a boost to the prisoner; even to those who had requested nothing be sent because of their family’s poverty. What appears to be obvious within the book is not always what he was trying to communicate to the reader.
This explanation is not mine – I remember it from the “Gulag”, which I read probably 15 years ago or so.
You are exactly right, Hyphenated American. Solzhenitsyn was trying to show the immense hunger of those who had done the excavation: any food, even ancient food, was irresistible to men subsisting on only a few hundred calories a day.
Robert Conquest, perhaps the pre-eminent Sovietologist on the planet, cited a comparable example in a documentary series he did a few years ago. A work crew of prisoners cutting down trees in the forest discovered an old shed and found a big metal barrel inside. They pulled the lid off the barrel and were overjoyed to find it nearly full of what appeared to be margarine. They hastily attacked the barrel, consuming nearly half of it – just picture anyone eating even a spoonful of only margarine and then try to imagine a few people devouring half a BARREL of it! – before someone noticed the faded writing on the side of the barrel: it was not margarine, it was light lubricating grease! (Strangely enough, the men suffered no ill-effects from eating the machine oil. They were so badly malnourished that it passed straight through them.)
Henry, I think Solzhenitsyn’s main point was how ubiquitous the Gulag was in those days.
P.S. Both my grandfathers and my grandmother wetn through the Gulag…
They couldn’t get their hands on anything else to eat that was..edible. The horrific plight of those who struggled to survive this monstrous system is more COMPELLING than the fact that they were forced to consume prehistoric food. The HUMANS are more important than the FOOD CHAIN.
Solzhenitsyn also has a wonderful novel about life in the Gulag. The novel is The First Circle. Because most folks will find The First Circle rather good reading, if not riveting, it just might be a better starting place than Gulag Archipelago. At one point the protagonist is offered an important and challenging assignment by the government. He has to sit down and calculate whether he will have sufficient nutrition to carry it out.
“Solzhenitsyn also has a wonderful novel about life in the Gulag. The novel is The First Circle.”
Nah, “The First Circle” is a much milder story about the Gulag – because it described the life of priviliged Gulag prisoners – the educated few that were sent to “sharashka”, engineering design centers of the Gulag. The food there was much better than in normal prison camps, and the work was much easier. It’s a great book, no doubt about it, but it is not a story to read if you want to learn the life of a normal Gulag prisoner. To get the feel, you need to read the “One Day in Life of Ivan Denisovich”.
P.S. The title “First Circle” comes from Dante’s first circle of hell – which was reserved for intellectuals, poets and generally educated folks.
Reading “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is a must; I did in my teens, and it has left an indelible impression. Another book that should be on the curriculum is Viktor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, for any student of 20c history to come to grips with the Soviet version of communism, the Great Famine, WW2, and what the U.S. then looked like to an outsider observing astutely.
When will we fully come to grips with the argument that Stalin was worse than Hitler and that the Soviet Union, that paradise of social justice, has never received the full “credit” it deserves in the annals of infamy?
Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Fact.
We have to remember Hitler had far less time and “prime material” available than Stalin. Fact
Which one was worse?
In Nazism the death of new born babies was neither a bug, nor a by-product it was a goal. Most of the time, children of people arrested by NKVD were sent to orphanages.
It is clear from reading the Gulag Archipielago that its primary function was not political repression but providing cheap labor, labor who could be, if needed forced to work by minus 40C, moved to places where no lodgings existed and who didn’t require costly safety measures. In other words Stalin, the head of the so-called “Workers Paradise”, that beacon of our liberals, restablished slavery.
Hitler’s plan included creating German colonies in Soviet Union were members of the master race would be served by Russian slaves (who would be kept in semianimal condition and banned of learning to read and write) all while the prettiest Russian girls would be put to work in the brothels of Hamburg. That, including the part about the girls, was in German newspapers by the time the Germans thought they were going to win the war.
These orphanages that you speak of were little more than GULAGs for the kids. The child-inmates were beaten, starved and neglected. The Soviet System was not about cheap labor. It was a method of eliminating political opponents and class enemies while getting productive labor out of them. You could argue that quickly gassing people was more humane than working people to death in subzero temperatures.
Yes they were. But according to Solsyenytsin himself they weren’t supposed to be: the state had allocated the resources for those children being half decently fed. Then their guards pocketed the funds and sold the food and clothes.
If we are playing that game, Mao probably wins the prize as the most lethal man in the 20th Century with somewhere between 40 to 70 million victims. Yet he is still a role model for people associated with our current Administration while Augusto Pinochet who may have killed 3,000 Commies is their bogeyman.
Old Soldier:
You are out of date. Recently published research relying on Chinese archives puts the death toll from the “Great Leap Forward” to 45 million alone. When you add the 20 million from the Cultural Revolution the minimum is set at 65 million. The total number of Maoist dead is more likely 65-100 million. But the real champion mass murdere by percentage of the population is Pol Pot. He murdered 40% of Cambodia.
FWIW, Pol Pot’s regime resulted in 20%, not 40%, of Cambodia dying off. My wife was one of the survivors, and she just looked this up for a paper for her Masters in nursing at FIU. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields
Let us not forget Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy.
Hitler’s plans were one thing, German wishes another. In the early years of the second World war, farmers were asked if they wanted a farm in the east. Nobody wanted. At present, there are lots of pretty Russian girls working in the brothels of Hamburg and elsewhere in Germany. However, Germany’s bad boys are not responsible for it. They lost control of the business of prostitution long ago.
If you really wish to keep the running score, how many have died at the barricades of Marx/Engels spawn in E Europe, China, Russia, S East Asia, etc?
Billions?
The claim that the Soviet GULAG system “.. is the most or second-most horrific story ever told…” is risible. It is only true if you compare it to Mao’s China. Given the fact that the Holocaust would not have happened without the assistance and support given by Stalin to Hitler certifies the Soviet regime as far worse than the Nazis.
So what is the difference between Putin and Obama? Putin is not a Communist
Although Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork runs well over 600 pages, densely footnoted, …”
It’s too bad that you didn’t include the word “abridged” in that first phrase somewhere because you certainly can’t be referring to the unabridged version. I have a paperback copy of the unabridged version in front of me. It was published in 3 volumes and the lengths of the volumes are as follows: Volume 1 is 615 pages excluding the translator’s notes and glossary and 641 pages including them; Volume 2 is 672 pages excluding footnotes and glossary and 691 pages including it; and Volume 3 is 529 pages excluding the footnotes and glossary and 560 inculding them. That comes to 1816 pages if you exclude notes and glossaries and 1892 if you include them.
Now this great length will inevitably be daunting to some who are considering reading this book and I deeply regret that. I have read the entire book from cover to cover three times so far and expect to read it again at least a couple of additional times. That’s because it is without a doubt the absolute best book I have ever read, bar none.
That is not to say that is the most fun I’ve ever had with a book. It is not a light-hearted or cheery read by any means. But it is the most powerful and profoundly moving book I’ve ever experienced. My brother, who doesn’t like me much, speaks very tersely when he speaks at all and has no obvious interest in politics or the history of the Soviet Union
was so moved by it that he made a point of calling me long distance and talking about it for a solid half hour when he read it. He’s never done that before or since about anything.
This book will break your heart as you see man’s inhumanity to man displayed through the eyes of nearly 200 eyewitnesses. While there is still some dispute over the number of Lenin’s and Stalin’s victims, responsible estimates vary from 10 million to 66 million. (And just as with The Holocaust, there are hard-core Stalinists that deny that the vast majority of atrocities in the Gulag occured at all.) This book will also rekindle in you a belief in the transcendence of the human spirit because, even as the horrors are depicted, you see moments of goodness in (some) people as they succeed in fighting the almost irresistible urge to do harm to their fellow men in exchange for a bit more food or warmth to stave off the bitter Siberian cold.
You will also be exposed to the most intensely honest writer I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Solzhenitsyn was driven by the need to bear witness to what he and his fellow zeks (prisoners) had experienced and pulls no punches in describing what they saw.
If I believed in making books compulsory reading, I would certainly put this book at the top of the list. It should be read by everyone in every country. I can think of no better way to convince people of the dangers of establishing a communist regime.
Far too many people think that Hitler, as appalling as he was, was the worst mass killer in human history. They have no idea that Lenin/Stalin and Mao were worse yet. (One expert says that Mao killed 70 million of his own people which, if true, puts him ahead of even Lenin/Stalin.)
I simply cannot recommend The Gulag Archipelago highly enough. If ever there was a “must read” book, Gulag is it.
Good job Henry. I have the same three volumes, and likewise have made multiple readings. I think it’s the job of anyone who wants to understand history and the behavior of ‘leaders’ of mass movements to have this material in mind.
And there’s a new history, just out, by Timothy Snyder, of equal gravity. ‘Bloodlands’. As important and well worth reading as the Gulag Archipelago. See @13 below.
Henry exactly gets to the importance of Solzhenitsyn. I read all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago in the early 1980s and I found them engrossing and morally compelling. The books do not read like translations. The author has a total view and grasp of his subject material, inside and out. The only author who ever struck me the same was was Charles Dickens. Solzhenitsyn was truly a prophet of our times, one whose message is still not properly understood. The books of Robert Conquest and the recent Bloodlands are also excellent for understanding the Soviet era.
I have read a great deal of Russian and Soviet history and “The Gulag” will be added to my list. I’m nearly finished with “The Great Terror: A Reassessment”, and it’s difficult to imagine the impact Stalin’s ruthlessness had on the entire society. For an insight into the paranoia and breakdown of families andfriends, read “The Whisperers”.
I’m quite surprised that Putin is making this required reading, as I fear that the old Soviet thoughts and methods have re-appeared over the last decade.
“Those who dismiss the idea that Stalin might be worse than Hitler almost certainly have not read The Gulag.”
Those who dismiss the idea that Stalin might be worse than Hitler almost certainly have chosen not to read the Gulag Archipelago. For many on the Left, defending something noxious is always easier when they don’t know all the messy details; hiding the ugly truth behind a screen of abstract rhetoric is easier that way.
an excellent article, and solzhenitsyn should be required reading for any empty gov’t or media figure who pontificates about the ussr. . . but it’s astounding and depressing that not all of this great author’s works are available in english translation. for example, his red wheel trilogy. . . you can read vols 1 (1914) & 2 (1916), but vol 3 is untranslated into english. . . not knowing russian, i had to plow through a french version. that was slow! and as far as i know, there aren’t plans to translate it. my hunch is that publishers aren’t keen on ‘anti-soviet’ authors to this day, but perhaps that’s too suspicious?
I’ve always been disgusted by the way ex-soldiers were treated in Solzhenitsyn’s stories about the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn himself was sent to the camps for one critical remark in a letter. His character Ivan Denisovich was accused of being a spy because he was captured by the Germans and escaped. His case seemed to describe the general pattern: retreating made you a traitor; getting captured made you a collaborator; escaping and trying to return to duty made you a spy. This probably happened to thousands of Soviet soldiers during and after WWII – even ones who had been liberated from German concentration camps. The brutality and depth of paranoia that drove this treatment is hard for Westerners to comprehend. Is it uniquely Russian or uniquely Communist?
I think it’s characteristic of all repressive systems. It is glaringly obvious in all communist countries, but can also be seen in dictatorships. How bad it is in any dictatorship is probably a function of the personality of the dictator.
It seems to me that communism shows the most insane variety of it. These folks are just nuts!
The physical brutality is enormous yet the brutality of a theft of minds… to be so impressed that they would carry out this enormous infamy.
In America, we are witnessing the theft that precedes the brutality we condemn elsewhere.
It could happen here.
Recommended companion reading to “Gulag”:
“The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom.
The brutality and depth of paranoia that drove this treatment is hard for Westerners to comprehend. Is it uniquely Russian or uniquely Communist?
It could be argued that the paranoia was more a feature of Stalin himself that of all Russians or all Communists. Which is not to say that other Communists haven’t been immensely brutal in their own ways! As others have mentioned, Mao was massively indifferent to the lives of his own people and killed as many as 65 million in the Great Leap Forward alone, which ran for only 3 years; many additional millions were killed throughout the rest of his time in power. But as far as I’ve been able to determine, Mao was not particularly paranoid, just supremely cruel and callous towards his own people.
Stalin had a level of paranoia which would surely be immensely fascinating to a psychologist. One of the most telling quotes I’ve heard was Stalin’s remark to Beria, the last head of the secret police during Stalin’s reign of terror. He once confided to Beria that he (Stalin) was so paranoid that he (Stalin) even feared that he himself (Stalin) was plotting against himself!!
Stalin’s purges, launched in the 1930s, swept up literally millions of people, all supposedly plotting against him or the Soviet Union in some fashion or another. The overwhelming majority of those people were completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatever. This did not matter to Stalin. The “security organs” (secret police) were ordered to torture these people until they confessed to whatever plot the interrogator wanted to tell to prove that he (the interrogator) was doing his job. Each person betrayed under interrogation was then arrested and tortured until he betrayed additional “spies”, “saboteurs”, or whatever. Solzhenitsyn describes this at considerable length. Whether Stalin truly beleived that any of the people arrested were really a threat to his system or his administration is not really known. Perhaps it was all just a cynical way to justify shooting many hundreds of thousands and making slave labourers of millions more. Or maybe he really did fear that the masses were going to overthrow him.
There is little doubt that he harboured grudges against those who had ever wronged him in any way and actively plotted to get even with them. As a result, those in the inner circle who had insulted him or disagreed with him or allied with those he considered enemies were marked for eventual disposal. Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror covers this in considerable detail. But this was infighting among the top ranks of the Communist Party; it doesn’t prove that Stalin really thought the masses of ordinary people represented a threat to him or his rule.
As for the military, it was indeed the case that any Red Army soldier who was captured and managed to escape was inevitably thought to have been “turned” by the Germans even if he had only been held a few hours before escaping. Soviet soldiers quickly learned to pretend that they had simply been lost when they got separated from their units, otherwise they would be regarded as spies and treated very harshly.
Read ” The Gulag” when I was young. . . . still remember the part about Soviet bomber pilots wishing they had dropped their last load of bombs on “Mother Russia” before they landed. . . and were arrested by the secret police. . . . Those of us who are armed and willing to defend ourselves (as per the 2nd Amendment) are all that is keeping a gulag scenario from happening here. . . .Armed citizens are the “o”‘s worst nightmare. . . . as they are to all dictators, or wanna-bes.
A little thought will bring us the answer to your question. The American public schools cannot make Gulag required reading because the public school system is its own gulag. Expecting that entity to do what contradicts its own interest is misspent energy that should be spent in eliminating all government schools.
Lord Acton-
{A) government entirely dependant on {public} opinion looks for some security on what that opinion should be, strives for the control of the forces that shape it, and is fearful of suffering the people to be educated in sentiments hostile to its institutions.
Of course Stalin was worse than Hitler. After the bodies at Katyn were discovered, the Nazis brought in forensic scientists to prove Germany had nothing to do with it.
The German experts, of course, were not believed in the West during WW II. It was thought that their claims were unreliable and they were saying what they said at Hitler’s behest. Strategic considerations were also a factor: Stalin was by this point an ally of the West and smearing the ally that was bearing the brunt of the fighting simply wasn’t politically possible. The Polish government-in-exile was satisfied that the German evidence was accurate and that Stalin’s minions were responsible for the Katyn Forest massacre, which caused Stalin to construct an alternate Polish government that was far more sympathetic to the Soviet Union and communism; that government eventually formed the core of the postwar Polish governments whil the government-in-exile was essentially shut out.
Those who have read it understand that, while Stalin’s genocide was not as focused or efficient as Hitler’s, and while it transpired in places never liberated by the U.S. Army and its photographers, it lasted far longer. And while Stalin didn’t focus his cult of death on particular groups, such as Jews and Gypsies, he cast a much wider net.
There’s an import new book which casts detailed light on the Hitler/Stalin enthusiasm for murdering civilians of various racial, ethnic and national characteristics. ‘Bloodlands‘, Timothy Snyder. At last, not written from the perspective of the murderers, but rather the murderees. And comprehensive in its full coverage of the events from 1933 to 1945. There’s a better view in it of Stalin’s overall policies than Solzhenitsyn’s book, though no one does the Gulag as well as he.
Any student of human behavior on a national/international scale had better draw a deep breath and read this one for its studied and comprehensive perspective – because by the course of current events, it appears that the conditions for such behavior are forming once again.
Thanks for the tip. Few of us have time to read something as massive as the Gulag. A well done, comprehensive treatment of the subject would be very valuable.
The problem is that liberals dominate the educational establishment,and they are nothing but latent stalinists who sympathize with both Stalin’s goals and means. just look at how they lickspittle Castro.Perhaps the Tea Party could disseminate this and other anti-communist texts.
The easy explanation for the Gulags is that Stalin was a tyrant… etc. True. But that is not the MAIN thing. Tyrannies can be benevolent or not. Stalin’s was most definitely not benevolent but it was also supremely inefficient. As taxation grows the motivation of the people to produce is reduced. In the case of the Soviet Union, a clear case of 100% taxation, the only incentive to produce was terror. But terror is very difficult to implement all the time all over the place. So in the end everyone ends producing as little as possible and consuming as much as possible. That brings the necessity of slave work. The Gulags were nothing but that: slave work designed to get some people to produce what others could not be forced to do. Think of that when you see how as taxation grew in the US so grew illegal immigration (a soft kind of slavery) Sure it is not as harsh as the Gulags but as taxation and national debt keep on growing slavery will not delay in rising its ugly head. There is no point in trying Socialism one more time to see if this time it works. It won’t. As we in the US get closer and closer to be a Socialist state the same symptoms and maladies that plagued (an eventually killed) the Soviet Union are beginning to appear.
Well said. Terror is superior to taxation…
For all those proponents of Central Planning:
The people in Moscow are still waiting for the wheat to come in from the fields.
The american companion to the russian “The Gulag Archipelago” is
“The Closing of the American Mind” – Allan Bloom
“Closing” is an oracle on the coming of the Obama regime 24 years ago.
Prescient as it is disturbing let it be a lens to peer over the fertile ground being plowed by the Left and their minions, today in the youth of America. The nearly inexhaustible supply of the Left’s cannon fodder here is explained.
Bloom’s “Closing” impact and direct hit on the Left’s origins of current thought is no more revealed than by his critics, nay, their “assault” launched in reviews:
“the outraged “assault” on the book was continued by negative and impassioned reviews by Benjamin Barber in Harper’s; by the scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche Alexander Nehamas in the London Review of Books; and by David Rieff in The Times Literary Supplement.[22] David Rieff called Bloom “an academic version of Oliver North: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic.” The book, he said, was one that “decent people would be ashamed of having written.” The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude “the responses to Bloom’s book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers.” Wikipedia/Allan Bloom
“a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers.”
Sound familiar?
Apart from Solzhenitsyn’s various books, the work of Lev Kopelev (April 9, 1912 – June 18, 1997) gives an important insight into the Soviet system. Book No. 1: The education of a true Believer(German: Und schuf mir einen Götzen, 1976) – Here Kopelev describes his time as a young communist and the famine in Ukraine. Book No. 2: To be preserved Forever (Aufbewahren für alle Zeiten, 1976). This book is about the war and his time in the Gulag, where he met Solzhenitsyn. Book No. 3: Ease my sorrows(Tröste meine Trauer). This book is about Kopelev’s further life.I knew Kopelev personally. And I have/had personal links to Russia: The family of my husband was a Russian-German one and they had to pay a very high price for it. Sometimes for the Russian element, sometimes for the German one.
Reading The Gulag Archipelago in 1979 changed my life. It was a look at human society from a completely different perspective–one without the rule of law and with no respect for the value of the individual human being. I have been a conservative, convinced of the importance of the rule of law and respect for the individual ever since. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is accessible and short enough to give high school students and introduction to this essential story, but it would be better to have them read the abridged version of Gulag. I am heartened that it is being read in Russia. This is a chapter of human experience we would not wish to repeat through inattention to its lessons.
I taught “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” to ninth graders for several years in high school English.
Certainly such books have a valuable message regarding the need to avoid authoritarian government. Yes. lefties can be uncomfortable with such books and need their feet held to the fire to include some in the curriculum. However, too many righties jump to equating Obama with Stalin because he is a socialist/leftie. It’s kind of like the horror stories parents used to tell to their children to keep them on the straight and narrow…or just to control them, depending on how you look at it.
Yes, these horrors existed, but one cheapens their meaning when you fling the Gulag at Obama or Pelosi. There is a measured lesson to be learned from the Gulag, but when I hear the flingers of “Stalinist” at all lefties, I am reminded of another “truth.” Crazy people say crazy things.
We should not forget to mention our own Stalin want to be Communist, William Ayers; who, in his own rough estimate, expressed the need to ‘liquidate’ at least 25 million Americans in the reeducation camps he had planned for those who resisted his Socialist plans for Dystopia. Both he and his murderous wife but demure wife are the neighbors and social misfit friends of the First Couple in Chicago. You may remember Ayers as the guy Michelle, by a slip of the tongue, identified as the real author of the faux autobiography of Dreams; because her husband just couldn’t get it together to fulfill his lucrative contract to write the book.
Nope. don’t remember. What did she say and when? And please source it.
Agreed, would love this factual information. Dynomite if it’s true.
It must be getting hard to find anyone who can can get worked up about a hitler vs stalin argument. It’s a bit like arguing over whether smallpox is worse than polio. Nobody sensibly wants a dose of either, and thankfully it’s all in the past (or should be).
Interesting stuff on the gulag here:
http://www.mudvillegazette.com/034136.html
I hate to say “My zek suffered more than your zek,” but Varlam Shalamov spent 17 years at the camp in Kolyma; his collected stories are in Kolyma Tales (Penguin 1994). It is categorized as Fiction, because maybe it is easier to believe that way.