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’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.
The first time I realized Taibi was sus was when he mentioned that he was reading Gulag archipelago _again
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.
