You're commenting as if Capitalism and Imperialism are squeaky clean, which is incredibly far from the truth. Just to give a little more context, Solzhenitsyn was a Fascist who supported the Germans during WWII and openly supported Franco in Spain. He was also a notorious anti-semite even at a time when anti-semitism was punishable by death in Soviet Russia. I've read Gulag Archipelago and he's a pretty good writer, but it should not be considered a work of non-fiction.
A quote from an interview with his wife:
"Natalya Reshetovskaya, a Russian chemist who twice married the dissident writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, and questioned the famous account he gave of Stalin's prison camps in ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' died in Moscow on May 28. She was 84.
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.
He began a series of love affairs with younger women and when Miss Reshetovskaya protested, she wrote that he replied: ''I have to describe lots of women in my novels. You don't expect me to find my heroines at the dinner table, do you ?''
He eventually left her for Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician.
What is a gulag? It's a penal colony or a labor camp or a prison.
The US today houses more prisoners for slave labor as a percentage of it's population than the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag period, modern day Russia, Iran or China.
The comment you are replying to was rife with absolute inaccuracies. I can assure you you won't get anywhere trying to argue against that person.
Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned by Stalin because while on the front lines fighting against the Nazis he wrote a letter that was intercepted with statements in it critical of Stalin's poor execution in supplying the army.
The parent commenter doesn't even get this basic fact right and flips it on its head. Denial effects like this are the mark of a true ideologue, and as you pointed out the whataboutism is also a tale for cognitive dissonance. And the dismissive attitude towards gulags is also indicative of somebody shutting out information that would undermine a fragile ego clinging to ideology for purpose.
What part is inaccurate and where did I say anything contradicting what you're saying? I've studied Russian history for many years. We know much more about the gulags since Glasnost and the opening of the archives. We can now compare actual numbers against Solzhenitsyn's. I've studied this quite a bit and could go on forever, but here's a link to one post on AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j2un8/is_so...
The biggest specialist in this subject, Viktor Zemskov, who worked in the Soviet archives in the period of 'Perestroika' gives the following facts1 "In 1937 there were 1,196,369 prisoners and 87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc. In 1938 in GULAG were 1,881,570 prisoners and 81% of them were ordinary criminals.
What do you say to a person who cites Soviet statistics in earnest?
What do you say to a person who, in one comment, rails against incarceration in the United States, only to say that in the Soviet Union the GULAG wasn't so bad because... "87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc."
During WWII, German prisoners, and anybody else drafted into service for Germany and captured, were killed or sent to the Gulags. During and after the war, anyone who had been taken prisoner and returned to Soviet custody were considered deserters, and shot or sent to the Gulags. Civilians in places first overrun by German and then Soviet forces were considered collaborators and commonly killed or sent to the Gulags. The choice which often depended on availability of transportation.
Gulag terms were often only a few years because the lifespan of prisoners at many sites was short, particularly gold mines.
So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.
The commenters who compared prisons in the United States with Gulags, where you were sent to dig for gold basically by hand, poorly dressed at -30C for 12 hours.
> So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.
It takes a special kind of ignorance to believe statistics like this, and then to believe that being a "thief" makes being sent to prison okay, while complaining about incarceration in the United States, where people are incarcerated for petty crimes. It is mind bending.
Your comment was a littany of attempts at character assassination largely unrelated to the work in question. The idea that Russian gulags were "just a prison" is a ridiculous characterization that no historian would agree with. They were prisons for political prisoners, who were there warehoused there to keep them from speaking out against the regime, and they were put there without due process of law. The idea that that is even remotely comparable to the American judicial system is just completely ahistorical Stalinist apologism.
A relatively small percentage were political prisoners, but when you compare the number of people who have received very lengthy sentences for minor drug possession, in some cases life, how is that any better? Not to mention Jim Crow in the US at the time. We have the largest prison population in the world by a considerable margin. Most of the people in our jails and prisons are there for drug offenses and crimes of poverty.
The US has a far larger prison population as a percentage of total population right now than the Soviet Union did even at the height of Stalin's purges. We have access to the Soviet archives now. We have actual numbers on these things.
Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.
There was no rule of law in the USSR. Sentencing was arbitrary. Your typical "thief" was quite often a person who inhabited the apartment someone else wanted, or a person who's position someone wanted at work. Write to the authorities that you saw them stealing: done! There were prison quotes to fill, most seriously. The United States has absolutely nothing on the Soviet Union.
Only a person who has no experience outside the realm of Western existence could believe such a thing as Soviet (or today, Chinese) statistics. People were disappeared, summarily shot in basements, all the time. The whole system worked like that, from prisoners in prisons to the production of basic commodities: https://soviet_intelligence.enacademic.com/381/Uzbek_Cotton_.... Everything was lies and murder.
Western intellectuals spent decades defending and minimizing Soviet atrocities, because like many intellectuals, they really believed Utopia is possible, if only everyone thought like them.
They still do. The admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's response to COVID has been very telling. Note that praise of Taiwan, who handled it phenomenally without welding people into apartment buildings, has been limited in comparison.
Honest question: where do you get the information that you're operating on? It sounds like you're just presenting opinion and you don't know a whole lot about Soviet history, gulags, or the US prison system.
You do know that we have forced labor in the US and slavery is allowed under the 13th amendment if you are convicted of a crime. Prisoners are frequently lent out as cheap labor to private companies.
I would encourage you to look at the Soviet statistics on the Ukrainian famine, and ask yourself if any of them can be trusted, and why you have trusted them in the past.
We're talking about a government that suppressed its own scientists to a point where a critical design flaw in a nuclear reactor was ignored until the world's worst nuclear accident occurred.
And like a good little ideologue, you proceed with whataboutism, assuming that people like me haven't called legislators to demand an end to private prisons and prison labor. I have.
You're setting up straw men and attributing lots of arguments to me that I'm not making. I spent a month in Kyiv last year, went to the Holodomor museum, and just finished a book about it not too long ago. The famine was very much a real thing. I've also been to Chernobyl, but I'm not sure why you're bringing any of this up.
The stats talk about number of people imprisoned in a particular moment of time. It doesn't say if a part of them for example died over the next couple of months due to cold and starvation and were topped up with new inmates That would make the number look unchanged during the next count.
How is this whataboutism? I'm in no way apologizing for gulags, but the "Socialism and Marxism always leads to utter destruction" take is so tired and insulting to those who actually study history and political science.
Also, this "Ultimately that adherence to a singular ideology, with aggressive suppression of all others, leads to every subsequent horror." You do realize this holds true under every economic system, right. It was true under feudalism and it's absolutely true under Capitalism. That's kind of the nature of a system.
Edit: The point of bringing up the anti-semitism and Fascism was to show that his views, pretty much all around, were strongly forbidden in the Soviet Union at the time. Absolute free speech works fairly well in America, but you have to understand that at the time in that part of the world there were many different cultures with high-tensions sharing the same space. If hate speech was allowed it would result in non-stop war. The same thing was the case in Yugoslavia where hate speech was strongly punished and it served the purpose of keeping the peace, until Tito died. The history of the Balkans illustrates this point quite well. Yes, we all love free speech, but endless wars are good for nobody.
FWIW, I've traveled through all of these countries extensively and Russian is my second language. I also speak a bit of Serbo-Croatian. Traveling around and speaking with these people changed the lens with which I view these things. There is more nuance than words can describe and the history is complicated to say the least.
When and where did you do your travels? Living in the former USSR I can absolutely confirm the history is way more complicated, than it is commonly presented. Changes over time, changes depending on people you speak to. In my country we have had read army, Finnish army and Waffen SS veterans living out their lives quite peacefully together but they would no doubt give you a very different perspective on how the GULAG felt. And it’s not that you can tell from the outside.
As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?
I was in St. Petersburg and Moscow last year and spent a month in Kyiv. I've been to Czech and Slovak republics the year before. Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Belarus. Next on the list is Georgia, Armenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. I've been wanting to go to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan too.
The percentage of the population that ended up spending time in a work camp was about 2.5% and the average sentence was 2-3 years. It's terrible what happened, there's no two ways about it, but the transition from feudalism to capitalism was pretty horrendous beyond words.
Honestly, the history of the region is so complex that it's incredibly challenging to know where to begin.
He was fighting in Red Army during the WWII and got wounded doing so. How that constitutes supporting fascism, I do not know. In his later years his views did indeed drift to russian nationalism bordering on russian supremacy. This led him to fall out with, among others, Estonians who sheltered him while he was writing the Archipelago. This is a pity, but does not negate the significance of his early work. Neither does his work imply anybody else to be squeaky clean. It explores evil, it’s working on people and documents the outcome of that work in a particular case.
He was fighting for his country. If someone invaded the US during the Trump, Bush, or Obama depending on who you dislike, we would all be fighting to defend our country regardless of who was in charge. Defending your was of life, family, countrymen doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to wrap your head around.
He ended up leaving the US and going back to Russia because he said the US had no culture. Not saying I agree with that, but that's how he felt. It's pretty common for people to become more nationalistic after they leave their home country.
The facist tendencies come from a meeting he had with Thatcher where he said "The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon." It seems extraordinary that Solzhenitsyn saw the failure of Nazi Germany to annex the Soviet Union as some kind of missed opportunity.
He also visited Franco in Spain on a number of occasions and did a TV interview where he praised Franco.
When I first read Gulag Archipelago I accepted it as fact and projected his feelings onto the rest of Russian society. It was only through later studies that I found this to not be the case.
Ragarding the Holocaust - if anyone has a reference to someone debunking the common arguments for denying its size I’d appreciate a link. Arguments such as all death camps being in the soviet controlled part of Germany (after the war), the wooden doors in gas chambers idea, that holes for putting gas in gas chambers were made after the war, and that gas and collection of shoes (I remember the mountain of them when visiting) were used for delousing. It’s easy to find claims online that these things point to the event being a communist propaganda fabrication, but surely the well read HN community can help me debunk such claims.
A quote from an interview with his wife:
"Natalya Reshetovskaya, a Russian chemist who twice married the dissident writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, and questioned the famous account he gave of Stalin's prison camps in ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' died in Moscow on May 28. She was 84.
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.
He began a series of love affairs with younger women and when Miss Reshetovskaya protested, she wrote that he replied: ''I have to describe lots of women in my novels. You don't expect me to find my heroines at the dinner table, do you ?''
He eventually left her for Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovska...
He has a "on Russians and the jews" bit on his wiki. Ridiculous anti-semite the west used as a poster boy for the horrors of the gulag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn#On_Russ...
What is a gulag? It's a penal colony or a labor camp or a prison.
The US today houses more prisoners for slave labor as a percentage of it's population than the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag period, modern day Russia, Iran or China.