Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.
I thought the reading was superb, even though the quality was a bit scratchy.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate
them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to
destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it
is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow
enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at
various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.
At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name
doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
It's true that there's some dry and boring material, but I can hardly blame the author for that: he's the last living source for so many of these stories. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, trying in vain to resurrect the final, fading memories of the countless missing people who touched his life—nameless and nearly faceless, probably buried in some unmarked grave—while waiting for the KGB to burst in any minute and destroy his decade of work. How much more painful must the process of editing be when the things you cut are fragments of human lives that might as well have never existed once they leave the page?
Unfortunately, there's now a contingent of the Russian population that denounces Solzhenitsyn for reasons of pure nationalism. It makes me so sad when I see Solzhenitsyn mentioned in the Runet, because it's almost always extremely vitriolic...
"если первая крохотная капля правды разорвалась как психологическая бомба - что же будет в нашей стране, когда Правда обрушится водопадами? А -- обрушится, ведь не миновать."
Obviously, this is to a large degree a matter of taste, but I am far from the only Russian speaker finding Solzhenitsyn's language highly stilted and artificial. The English translation you're quoting is much better.
Interestingly, same is very often said about Vonnegut's translations into Russian.
I am, however, listening to an audiobook version, so maybe it's different on the page.
https://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/11816/25/Voiinovich_-...
'Invented words' is what made me think of it, I don't think it's much in evidence in GULAG but it definitely pop up in his fiction. In Voinovich's parodic telling, it's due to an excessive reliance on the 19th century 'Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary'. It's a perfectly pointed barb.
I think where GULAG succeeds is in exactly what he puts on the front page "an experiment in literary investigation". Everything from 'В круге первом' through 'Как нам обустроить Россию' and later gets progressively weirder and, well, to put it politely, not better.
[1] In some sense, at least; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
Is what I'm replying to. It's a very narrow slice of a much bigger thing.
Life after (or even before) Stalin was not free from such abuses.
I'm not sure why you think I said anything of the sort.
As to 'figured out', no, of course they didn't have a sudden epiphany while taking a shower one morning. The paranoid nutcase that ruled them died.
The thing that I was getting at, really, is that there is a fairly common but mistaken notion that the Soviet system was all about overt repression; that it depended, throughout its entire lifespan on the direct and immediate threat of deadly state violence. It didn't and that's, in many ways, a more interesting and disturbing thing to consider.
This isn't a particularly original or new thought - if you've run across, say, Masha Gessen's recent writing, it's often reiterated (as a kind of starting point) there as well.
Ah, exactly - I don't think that's why it continued to work. Consider, for example, how quickly and effectively the system replicated itself all over Eastern Europe. Those places had their bloody coups and brief periods of Stalinist terror but nothing of the Soviet scale and duration. Many avoided outright forced collectivization, a few didn't even require a permanent occupying Soviet army. And it still worked.
Even if we can't agree how or why, it's on us to always think about it in the hope it might in some small way prevent it from happening again. In the places that we left or the places we came to.
And because you didn't have the Big Terror to the same extent, life in Eastern Europe was quite a bit better than in the USSR. When we visited a friend in Prague in 1985, he had a collection of "anti-soviet" literature (including Kolyma Stories that would be enough to send anyone in USSR reliving Shalamov's experience. And he didn't even hide it...
Not everybody was living in a prison camp in USSR, not even a majority of the population. This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.
Person who judges life in USSR by these kind of books will have a very skewed opinion.
I think the parent comment is reductive in a the-opposite-of-insightful way but no, that literature was not "funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse."
I mean, I'd agree that the material is a thin slice of the society, but come on. These are real personal narratives of people who lived through these experiences. The implication that "the West" is why these books exist, not just why we're able to read them, is absurd.
Can you think of some that weren't, I dunno, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or Huck Finn? The notion that a survivor's memoir like Shalamov's is some kind of Western plot was absurd in its time and plainly disgusting now.
No no no no no no. How do you jump from one to the other? That's like saying Anne Frank's diary's credibility is tainted by the injustice of the internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry.