Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)
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nevalalee.wordpress.com
A learning process where you remember all the facts and recite them exactly, you get a good grade is bad. That doesn't mean you actually understand and can apply your knowledge. There was this article on HN a couple of days ago about the medical paper where the author had reinvented the integral. That's the result of too much memorization.
Intuitive understanding of math is better than rote memorization. But that does not mean that rote memorization is bad, only lesser. I'm also not convinced that many people can grasp something intuitively, bypassing rote memorization.
The shared civilization behind ancient Greece and ancient Northern India and ancient Britain had a system of oral-formulaic poetry, wherein descriptions are full of stock phrases like "wine-dark sea" or "rosy-fingered Dawn", like in today's "My name is X and I'm here to say" in more recent oral poetic forms.
If you have no writing, all of your community's texts are fan fiction with limit on headcanon. People brought tape recorders to Bosnia in the 1930s, to try to see how oral folk music worked, and to see how much it changed day to day and year to year, and they found that they couldn't glue the same story together from day to day.
https://academyofideas.com/2017/04/gulag-archipelago-aleksan...
Here's a link to the abridged version: https://www.amazon.com/Archipelago-Peterson-introduction-Ale...
But if you want the full experience, look up the three-volume originals.
In the Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn cites something that has really stuck with me:
> Martin Latsis, writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of red terror.”
A haunting quote, you would think. The thing is, I'm not sure that our younger generation would learn much from reading Solzhenitsyn, or even the above quote. I think even Solzhenitsyn can't teach you that you cannot take things like "equality" at face value. That maybe there are deeper realities lurking beneath the surface?
I'll leave it to Dylan:
> A self-ordained professor's tongue / Too serious to fool/ Spouted out that liberty / Is just equality in school / "Equality," I spoke their word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now.
I purchased his book off Amazon a few weeks ago, thinking it wouldn't be long until they started delisting books. Now all this nonsense with Dr. Seuss.
One quote, loosely paraphrased from another book I'm struggling to finish -- an interview with survivors of post WW2 totalitarianism. One of them was incredibly disillusioned, and told the author not to bother with the interview, as no one would be ready to believe it was happening until it was too late.
Edit: I am speaking very loosely here. Yes, I know the government isn't censoring Dr. Seuss. Yes, I know the estate has the right to cease publishing for any reason. Yes, I know Amazon did not delist Dr. Seuss, it was eBay. But I was not referring to any of these things, and I did not intend to.
My statement was intended to be this: I expect Amazon to delist books, and am purchasing physical copies. What is happening now with Dr. Seuss is in the category of things that drove my worried purchases.
Rarely will I say this, as I value being precise with what I'm saying. If your response is, "But @bjt2n3904, the government isn't censoring this" you are both technically correct, and missing the forest for the trees.
Except it was the copyright holder of the Dr. Seuss books that decided to withdraw these books. Not the government or sellers like Amazon. It's more of an argument for reducing the length of copyright in the US rather than some sort of ominous supression of free speech.
From wsj:
> Online marketplace eBay Inc. said it is working to prevent the resale of six Dr. Seuss books that were pulled earlier this week by the company in charge of the late author’s works because they contain offensive imagery.
Just like with tech companies' internal political culture or newsroom revolts sweeping all the major journalism houses, publishers have themselves experienced both internal employee activism and external pressures. Consider for example, that employees in Penguin House were in literal tears (https://reason.com/2020/11/25/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-l...) because they decided to publish Jordan Peterson's new book. Or observe how activists associated with Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon tried to stop a local landmark book store (Powell's) from selling Andy Ngo's book "Unmasked", which details the criminal activity of local antifa cells (https://pen.org/press-release/pen-america-supports-powells-d...).
Book burning was once a far-fetched joke but it really is very much upon us. And it doesn't have to come in the literal form of a book burning. It's enough for the threat of "cancellation" to force the hand of authors, publishers, or retailers.
But antifa is an activity, not an organization. Anyone can do antifa simply by opposing local fascist activity. It may be as simple as covering up fascist graffiti, or punching Richard Spencer. Some people do it with their friends, others alone. Every little bit helps, but more helps more. Try not to endanger yourself or non-fascists.
There are many fascist and fascist-leaning groups and individuals, and many opposing them. Anyone may oppose them, without need for permission. Organizing with local others can produce greater effect. That also does not require permission.
Any existing organization may choose to engage in anti-fascist activity, possibly in coördination with other groups. That also does not imply an "Antifa" organization.
Opposition to fascism is everyone's responsibility. How that opposition may best be effected varies with circumstance. Rooting out fascism in police departments is an obviously important part of anti-fascist activity.
Why should a company still feel like this is appropriate to publish?
Or this image: https://www.nepm.org/sites/wfcr/files/styles/medium/public/2...
Should we still be publishing this: https://imgur.com/ykQpXON
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
It's also only 33TB on bittorrent. Humanity's literary heritage fits on $900 worth of hard drives. If Sci-Hub is the World Library's nonfiction section then LibGen is the fiction aisles.
The sad part is that they end up rather excitedly reinforcing the very regime that put them there and, towards the end, are instrumental in thwarting one of their country's best hopes at throwing off the yoke of Stalinism.
If you do read it, make sure you get the uncensored version. The chapter making fun of Stalin's working habits is hilarious.
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.
If only. Never thought I would see gulag apologism, but I am not surprised.
I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov was a facist anti-semite, too.
PS. Nice touch with the whattaboutism.
PSS. As a Jew I just love when antisemitism is invoked in character assassinations. Makes me feel loved, valued and most all: protected! ;)
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.
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, 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."
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.
All that said, I welcome injections of nuance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin purges is was about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents.
From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...
- the belief in Soviet statistics and
- a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
Was she still living in Russia at the time this was published?
The author lived in the most extreme one and his writings show that.
I can tell you that from my personal experience that the time after the fall of communism and before the agents of capitalism gained power in society was the most free time in my life.
Solzhenitsyn wrote a lot and TGA seems like a melting pot of his own anticommunist beliefs, his experiences under Soviet rule, and an interest in his craft as a writer. But it's not 100% a historically accurate book.
Obviously (shouldn't have to say it but who knows these days) gulags were bad and I wouldn't want to be placed into one etc. I do however think we do ourselves a disservice when taking untrue accounts as factual, as is the case in a lot of western treatment of Soviet leaders (esp. Stalin; Lenin seems to get more of a pass).
How does your post truth attitude account for the fact that the stories that have come out of the gulags and auschwitz by many many people seem to tell the same stories? Are these just fictional novels popping up in everyone's heads?
Shameful, I'm so angry after reading this, as someone from one of these countries who's family was affected. You should be ashamed for trying to normalise this type of society.
I also think you missed the part where the author acknowledges that it's a work of fiction and informed by real experiences but not meant to relate to reality per se. So while I value your input (of course!) I can't help but wonder if a re-read of previous comments might be in order.
Have you read at least the first few chapters of The Gulag Archipelago?
Russia is an authoritarian oligarchy and their school system presumably reflects this. I don't think this is a mark in favor of what you think it is.
> Have you read at least the first few chapters of The Gulag Archipelago?
As a teenager, yes, do you think I'm missing something crucial, specifically from the early bits?
I don't know what country you are from, but I doubt its any with experiences of death camps. Take your non historical post truth head out of your ass and realise that MILLIONS of people were killed in nazi germany, the gulags, by the chinese communists. MILLIONS others were starved to death because food was confiscated from them.
These systems don't SUCK. They were the lowest points of human history.
I'm so fucking angry with apologists like you. You have no idea what people went through.
> I don't know what country you are from, but I doubt its any with experiences of death camps.
I'm sorry that I wasn't sufficiently excoratory of the gulags. What adjective do you think would make you feel I have an acceptable level of distaste for forced labor camps?
I also don't think the gulags were death camps, weren't they "reeducation" and labor camps? Unlike a death camp, the point is to produce labor (in large part this uncompensated, essentially slave, labor was a major contributor to the USSR's ability to take on a half decade's industrialization in a fifth of the time, or so I'm led to believe).
> I'm so fucking angry with apologists like you. You have no idea what people went through.
I don't think you're in a state to have a rational conversation about politics, because it sounds like you have personal or familial experience with these institutions. I know some of my close friends have very close ties to the Trail of Tears in the USA and I also avoid talking to them about the issue - not because it's taboo, but because I don't think there's a meaningful conversation to be had there. It was an atrocity, and will never be made right. What can you say to that?