A Legendary Exposé of the Brutality of the Soviet Union
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Also, it is now known to be largely made-up, with many of the stories of the book being a certain lie.
In any case, whatever helped kick down Soviet Empire was worth the costs incurred and i think he was one of the greatest figures out of those who made it happen. What matters is that plenty of people read, and believed it. Glasnost created, almost instantly, a critical mass of literature like that, widely available to the Soviet reader, bringing up realisation that the very existence of the nation they lived in, was immoral, unacceptable, and it had to be smashed as soon as possible.
Almost no one really did anything about it, or if they did, it didn't matter. It's just that when USSR started shaking, almost no one was willing to help it.
In Ukraine in 2013, we had Maidan and similarly sized Antimaidan. In 1991 Moscow, there was no Soviet "antimaidan", no one gave a flying fuck about saving the Union anymore. People like Solzhenitsyn were the main if not the only reason why it was the case.
I read many of his works. Cancer Ward looks like traditional fiction, but we know that it is directly inspired by his personal experience.
That's one of the distinctive traits of this author. He went through pretty much everything he wrote about.
I really wish you would understand at some point that such statements play right into Putin's hands, and are one of the major reasons why he's still in power and has no realistic prospects of losing it. Until you do, there will be no lasting peace.
Source? I have heard that the stats in the book may be inaccurate but not that the stories were outright made up.
... under the careful guidance of the CIA.
It would have been a much better work if he did not exagerate so much. But, "P: [hopping down from his throne] I'll tell you what I want! I want a last supper with one Christ, twelve disciples, no kangaroos, no trampoline acts, by Thursday lunch or you don't get paid!! "
> After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–1967, he worked to develop his preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago into finished typescript. He accomplished some of this while in hiding at his friends' homes in the Moscow region and elsewhere. While held at the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in 1945, Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education, who had been taken captive after the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1944. Solzhenitsyn entrusted Susi with the original typed and proofread manuscript of the finished work, after copies had been made of it both on paper and on microfilm. Susi got the manuscript to his daughter, Heli Susi, who kept the "master copy" hidden from the KGB in Estonia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And the North's military so easily overwhelmed the South's that within two months, they were driven to brink of defeat, retaining only the Pusan Perimeter on the south-eastern tip of the peninsula.
If an internal actor wants more power and starts making moves, you’d have to have consensus and collective action from the rest of the group to stop them. That is both very difficult and very expensive to achieve.
In practice, it turns into authoritarianism very different from the idealized goal.
> A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).[1]
Then starting from that, what the military does best is producing weapons.
That's the only country which wasn't at war which was proportionally spending that much on the military.
The Soviet Union was a military state disguised as a country, pretty much nothing outside the military really mattered there.
It's even visible on the inside organisation of the Soviet Union itself (which they picked themselves, nobody asked them), which is pretty much the same as in any army, just at a country level.
Sure, the US exploited that flaw but it's been there by design.
On the other hand, that excuse runs pretty thin after 1945. But the oppression was still there. So it appears that oppression was more a feature of the system. (Or at least a feature of the man - but then Lenin did it too, and Brezhnev did it perhaps less, but still enough to be oppressive, so it looks like it was a feature of the system.)
Post-war Yugoslavia was such an example. As for the brutality, here’s a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goli_Otok#Prison
It's funny, if you want to find the truly most loathsome of your fellow citizens, just browse your state's public sex offender registry. How many "punch nazi" types would endorse assaulting these people? Probably none, not even for the ones politically organizing and advocating for their "cause" (the "MAPS" types)--which is the correct attitude for a civilized society.
I've read a lot of pro fascist speech arguments on HN, but "we should treat them with the dignity and respect we afford child-fuckers" is definitely a new one on me.
Pedophiles generally aren’t advocating for an overthrow of the system and putting non-pedophiles in death camps.
The ones on the registry have already been caught and punished, too. We have no such public registry of Nazis.
And Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37 occurred because Communists weren't opposed enough. Yet conservatives don't go around calling for "Communists" (let alone as broadly constituted as the left casts their opponents as "nazis") to be assaulted, because they understand speech != violence.
> Pedophiles generally aren’t advocating
It's not hard to find pedophiles trying to rebrand themselves (e.g., "MAPS") and trying to advocate for decriminalization or reform.
> The ones on the registry have already been caught and punished, too. We have no such public registry of Nazis.
Probably because they haven't broken any laws--you know, the things a civilized society is supposed to use to punish its transgressors.
This is a very hard assertion to support. A current Republican Congresswoman called for Nancy Pelosi's execution; https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/politics/marjorie-taylor-gree....
The former and future Republican president called for demonstrators to be shot, hecklers at his rallies to be beaten up, said "Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!" when Montana's governor assaulted a reporter...
A decent chunk of conservatives assaulted Congress when they didn't like the election results, and a lot more supported the action.
> It's not hard to find pedophiles trying to rebrand themselves (e.g., "MAPS") and trying to advocate for decriminalization or reform.
And if they make any significant inroads politically I'll happily add them to the punching list.
It also takes as an assumption that intolerant ideas outcompete tolerant ones, opposed to reach some equilibrium solution or the opposite.
I read The Gulag Archipelago and did not find it to be as damning to the Gulag system as people seem to paint it, at least in historical context. Forced prison labor was only officially abolished in Britain in 1948. Political prisoners in USSR were but a tiny part of Gulag prisoners. Considering USSR replaced literal monarchy, that is still a big improvement. In the turmoils between 1917 and 1945 it is no wonder a proper court system was not established and the country had what it deemed other priorities. Hindsight is 20/20 here.
Solzhenitsin himself was booked for spreading information about Soviet atrocities, but severe penalties for spreading such information existed in many countries, including Britain. It is a rather typical (especially then) wartime law, that in Britain for instance went up to death sentence (probably not for that particular kind of violation).
This all feels alien now, but it is not that much different from other major powers were doing at the time.
Comparing them on a binary basis runs the risk of making no true Scotsman errors, and easy to do as google powered amateur historian.
Take toikas. They are a terrible and very corruptible court system for peace time, but in 30 years of USSR life by the time Solzhenitsin got arrested 10 were in either the civil war, or in the WW2, where swift decisions might have been of more importance than the rate of false positives. So I can see why they weren't replaced until later.
Their main conclusion is that no master plan existed for extermination and enslavement - much like how communists argue that there was no overarching plan when the Soviets starved several million people to death during the Holodomor, and committed many other crimes against humanity.
It's uncanny how similar the excuses are.
The USSR's intent to exterminate Ukrainians (and many other ethnicities) can be proven to the same standard; and has been proven; and this has led to worldwide condemnation, from the European Parliament representing 450 million people in 27 countries, to even Ecuador and Australia.
The European Parliament,
...
Recognises the Holodomor, the artificial famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine caused by a deliberate policy of the Soviet regime, as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, as it was committed with the intent to destroy a group of people by deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction;
Some countries of EU and the parliament recognizing something is not evidence of any kind.
In fact it paints EU parliament in bad colors to me because wow, coincidentally they do it in 2022 with many individual countries still objecting and US and UK simply refusing to twist the facts into that conclusion just yet.
None. No direct record of any kind exists to prove that Hitler ordered the Holocaust.
As for indirect evidence, there's plenty for the Holodomor too: a) Stalin and other top-ranking officials were aware of the food shortages in Ukraine, b) they knew that their policies were going to make things worse, c) they still adopted those policies, and d) they expressed satisfaction with the outcome. They deliberately allowed millions of people to die of starvation to suppress Ukrainian national identity and punish them for perceived disloyalty.
If someone came to your city, confiscated all food, harshly punished any attempts to store even a minimal amount for basic survival, caused a horrific starvation that killed many people, drove survivors to such insanity that mothers ate the flesh off their living children, and still blocked all foreign aid and prevented people from leaving, then how would you call it if not deliberate mass murder?
> the highest level of the German government
Cool, that's the first time "the highest level" comes up. You started with "The Nazi regime". Do you think "The Nazi regime" is Hitler and his direct reports? How many is that? About 20 people?
> there's plenty for the Holodomor too
Then you list 1 single piece of "evidence" (one list of items that would implicate regime provided ALL of them are true). And it is not really an evidence, because clause "b) they knew that their policies would make things worse" is your own personal guess. I can't see how you could logically arrive that Stalin foresaw that that policy will make things worse. What evidence do you have for that claim? I kinda suspect that your evidence for it looks likes this:
(a && b && c && d) => Holodomor was intentional.
Holodomor was intentional.
b must be true