Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

From literary perspective, it was a rather weak work. Giving him the Nobel prize was certainly politically motivated and put a lot of shame of the Nobel committee. It's dull, quite repetitive, and overall boring.

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.

> Also, it is now known to be largely made-up, with many of the stories of the book being a certain lie.

Source? I have heard that the stats in the book may be inaccurate but not that the stories were outright made up.

Basically the absence of sources supporting the stories is the problem here.

That's only an issue if you're treating the book as a primary historical source, but it's a far cry from it being "largely made-up." Dude was transcribing remembered stories from countless conversations with inmates, of course it's not going to be completely accurate.

> Dude was transcribing remembered stories from countless conversations with inmates, of course it's not going to be completely accurate.

... 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!! "

What are you talking about? He wrote the book covertly in the Soviet Union:

> 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.

A work of fiction is largely made up? Shocking.

It is actually not a fiction but a slightly faked documentary. The ambition of the author was to present what he knew about Gualg, filling the void with imagination so that the whole book looks like a well-researched documentary.

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.

It may not have amounted to a desire to save communism itself, but there was enough opposition to the "shock therapy" liberalization being imposed after its fall that Yeltsin had to shell parliament at the U.S.'s behest in 1993. We got what we wanted, and the Russians got 10 years of kleptocratic asset stripping whose consequences led directly to Putin.

But that was too late by then. Soviet Union was done. The goal has been achieved. No one really cared about what happened to Russia after (and in a hindsight, it was a mistake - process of breaking it down into pieces, each having it's own version of history and hating each other, should have continued until what remained was safe). But of course, hindsight is always 20/20.

> process of breaking it down into pieces, each having it's own version of history and hating each other, should have continued until what remained was safe

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.

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