13 ms·

Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.

by Fins 8y ago

allthing 8y ago
I would also highly recommend "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum. She covers the entire history of the Gulag in great detail from the Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Empire.
jpatokal 8y ago
Kolyma Stories and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are an incredible pair. For Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag is deeply personal and his rage seeps through every page. Shalamov is the complete opposite, and his book is an inhumanly dispassionate sequence of vignettes of camp life. Some of the mental images stick with you for life, like the zek (camp inmate) who broke into the camp larder, barricaded the door from the inside, and feasted by gnawing on raw, frozen bacon. He was still smiling when they broke in, dragged him out, beat him and threw him into the isolation cells, because at least his belly was full...
- foobiekr 8y ago
  Gulag Archipelago looks daunting. It's an insane amount of material. Must one read all three volumes?
  - kinsomo 8y ago
    I read a ~400 page abridged version, but I do feel I missed out.
    - cwyers 8y ago
      I've read the original three volume version, which I got from a library. I own the abridged. You do miss a lot, but you can still get a lot out of the single-volume version.
  - romanhn 8y ago
    I listened to an unabridged audiobook version - 67 hours of laughingly bad, home-made narration in Russian. Even then, it was easily one of the most riveting books I have come across.
    - archagon 8y ago
      Was it this one, by chance? https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 I thought the reading was superb, even though the quality was a bit scratchy.
      - romanhn 8y ago
        No, it was the Ignatiy Lapkin version (linked from that page). That guy was something else.
  - pvg 8y ago
    You don't have to. Big chunks of it can be difficult to follow without the historical context Solzhenitsyn assumes the reader has - that you'd have to get elsewhere. More importantly though, you don't really have to read it in order, you can poke around the ToC and find stuff that doesn't require knowledge of the details of the early show trials, etc. You can hop over to the chapter on arrests or escape attempts and see how it goes.
  - jfk13 8y ago
    For a less intimidating introduction, you might like to try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
    - dragandj 8y ago
      One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a good book, but nothing like the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich was officially supported by the USSR in a brief period after Stalin's death, as a book that talks about the imprisonment, but waters it down so much as to make it not-so-terrible. Gulag Archipelago is much more interesting, and also much more eye-opening.
  - Fins 8y ago
    The problem with* Gulag* is that (in Russian) it is quite badly written, unlike Shalamov's stories which real literature even before editors got to them. History-wise, there are better sources, too.
    - archagon 8y ago
      Strongly disagree. Reading for the first time in Russian and finding that it flows wonderfully. Solzhenitsyn has a unique tone of voice: at once conversational, ironic, sadly humorous, and full of pathos. His imagery can be breathtaking, e.g. when he's talking about the different rivers of prisoners flowing in and out of the gulag system. When referencing his own life, his sense of narrative pacing is superb. And when it comes to matters of the soul, he has a way with words that few others can touch. Indeed, there's a number of what I would consider "best of all time" quotes in the first few chapters alone. 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. (I wrote down: "names are leaky abstractions.") 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...
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    I found it quite accessible and have read it end to end twice. It's not a Russian heavy literature doorstop a la War & Peace, but an encyclopedic one-man survey of every aspect of the camps, roughly in chronological order: first the the history of labor camps in Russia, then the journey of a typical inmate (arrest, interrogation, trial, transit, arrival, life and death in the camps for prisoners and guards alike, freedom [1]), then the slow winding down of the system. [1] In some sense, at least; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
  - dragandj 8y ago
    It's long, but very interesting. It's much better to read it whole, than some abridged version.
- fractallyte 8y ago
  The Gulag Archipelago is available here: https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes
pvg 8y ago
I'm not making some 'it wasn't real communism, man!' defense but those books are about the reality of prison life under the peak of (communist) totalitarian repression. There was a lot more to the reality. Even the Soviets eventually figured out that level of murderous control was an entirely unnecessary waste of human life and the communism communismed on for decades.
- cwyers 8y ago
  That's not entirely accurate. They did figure out that Stalin's level of repression was unnecessary, or at least they lacked the conviction to carry it out. But in "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, he documents how much of the apparatus continued forward into Khrushchev's regime. He details the town of Novocherkassk, where workers went on strike in June of 1962. Tanks and troops were dispatched. The strikers were fired upon. The wounded were rounded up, and the families of the wounded and the dead were shipped off to Siberia. He talks about other incidents. He talks about how the religious were still treated the same as under Stalin. Life after (or even before) Stalin was not free from such abuses.
  - pvg 8y ago
    Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism. 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.
    - Fins 8y ago
anticodon 8y ago
It's a one-sided and highly exaggerated view.
- pvg 8y ago
  It's pretty hard to cover whatever the other side is when you're stuck in a prison camp. Not sure in what way it's 'exaggerated', though. The worse stuff, nobody was left to write about.
  - anticodon 8y ago
    Parent comment was saying that these are the books to read if you want to know life under communist rule. I wanted to say that it's not true. This kind of literature describe only a small part of a life. 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.
    - pvg 8y ago
      This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse. 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."
    - cwyers 8y ago
      > This kind of literature was 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.
      - jhbadger 8y ago
d0mine 8y ago
only as much as Abu Ghraib represents capitalism and democracy.
- AlexB138 8y ago
  I would suggest that Abu Ghraib represented Imperialism more than Capitalism or Democracy. But I would also say it's a false comparison. There's a massive difference in frequency and scale.

Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.

by Fins 8y ago

Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.

I would also highly recommend "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum. She covers the entire history of the Gulag in great detail from the Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Empire.

jpatokal 8y ago

Kolyma Stories and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are an incredible pair. For Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag is deeply personal and his rage seeps through every page. Shalamov is the complete opposite, and his book is an inhumanly dispassionate sequence of vignettes of camp life. Some of the mental images stick with you for life, like the zek (camp inmate) who broke into the camp larder, barricaded the door from the inside, and feasted by gnawing on raw, frozen bacon. He was still smiling when they broke in, dragged him out, beat him and threw him into the isolation cells, because at least his belly was full...

foobiekr 8y ago
Gulag Archipelago looks daunting. It's an insane amount of material. Must one read all three volumes?
- kinsomo 8y ago
  I read a ~400 page abridged version, but I do feel I missed out.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    I've read the original three volume version, which I got from a library. I own the abridged. You do miss a lot, but you can still get a lot out of the single-volume version.
- romanhn 8y ago
  I listened to an unabridged audiobook version - 67 hours of laughingly bad, home-made narration in Russian. Even then, it was easily one of the most riveting books I have come across.
  - archagon 8y ago
    Was it this one, by chance? https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4011302 I thought the reading was superb, even though the quality was a bit scratchy.
    - romanhn 8y ago
      No, it was the Ignatiy Lapkin version (linked from that page). That guy was something else.
- pvg 8y ago
  You don't have to. Big chunks of it can be difficult to follow without the historical context Solzhenitsyn assumes the reader has - that you'd have to get elsewhere. More importantly though, you don't really have to read it in order, you can poke around the ToC and find stuff that doesn't require knowledge of the details of the early show trials, etc. You can hop over to the chapter on arrests or escape attempts and see how it goes.
- jfk13 8y ago
  For a less intimidating introduction, you might like to try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
  - dragandj 8y ago
    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a good book, but nothing like the Gulag Archipelago. Ivan Denisovich was officially supported by the USSR in a brief period after Stalin's death, as a book that talks about the imprisonment, but waters it down so much as to make it not-so-terrible. Gulag Archipelago is much more interesting, and also much more eye-opening.
- Fins 8y ago
  The problem with* Gulag* is that (in Russian) it is quite badly written, unlike Shalamov's stories which real literature even before editors got to them. History-wise, there are better sources, too.
  - archagon 8y ago
    Strongly disagree. Reading for the first time in Russian and finding that it flows wonderfully. Solzhenitsyn has a unique tone of voice: at once conversational, ironic, sadly humorous, and full of pathos. His imagery can be breathtaking, e.g. when he's talking about the different rivers of prisoners flowing in and out of the gulag system. When referencing his own life, his sense of narrative pacing is superb. And when it comes to matters of the soul, he has a way with words that few others can touch. Indeed, there's a number of what I would consider "best of all time" quotes in the first few chapters alone. 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. (I wrote down: "names are leaky abstractions.") 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...
- jpatokal 8y ago
  I found it quite accessible and have read it end to end twice. It's not a Russian heavy literature doorstop a la War & Peace, but an encyclopedic one-man survey of every aspect of the camps, roughly in chronological order: first the the history of labor camps in Russia, then the journey of a typical inmate (arrest, interrogation, trial, transit, arrival, life and death in the camps for prisoners and guards alike, freedom [1]), then the slow winding down of the system. [1] In some sense, at least; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
- dragandj 8y ago
  It's long, but very interesting. It's much better to read it whole, than some abridged version.
fractallyte 8y ago
The Gulag Archipelago is available here: https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes

pvg 8y ago

I'm not making some 'it wasn't real communism, man!' defense but those books are about the reality of prison life under the peak of (communist) totalitarian repression. There was a lot more to the reality. Even the Soviets eventually figured out that level of murderous control was an entirely unnecessary waste of human life and the communism communismed on for decades.

cwyers 8y ago
That's not entirely accurate. They did figure out that Stalin's level of repression was unnecessary, or at least they lacked the conviction to carry it out. But in "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, he documents how much of the apparatus continued forward into Khrushchev's regime. He details the town of Novocherkassk, where workers went on strike in June of 1962. Tanks and troops were dispatched. The strikers were fired upon. The wounded were rounded up, and the families of the wounded and the dead were shipped off to Siberia. He talks about other incidents. He talks about how the religious were still treated the same as under Stalin. Life after (or even before) Stalin was not free from such abuses.
- pvg 8y ago
  Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism. 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.
  - Fins 8y ago

anticodon 8y ago

It's a one-sided and highly exaggerated view.

pvg 8y ago
It's pretty hard to cover whatever the other side is when you're stuck in a prison camp. Not sure in what way it's 'exaggerated', though. The worse stuff, nobody was left to write about.
- anticodon 8y ago
  Parent comment was saying that these are the books to read if you want to know life under communist rule. I wanted to say that it's not true. This kind of literature describe only a small part of a life. 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.
  - pvg 8y ago
    This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse. 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."
  - cwyers 8y ago
    > This kind of literature was 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.
    - jhbadger 8y ago

d0mine 8y ago

only as much as Abu Ghraib represents capitalism and democracy.

AlexB138 8y ago
I would suggest that Abu Ghraib represented Imperialism more than Capitalism or Democracy. But I would also say it's a false comparison. There's a massive difference in frequency and scale.