6 ms·

A Legendary Exposé of the Brutality of the Soviet Union

47 points by eadmund 2y ago

anovikov 2y ago
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.
- pavlov 2y ago
  A work of fiction is largely made up? Shocking.
  - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
    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.
- cempaka 2y ago
  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.
  - anovikov 2y ago
    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.
    - rapacious 2y ago
      > 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.
- archagon 2y ago
  > 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.
  - versale 2y ago
    Basically the absence of sources supporting the stories is the problem here.
    - archagon 2y ago
      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.
      - hulitu 2y ago
        > 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!! "
        archagon 2y ago
        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.
cafard 2y ago
The brutality of the system, particularly but only under Stalin, was not really a secret by 1978. By then, people were readier to hear about it.
cempaka 2y ago
[flagged]
- a12k 2y ago
  The absence of photographic evidence from the gulags doesn’t negate their existence. The Soviets deliberately restricted documentation of the camps, and destroyed records before and during the fall of the USSR.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > If it was so essential to the Soviet system, where were all the images of millions of prisoners in gulags after the Berlin Wall fell? This doesn't really make sense as an objection; the gulags were (mostly) long emptied by then, and the collapse followed. Correlation is clearly there; causation is something you can argue either way. Navalny died in a ex-Gulag labor camp.
  - cempaka 2y ago
    How long emptied, exactly?
    - short_sells_poo 2y ago
      My wife's grandfather had to endure the horrors of a soviet gulag and came back almost starved to death. A 1.9m tall man who weighed less than 50kg. And then revisionists like you come along and start questioning things because you in person haven't seen it. Well, I guess lucky you.
      - cempaka 2y ago
        I haven't made any argument that no gulags ever existed, or that no one was ever mistreated in them. I imagine it was especially rough to be in one when resources were being poured into ending Nazi Germany's salt-the-earth campaign during Barbarossa.
        2y ago
pfortuny 2y ago
Whatever you think of Communism, the repression under Lenin and Stalin is worth knowing in and of itself.
- cempaka 2y ago
  It would be nice if we had an example of a communist state which came into existence and was not immediately beset by foreign intelligence agencies, influence campaigns, and actual military invasions attempting to depose it. We've seen how capitalist regimes behave under such conditions and it's no better.
  - _zagj 2y ago
    You have examples, like North Korea, which invaded its southern neighbor in an act of naked, unprovoked aggression five years after the peninsula was partitioned.
    - _zagj 2y ago
      To the downvoters: we now know conclusively that Kim Il Sung initiated the war, and did so only with Stalin's (initially reluctant) blessing: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/cable-nos-408-410-shtykov-vyshinsky-politburo https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/cable-nos-4... 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.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    It’s probably not possible if you also throw in internal actors seizing power. Communism suggests an absence of concentration of power. 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.
    - skirge 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_zagj 2y ago
[flagged]
- ajuc 2y ago
  On reddit, hn, and internet in general the conservatives support modern totalitarian states like China, Russia or Iran much more often than progressives. Despite very real and very recent atrocities.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  I mean, punch Nazis and Stalinists.
  - _zagj 2y ago
    How about acting like a civilized person and not responding (or encouraging others to respond) to speech with violence?
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Civilization (and the social contract that sustains it) requires defense at times. D-Day serves as an example; we did substantially more than punching.
      - vacuity 2y ago
        Indeed, although I think people "on the right side of history" (whoever they may be, fill in the blank yourself) would (could) do a bit better to ensure they use violence as a last resort. Never too late is crucial, but never too early is still important.
      - _zagj 2y ago
        D-Day was done in response to violence (starting with the invasion Poland in 1939), not speech. Protection of political speech is the bedrock of American civilization. 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.
stmw 2y ago
Suprised Smithsonian does not provide more context on him in that link - here is a better write-up - "the fall of a prophet". https://quillette.com/2018/12/21/solzhenitsyn-the-fall-of-a-prophet/ https://quillette.com/2018/12/21/solzhenitsyn-the-fall-of-a-...
lostmsu 2y ago
Disclaimer: commie. 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.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  You make a good point, as we should remember the many times the US and other countries imprisoned nonviolent political dissidents. However, I think when comparing the USSR, I think the magnitude and severity are distinct. Comparing them on a binary basis runs the risk of making no true Scotsman errors, and easy to do as google powered amateur historian.
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    The point is not even in the relative sizes of the atrocities, but in the maturity of the involved systems, and priorities. 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.
    - mopsi 2y ago
      How would you feel about similar excuses made for Nazi atrocities? The Nazi regime was also very immature, barely five years old by the time of Austrian anschluss, and invented many policies on the go, and was at war for most of its existence. Neo-Nazis even use exactly the same phrasing of "swift decisions" and "priorities" to reduce human suffering into abstract concepts and handwave it away.

47 points by eadmund 2y ago

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.

pavlov 2y ago
A work of fiction is largely made up? Shocking.
- sam_lowry_ 2y ago
  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.
cempaka 2y ago
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.
- anovikov 2y ago
  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.
  - rapacious 2y ago
    > 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.
archagon 2y ago
> 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.
- versale 2y ago
  Basically the absence of sources supporting the stories is the problem here.
  - archagon 2y ago
    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.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > 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!! "
      - archagon 2y ago
        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.

cafard 2y ago

The brutality of the system, particularly but only under Stalin, was not really a secret by 1978. By then, people were readier to hear about it.

cempaka 2y ago

[flagged]

a12k 2y ago
The absence of photographic evidence from the gulags doesn’t negate their existence. The Soviets deliberately restricted documentation of the camps, and destroyed records before and during the fall of the USSR.
ceejayoz 2y ago
> If it was so essential to the Soviet system, where were all the images of millions of prisoners in gulags after the Berlin Wall fell? This doesn't really make sense as an objection; the gulags were (mostly) long emptied by then, and the collapse followed. Correlation is clearly there; causation is something you can argue either way. Navalny died in a ex-Gulag labor camp.
- cempaka 2y ago
  How long emptied, exactly?
  - short_sells_poo 2y ago
    My wife's grandfather had to endure the horrors of a soviet gulag and came back almost starved to death. A 1.9m tall man who weighed less than 50kg. And then revisionists like you come along and start questioning things because you in person haven't seen it. Well, I guess lucky you.
    - cempaka 2y ago
      I haven't made any argument that no gulags ever existed, or that no one was ever mistreated in them. I imagine it was especially rough to be in one when resources were being poured into ending Nazi Germany's salt-the-earth campaign during Barbarossa.
      - 2y ago

pfortuny 2y ago

Whatever you think of Communism, the repression under Lenin and Stalin is worth knowing in and of itself.

cempaka 2y ago
It would be nice if we had an example of a communist state which came into existence and was not immediately beset by foreign intelligence agencies, influence campaigns, and actual military invasions attempting to depose it. We've seen how capitalist regimes behave under such conditions and it's no better.
- _zagj 2y ago
  You have examples, like North Korea, which invaded its southern neighbor in an act of naked, unprovoked aggression five years after the peninsula was partitioned.
  - _zagj 2y ago
    To the downvoters: we now know conclusively that Kim Il Sung initiated the war, and did so only with Stalin's (initially reluctant) blessing: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/cable-nos-408-410-shtykov-vyshinsky-politburo https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/cable-nos-4... 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.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  It’s probably not possible if you also throw in internal actors seizing power. Communism suggests an absence of concentration of power. 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.
  - skirge 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

_zagj 2y ago

[flagged]

ajuc 2y ago
On reddit, hn, and internet in general the conservatives support modern totalitarian states like China, Russia or Iran much more often than progressives. Despite very real and very recent atrocities.
ceejayoz 2y ago
I mean, punch Nazis and Stalinists.
- _zagj 2y ago
  How about acting like a civilized person and not responding (or encouraging others to respond) to speech with violence?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Civilization (and the social contract that sustains it) requires defense at times. D-Day serves as an example; we did substantially more than punching.
    - vacuity 2y ago
      Indeed, although I think people "on the right side of history" (whoever they may be, fill in the blank yourself) would (could) do a bit better to ensure they use violence as a last resort. Never too late is crucial, but never too early is still important.
    - _zagj 2y ago
      D-Day was done in response to violence (starting with the invasion Poland in 1939), not speech. Protection of political speech is the bedrock of American civilization. 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.

stmw 2y ago

Suprised Smithsonian does not provide more context on him in that link - here is a better write-up - "the fall of a prophet". https://quillette.com/2018/12/21/solzhenitsyn-the-fall-of-a-prophet/ https://quillette.com/2018/12/21/solzhenitsyn-the-fall-of-a-...

lostmsu 2y ago

Disclaimer: commie. 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.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
You make a good point, as we should remember the many times the US and other countries imprisoned nonviolent political dissidents. However, I think when comparing the USSR, I think the magnitude and severity are distinct. Comparing them on a binary basis runs the risk of making no true Scotsman errors, and easy to do as google powered amateur historian.
- lostmsu 2y ago
  The point is not even in the relative sizes of the atrocities, but in the maturity of the involved systems, and priorities. 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.
  - mopsi 2y ago
    How would you feel about similar excuses made for Nazi atrocities? The Nazi regime was also very immature, barely five years old by the time of Austrian anschluss, and invented many policies on the go, and was at war for most of its existence. Neo-Nazis even use exactly the same phrasing of "swift decisions" and "priorities" to reduce human suffering into abstract concepts and handwave it away.