Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the police-state system in the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, is published in the original Russian in Paris. The book was the first of the three-volume work. The brutal and uncompromising description of political repression and terror was quickly translated into many languages and was published in the United States just a few months later.
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Solzhenitsyn’s massive work detailed the machinations of the Soviet police state from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to 1956. In the preface to the book, however, he warned that reading the work would be “very dangerous” for Russians in 1973. The book was important in that it maintained that police terror had always been essential to the existence of the Soviet state. This deviated from the standard Soviet line that such terror had only come about during the time of Stalin and evaporated upon his death in 1956. Solzhenitsyn admitted that political repression eased during the ensuing Khruschev years–the author himself was freed from political prison during that time. However, he believed that since Khruschev’s ouster in 1964, the Soviet state again resorted to intimidation and terror. His disappointment at the reversion of his country to these scare tactics influenced his decision to allow the publication of his book.
The book was an instant success in the West, but Soviet officials were livid. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, declared that the work was an “unfounded slander” against the Russian people. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported. He eventually settled in the United States. In the 1980s, he refused Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer to reinstate his Soviet citizenship, but did return to Russia to live in 1994. Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure in Moscow on August 3, 2008. He was 89.
Solzhenitsyn’s seminal work “Two Hundred Years Together” will not be published in English as it names those who started and ran the Bolshevik revolution…Hint: they weren’t Russian…
Never spoil a good story with the facts!
It’s available on Amazon in english. Thanks for the heads up. I’m ordering it.
“The book was important in that it maintained that police terror had always been essential to the existence of the Soviet state.”
If he were alive today he could write a book about copfuks and the American state. Probably wouldn’t have to edit all that much.
His words helped bring down the Soviet Union.
——
“The hazy lessons of his Orthodox Christian upbringing, which he had abandoned during his pre-prison stint in the Red Army, came surging back into his mind. He suddenly grasped his grandparents’ wisdom: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.”
—
“His memories of the radiation treatment and cancer therapy became the basis for his 1967 best-seller, “Cancer Ward.” The novel doubled as an allegory against the Soviet Union as it likened Marxism to a growing tumor. As one of its character says, “A man dies from a tumor, so how can a country survive with growths like labor camps and exiles?””
——–
But, his most influential work may have been “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” —— ” a riveting account of a single day for a typical prisoner in Stalin’s labor camps. Its acceptance in 1962 was a sensational event in publishing history, one that the Soviet communists would rue.
—- “The Soviet Union was destroyed by information, and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn’s ‘One Day,'” observed the Russian writer Vitaly Korotich to the press recently, noting the world’s embrace of the book.”
It was also a pretty damn good movie.
Vladimir Putin declares him a national hero.
Nice Article — “Solzhenitsyn’s One Day: The book that shook the USSR”
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894
[—- “The Soviet Union was destroyed by information, and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn’s ‘One Day,’” observed the Russian writer Vitaly Korotich to the press recently, noting the world’s embrace of the book.”]
Where is the book about the last thirty years in the US? It will bring down the MIC-Deep State – Leftist Front amalgamation that currently infests us like a horrible, antisocial, anti-white male and anti-progress tumor-plague.
The Soviet Union was not ended by an enemy of it, but rather by someone who wanted to reform it…who loved it, who believed in it and wanted it to be a light unto the world. Mikhail Gorbachev.
You can download his work in English on the internet if you look hard enough.I haven’t read all of his books as it takes alot of time.He goes into alot of detail.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt . . .”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
In my fantasy world, “Gulag” should not only be required reading in every American school, a functional understanding of its philosophical points should be mandatory not only for graduation but also as a qualification for public office. It’d clear out the Sheila Jackson Lee’s and Maxine Waterses and the other carbuncles in a heartbeat. Meaning it should also be retroactive, of course.
That is an ambitious requirement. We should first require that hs graduates be able to read.
Solzhenitsyn is not easy reading.