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Gulag Archipelago
In Russia, back in the day, things were truly fucked. If you were deemed some shade of state’s enemy you could and would be surprise arrested out of nowhere. No explanation. Just SMERSH is here, you’re under arrest, time to go off to prison. All disoriented while your home is ransacked.
This has to happen because socialism and communism are tough shifts for a formerly starts society to instantly make and if there’s any resistance or just questioning in general, the whole thing goes to shit. It’s super fragile. So there needs to be terror and the good ol iron fist or people will start realizing it sucks and mention it to others. So the commies had to purge their own revolutionary group. People in groups that were part of the revolution but were slightly different than the ruling bolsheviks. Wealthy people. Smart people. Engineers, scientists, people who are good at stuff. Lenin get his guys called the Cheka to round em all up and throw em in the clink. Now there’s no smart people left just ass kissers and people who are afraid of going to the clink. A nation of terrified yes-men. The recipe for success!
And what a success it was.
Oh also the churches. Gotta take them out too. Because loyalty to god would dilute one loyalty to communism. So it only makes sense to take all their gold and shit under the guise of redistribution of wealth for the people.
Here’s the best one. Farmers. Anyone who has any ability to farm. Any success at producing food. Round em up. Take their shit. Demonize them as ‘kulaks.’ Then throw more people in jail because crops fail and harvest don’t meet goals. A bunch of people starve to death as a result. Russia is fucked.
The failures of a planned economy are blamed on ‘wreckers.’ There are wreckers everywhere. If the tractor factory runs behind schedule because it doesn’t have the supplies it needs, wreckers. If it meets it’s quota but uses more than the allocated materials, wreckers. You can’t win. But most importantly, the commie way can not lose. That’s really the only rule. Logic must be defied at all turns to keep that true.
People who get arrested get interrogated and tortured. It doesn’t seem to matter if they are guilty or not. Sometimes they get a red hot poker up the ass to get them to fess up. Sometimes they are just beaten and/or kept awake for a month.
In prison, the food is gross and there’s not enough of it. The guard are sadistic and the interrogators keep busy getting answers that are irrelevant.
Shooting prisoners is also common. Dudes who got captured during WWII had it shitty because they’d get shot when they came home because they were of course spies and also, more importantly could bear witness to the fact that the non-communist part of Europe was pretty sweet in comparison to the motherland. There are 200 crimes that warrant capital punishment. During the war, just asking what’s going on can be seen as defeatism and land you in the clink.
Sometimes there trials but they are farces and dudes still end up in the hole. It just takes longer.
Eventually these unfortunate assholes are put on trains that sound like they were swimming in diarrhea and taken to camps where it was too cold to dig in the ground so they slept in tents and froze.
Ok, so the end result here, as far as I can figure out is that communism needs a lot of enemies in order to make itself seem right. All these enemies turn out to be the only smart and useful members of society so once they’ve purged every person of any worth, the county is now just a bunch of idiots.
Which brings us to today. Now we have a nation drowning in vodka enthusiastically ready to accept dictatorship which makes nothing but raw materials and cyberattacks. We may be fucked but these people fucked even more.
This book is dense but written with a vein of snark that makes it somewhat enjoyable.
In Russia, back in the day, things were truly fucked. If you were deemed some shade of state’s enemy you could and would be surprise arrested out of nowhere. No explanation. Just SMERSH is here, you’re under arrest, time to go off to prison. All disoriented while your home is ransacked.
This has to happen because socialism and communism are tough shifts for a formerly starts society to instantly make and if there’s any resistance or just questioning in general, the whole thing goes to shit. It’s super fragile. So there needs to be terror and the good ol iron fist or people will start realizing it sucks and mention it to others. So the commies had to purge their own revolutionary group. People in groups that were part of the revolution but were slightly different than the ruling bolsheviks. Wealthy people. Smart people. Engineers, scientists, people who are good at stuff. Lenin get his guys called the Cheka to round em all up and throw em in the clink. Now there’s no smart people left just ass kissers and people who are afraid of going to the clink. A nation of terrified yes-men. The recipe for success!
And what a success it was.
Oh also the churches. Gotta take them out too. Because loyalty to god would dilute one loyalty to communism. So it only makes sense to take all their gold and shit under the guise of redistribution of wealth for the people.
Here’s the best one. Farmers. Anyone who has any ability to farm. Any success at producing food. Round em up. Take their shit. Demonize them as ‘kulaks.’ Then throw more people in jail because crops fail and harvest don’t meet goals. A bunch of people starve to death as a result. Russia is fucked.
The failures of a planned economy are blamed on ‘wreckers.’ There are wreckers everywhere. If the tractor factory runs behind schedule because it doesn’t have the supplies it needs, wreckers. If it meets it’s quota but uses more than the allocated materials, wreckers. You can’t win. But most importantly, the commie way can not lose. That’s really the only rule. Logic must be defied at all turns to keep that true.
People who get arrested get interrogated and tortured. It doesn’t seem to matter if they are guilty or not. Sometimes they get a red hot poker up the ass to get them to fess up. Sometimes they are just beaten and/or kept awake for a month.
In prison, the food is gross and there’s not enough of it. The guard are sadistic and the interrogators keep busy getting answers that are irrelevant.
Shooting prisoners is also common. Dudes who got captured during WWII had it shitty because they’d get shot when they came home because they were of course spies and also, more importantly could bear witness to the fact that the non-communist part of Europe was pretty sweet in comparison to the motherland. There are 200 crimes that warrant capital punishment. During the war, just asking what’s going on can be seen as defeatism and land you in the clink.
Sometimes there trials but they are farces and dudes still end up in the hole. It just takes longer.
Eventually these unfortunate assholes are put on trains that sound like they were swimming in diarrhea and taken to camps where it was too cold to dig in the ground so they slept in tents and froze.
Ok, so the end result here, as far as I can figure out is that communism needs a lot of enemies in order to make itself seem right. All these enemies turn out to be the only smart and useful members of society so once they’ve purged every person of any worth, the county is now just a bunch of idiots.
Which brings us to today. Now we have a nation drowning in vodka enthusiastically ready to accept dictatorship which makes nothing but raw materials and cyberattacks. We may be fucked but these people fucked even more.
This book is dense but written with a vein of snark that makes it somewhat enjoyable.
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
This book took me almost a month to finish because it’s definitely- and likely, the most difficult book I’ve read this year. Not just in the number of pages but the content itself has so much to process.
The type of book that wouldn’t let you speed up your pace of reading because you don’t want to miss a word.
The type of book that wouldn’t let you speed up your pace of reading because you don’t want to miss a word.
This book was a labor of love. The first time I ever went on a plane was to travel to Russia when I was in high school, and I've been drawn to literature from that country ever since. I first picked this up about a decade ago and read the first 200 pages or so, but it was around the time we moved from Minnesota to Indiana, and sometime during that transition, I set it aside. I've been longing to get back to it, so when someone in my book club asked if there was a subset of people who would read it with her, two of us jumped at the chance. Once a date was set to discuss it, I set up a reading plan to ensure I finished.
These 600-plus pages make up only the first of three volumes. This copy is found just often enough at used book sales, but I've never come across the other books in the wild, new or used. My husband was kind enough to locate them online and gifted them to me, so I'm hoping to work through those volumes in the next year or so. A word of warning: one member of the book club switched to an abridged edition when it became clear she couldn't finish in time. However, as the discussion went on, she realized she got the overall picture but missed the specific stories that brought life to it and helped the other two of us appreciate it. So if you're intrigued, pick up the unabridged book(s), not the abridged copy.
Solzhenitsyn has compiled comprehensive information to inform us about how Russians were arrested and imprisoned with no cause in the years 1918-1956. The torture they endured, the interrogations, the monotony of daily life once they arrived in a cell -- much is covered in this volume. Solzhenitsyn wrote this in secret, and I'm in awe of his capacity to remember details, names, circumstances.
His insights are powerful; one section compares and contrasts Germany and Russia after World War II. Germany publicly prosecuted 86,000 war criminals, whereas Russia only put 10 on trial (given their populations, that number should have been closer to 250,000). Solzhenitsyn suggests that, when Russians hesitated to draw all of that evil into the light, wanting to ignore it and let sleeping dogs lie, they were teaching their youth that evil is not punished and, instead, is financially lucrative. Whereas Germany publicly condemned their sins, vowing to learn from them ("Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes", page 177). I mentioned this on a couple different occasions with a friend who grew up in Berlin, and she confirms that, when they discuss history, there is absolutely no sugarcoating Hitler's actions.
"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neighter punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the "weakness of indoctrinational work," that they are growing up "indifferent." Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!" pages (177-178)
His book is heavy and hard to read at times because of the subject matter, but he does have a sarcastic style that comes through that could bring a smile to my face in the darkest passages. And I found myself drawn to such beautiful, poignant insights:
"The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events, but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere sixteen minutes' wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying glass." (202)
This is an important read and I'm hoping to start the second volume in the coming weeks. It feels so relevant to read and process and discuss.
These 600-plus pages make up only the first of three volumes. This copy is found just often enough at used book sales, but I've never come across the other books in the wild, new or used. My husband was kind enough to locate them online and gifted them to me, so I'm hoping to work through those volumes in the next year or so. A word of warning: one member of the book club switched to an abridged edition when it became clear she couldn't finish in time. However, as the discussion went on, she realized she got the overall picture but missed the specific stories that brought life to it and helped the other two of us appreciate it. So if you're intrigued, pick up the unabridged book(s), not the abridged copy.
Solzhenitsyn has compiled comprehensive information to inform us about how Russians were arrested and imprisoned with no cause in the years 1918-1956. The torture they endured, the interrogations, the monotony of daily life once they arrived in a cell -- much is covered in this volume. Solzhenitsyn wrote this in secret, and I'm in awe of his capacity to remember details, names, circumstances.
His insights are powerful; one section compares and contrasts Germany and Russia after World War II. Germany publicly prosecuted 86,000 war criminals, whereas Russia only put 10 on trial (given their populations, that number should have been closer to 250,000). Solzhenitsyn suggests that, when Russians hesitated to draw all of that evil into the light, wanting to ignore it and let sleeping dogs lie, they were teaching their youth that evil is not punished and, instead, is financially lucrative. Whereas Germany publicly condemned their sins, vowing to learn from them ("Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes", page 177). I mentioned this on a couple different occasions with a friend who grew up in Berlin, and she confirms that, when they discuss history, there is absolutely no sugarcoating Hitler's actions.
"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neighter punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the "weakness of indoctrinational work," that they are growing up "indifferent." Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!" pages (177-178)
His book is heavy and hard to read at times because of the subject matter, but he does have a sarcastic style that comes through that could bring a smile to my face in the darkest passages. And I found myself drawn to such beautiful, poignant insights:
"The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events, but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere sixteen minutes' wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying glass." (202)
This is an important read and I'm hoping to start the second volume in the coming weeks. It feels so relevant to read and process and discuss.
This book shows the darkest horrors that humanity can inflict on one another.
May we listen to the warnings of uncountable corpses and not trifle with the path of destruction championed by Lenin and Stalin.
For any of us who find ourselves in any shadow of terror, may you find strength.
Humanity will begin to relive these things as soon as we neglect to take them seriously.
May we listen to the warnings of uncountable corpses and not trifle with the path of destruction championed by Lenin and Stalin.
For any of us who find ourselves in any shadow of terror, may you find strength.
Humanity will begin to relive these things as soon as we neglect to take them seriously.
This was a very hard read in terms of material and density alike. The Gulag Archipelago is both a nonfiction historical, and a personal account of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn details his own 8 years spent in the Soviet prison camps, as well as the history of the camps starting with their inception after the Russian Revolution.
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
One of the best books I’ve ever read. Terrifyingly sad yet somehow bitingly sarcastic and hilarious. But troubling enough that I may need a break before diving into part 2.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
fast-paced