Here’s what you say is “no answer except a quote from his ex-wife:”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.
From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:
In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.
According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”
The point of 200 years together being listed is that we know that he’s a liar and a conspiracy theorizing anti-semitic Nazi, so trusting his word alone on socialism makes no sense. We have every reason not to trust him and no reason to trust him, especially when he contradicts archival evidence on how prisons in the GULAG administration functioned.
As for soviet prisons, they varied quite a lot depending on severity of the crime and location, with many being pretty progressive for the time. Visitation, open air prisons, and a focus on rehabilitation was common. I already linked Russian Justice, but you should absolutely read it.
Yep, Wikipedia is written largely by westerners using western consensus, even if such consensus has inaccuracies or better information is available post-opening of the soviet archives. You can even see it uses the Gulag Archipelago as a source, despite it being a work of fiction.
I suppose to a certain degree that’s true, I just don’t trust the personal account of a Nazi that has been known to lie and that contradicts archival evidence.
Here’s what you say is “no answer except a quote from his ex-wife:”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.
Here’s a real quote:
>The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hit1er was stupid and did not use this weapon.
From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:
200 Years together is a completely different book and an ex-wife as a single source is not enough for me.
Okay, let’s assume his storys in the Gulag books are fictipn. What is your general opinion on gulags under Stalin?
The point of 200 years together being listed is that we know that he’s a liar and a conspiracy theorizing anti-semitic Nazi, so trusting his word alone on socialism makes no sense. We have every reason not to trust him and no reason to trust him, especially when he contradicts archival evidence on how prisons in the GULAG administration functioned.
As for soviet prisons, they varied quite a lot depending on severity of the crime and location, with many being pretty progressive for the time. Visitation, open air prisons, and a focus on rehabilitation was common. I already linked Russian Justice, but you should absolutely read it.
This sounds a little different.
Yep, Wikipedia is written largely by westerners using western consensus, even if such consensus has inaccuracies or better information is available post-opening of the soviet archives. You can even see it uses the Gulag Archipelago as a source, despite it being a work of fiction.
We will not be able to agree. But you can believe what you want. I do too.
I suppose to a certain degree that’s true, I just don’t trust the personal account of a Nazi that has been known to lie and that contradicts archival evidence.