Have read it at least six times ...
Posted on 08/03/2013 8:21:25 AM PDT by ReformationFan
Five years ago today, August 3, 2008, one of my heroes died. I never met him, but I think I know him. Of one thing I’m certain, the influence exerted on me by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is incalculable. It’s difficult to explain the personal impact of Solzhenitsyn. He was such a massive figure in the public eye and provoked controversy (the good kind) throughout the course of his life. He was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk in southern Russia. Toward the end of WW II, in 1945, while serving as a captain in the Red Army, he was arrested for making disparaging remarks about Stalin in a private letter to a friend. He was initially taken to the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow and was eventually sentenced to eight years of hard labor in several of the prison camps that he would later write about in his monumental three-volume, Gulag Archipelago. When I think of Solzhenitsyn, and I think of him often, several things come immediately to mind: highly principled, ferociously outspoken, unwavering, prolific author, unashamedly theocentric, inveterate enemy of all forms of totalitarianism, perseverance, endurance, faith, and perhaps most of all, suffering, suffering, and more suffering.
(Excerpt) Read more at samstorms.com ...
Ronald Reagan promised during his campaign in 1980 to honor Solzhenitzen by inviting him to the White House. Didn’t happen. Does anybody know why?
My guess is Chief of Staff James Baker torpedoed the idea.
One of the things that stood out in the Gulag was the absolute inability of many communists to ever admit that the State could do wrong.
I recall reading of one who said, “yes, I know that I did not do anything wrong. But there must be a higher purpose that is not clear to me. The State is more important than a single individual.”
This was, in fact a common theme. It makes clear that to many, the State is a simple substitute for God, and their belief in the State is their religion.
It requires humility to consider his admonitions. I think on what he said when I hear the term “American exceptionalism. The temptation to idolatry is a strong one.
A lot of westerners burned out by trying to start reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes), instead of beginning with his much shorter novellas and novels. Short and accessible, in a readable style, they both convey the darkness of the times without overwhelming the reader.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
The First Circle (1968), and
Cancer Ward (1968)
If you get through those and want more, and are not too depressed with the subject matter, only then you should try Gulag.
It is also a good launching pad for Russian literature as a whole.
Solzhenitsyn was a giant. My God, we are all pygmies by comparison.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn... in 1945, while serving as a captain in the Red Army, he was arrested for making disparaging remarks about Stalin in a private letter to a friend. He was initially taken to the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow and was eventually sentenced to eight years of hard labor in several of the prison camps that he would later write about in his monumental three-volume, Gulag Archipelago.He didn't like the US either, or democracy, but his second wife and their three sons have US citizenship.
A stunning quote. We should re-read it on a regular basis and take it to heart. Thank you.
I have tried to read his stuff a bunch of times. Never got more than fifty pages into it. Perhaps I will try again.
“He didn’t like the US either, or democracy”
True, Solzhenitsyn regarded the West as decadent, irreligious, & uncomprehending of the evil of communism, and said so in his 1978 speech, but where in his writings does he suggest a humane alternative to democracy?
There was a spoof ad for “Mother’s Borscht”, a kosher product, featuring Solzhenitsyn’s endorsement:
“Because even cowardly Western liberals have the right to eat well!”
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-the-ascent-from-ideology-27
try the above
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag trilogy should be prescribed reading in all colleges along with Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom.” Presidential candidates should have to read them as well. Especially Columbia graduates.
Another of his stories is one of the peasant who had two dogs and named them after Marx and Lenin (or Lenin and Stalin...names like that). The local commie council found out and couldn’t figure out if the peasant was honoring the commies or making fun of them. So they decided to shoot the peasant anyway to make sure.
A version of that book was actually aired on tv back in the early sixties. I remember watching it. I doubt it would get aired today.
Up until a few years ago I found such stories about the USSR shocking... now it seems so, so, so NAS and Homeland Security-ish...
Good advice !
Stalin had to have someone actually physically read the mail — a huge expenditure of manpower during years when literally millions were being fed to the guns. After the “allies” met in Germany, all of those Red Army soldiers who could be identified from news photos and eyewitnesses were sent to the Gulags. When Marshall Zhukov was asked how the families of the slain should be notified (probably an impossible job), he said, eh, after a couple of years when they don’t come home, the families will get the idea.
Even when the Wehrmacht was in retreat, and Hitler was demanding “counterattacks” (i.e., feeding whole armies into the Red Army guns) the carnage was horrendous on the Soviet side; the figures for the Battle of Berlin have been systematically and ludicrously understated (wikiwacky states 81K, a UK source claims 70K) by the various Stalinists in and out of all gov’ts and alleged institutions of learning — the Red Army losses (mostly 1st Ukrainian and 1st Byelorussian, they were tasked with it, due to the anti-Soviet activity during most of the war) were in the 100s of 1000s; in the street and house-to-house fighting, and with seriously superior artillery and other firepower, they managed to lose 2000 tanks in that period of not quite two weeks, and must have endured atrocious friendly-fire losses in their ground forces, a phenomenon which had also taken a serious toll during the open-country fighting.
The T34 is widely regarded as the best tank in WWII, but most of the Soviet tanks weren’t T34s. During the first year of Operation Barbarossa, a couple of million RA soldiers were shot down, another million/millionfive were captured or gave themselves up, and of the various tanks the RA was using, 1500 remained in working order (it sez here) out of the 22,000 (astonishing number!) they’d started with.
Molotov went east for very secret meetings with the Japanese (there was hardly a shot fired for years between the Red Army and the Japanese until victory in Europe) and came back to tell Stalin that he believed the czarist-era treaty would hold, so 70 divisions deployed in the east were brought west as quickly as they could be loaded on trains. The trains went back empty to bring another massive load. Had it not been for that tremendous redeployment, the defeats and collapse would have been much worse.
He’s well known as an advocate for the return of monarchy.
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