Posted on 12/11/2018 7:58:32 AM PST by C19fan
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, pundits offered a variety of reasons for its failure: economic, political, military. Few thought to add a fourth, more elusive cause: the regime’s total loss of credibility.
This hard-to-measure process had started in 1956, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave his so-called secret speech to party leaders, in which he denounced Josef Stalin’s purges and officially revealed the existence of the gulag prison system. Not long afterward, Boris Pasternak allowed his suppressed novel “Doctor Zhivago” to be published in the West, tearing another hole in the Iron Curtain. Then, in 1962, the literary magazine Novy Mir caused a sensation with a novella set in the gulag by an unknown author named Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.
That novella, “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” took the country, and then the world, by storm. In crisp, clear prose, it told the story of a simple man’s day in a labor camp, where he stoically endured endless injustices. It was so incendiary that, when it appeared, many Soviet readers thought that government censorship had been abolished.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Solzhenitsyn was also a Russian nationalist.
The Times should certainly be familiar with “total loss of credibility.”
He was also anti-Western and disliked the West’s secularist and materialist tendencies.
Solzhenitsyn felt it was going in the same direction as the Soviet Union. It would give him no joy to be proven right:
When you come right down to it, both Communism and liberalism are destructive of the human spirit.
I read A day in the life... and it blew me away. Building concrete block buildings in the harsh soviet winter, saving crust of bread as a ladle to scoop up every drop of soup, etc. The book really made me appreciate my life - and bread crust.
Knew a journalist who interviewed Solzhenitsyn in the 70s. Got a long interview on tape and before he could get out of the country, the Soviets beat him in his hotel room, took his tapes and gave him 12 hours, to the next flight, to leave the country. He hooked up again with Solzhenitsyn and got the whole interview on tape and got out with it.
People afraid of God and the truth aren’t long for this world.
Absolutely a great book, one that should be required reading in every high school class. Then there should be a follow-up: viewing the sardonically accurate, and bitterly hilarious, “The Death of Stalin,” which is available for rent at Amazon for $3.95. One of the funniest scenes is when the Politbureau wants to find some doctors to treat the dying Stalin and one of them says, “But where are we going to find one, they’re all in the Gulag?”
We all know who was responsible for the temporary dismemberment of the Soviet Union...
Check out his speech at Harvard: A world Split Apart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVG8SnxxCM&t=214s
A little over halfway through, he even addresses “fake news”, of course using different language.
It was required reading in 10th grade English when I was in high school. This was 1978 in WNY suburb of Buffalo. It is still one of my favorite books along with Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Catch 22.
In 1978 fewAmericans thought that socialism/communism was a good idea.
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