Proudly posting since the Jurassic
Posted on 09/02/2003 5:26:40 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
Discussion thread for The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn....
This book represented a personal look at the special Soviet prisons for scientists. I assume that Solzhenitsyn himself was once in such a prison. Even though the conditions in such prisons were harsh, they weren't nearly as brutal as the Siberian labor camps. From what I understand such scientific prisons, "sharaskas," were also used to develop the A-Bomb for the Soviets in the 1940s. Does anybody know if there was really a big attempt by the Soviets back then to develop a phone to scramble and unscramble voices? It is a common device nowadays but when were those phone scramblers actually developed? From the book, it looked like a near impossible task. One of my favorite parts of the book was when the Minister of State Security, Abakumov, went absolutely BERSERK when it appeared that the sharaska was nowhere near developing that scrambler phone. Also I enjoyed the portrayal of Stalin himself.
Another great scene was the Potemkin Villiage stunt pulled in the prison when some Americans came by to visit and were impressed with the phony front that was put on for their benefit.
The next Freeper Reading Club book assignment is The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh. This is perhaps the FUNNIEST book I have ever read. The discussion of this book will commence on October 13.
The FR Reading Club has now been operating for a little over a year. Some of you might think of this as some sort of literary tea society but I have decided to show you all the PRACTICAL benefits of being well-read. Therefore I plan to enter as many writing contests as possible this year and post my winnings. I have won several such contests before (including BEST Blair Witch Parody on the Web) but I never pursued such contests on a regular basis like I now plan to. The only Freeper who could give me a lot of competition in such contests is SamAdams76. Why? Because he has been deeply involved in the reading and discussion of these books. BTW, I get a big kick out of all the wannabee writers who want to write but it turns out they are far from well-read. To write write write you need to READ READ READ. </ sermonette>.
Absolutely. While I didn't read this one, I've read Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch which is a good starting point for those who want to try 140 pages or so of Solzhenitsyn before going on to Gulag Archipelago.
~Eric (ISBN 0-451-45939-3)
Yes, you're right. He was imprisoned 1945-1953. Though in WW2 he was a Captain of Artillery and twice decorated, he ended up in prison for writing a letter critical of Stalin. One of the prisons he served at was Marfino which employed mathematicians and scientists for research.
This book was definitely worth the read. If some gave up because they had a hard time following the names (Russian names are not only long and hard to pronounce but they use patronymic names as well) then they should have referred to the index of names in the front of the book. I found myself flipping back to that constantly because the author didn't always use just the surname of the character. He jumps between the surname and the patronymic names frequently and you need that index to make sense of it all.
I realize that the characters and specific events (that occurred in the "sarashka") are fictional but I think that Solzhenitsyn does a good job portraying what a typical prisoner (or "zek") was subjected to under Stalin's rule.
I learned a lot about the old Soviet Union in this book. For example, I never knew that Red Army soldiers who were caught behind enemy lines and taken POW by the Germans were immediately suspected by Stalin and handed out stiff prison sentences. In fact, it was considered a dishonor, apparently, for a soldier to be behind enemy lines at all, for any reason. It was sad to see how Stalin treated those soldiers who were loyal to their homeland and then treated so harshly upon their return.
It was revealing that Stalin (or rather his goons) meted out the same punishment to the POWs who resisted cooperating with the enemy as those who willingly cooperated with the enemy. If you were a POW under any circumstances, you were a suspected spy so far as Stalin was concerned. In fact, the fact that one would actually return to Russia after the war was proof, in Stalin's mind, that they were guilty of treason. Why you MUST be working as a spy for America!
An example of this was the story of Spiridon (the janitor). After the war, he was promised by German (or Allied) doctors that they could perform an operation to restore his eyesight (he had evidently drank some wood alcohol unknowingly) and he wanted to stay in Germany. However, his children pleaded with him to go back to Russia, after all, it was their "home." When they did, they were all separated and sent off to prison.
There is so much more I will discuss about the book but I need to run some errands. Be back later.
True. Operation Keelhaul was the forced repatriation of Red Army prisoners of the Germans back to the Soviet Union. All of them were immediately sent to labor camps. BTW, all Red Army personnel who were sent to the Spanish Civil War were liquidated upon their return. Also the leader of the Red Orchestra, the best spy network to spy on the Germans was immediately imprisoned upon his return to the Soviet Union as well. Actually anybody with any sort of contact with the West in the Soviet Union was automatically a suspect according to Stalin and they were either imprisoned or executed.
I wonder what the Russian people think of Stalin now?
Chapters 82-84 were the most riveting chapters for me. They describe the arrest and the subsequent processing (into the prison system) of Innokenty Volodin, the pampered son-in-law of the prosecutor Makarygin.
In a strange way, it reminded me of my boot camp experience at Parris Island. Like Volodin, I was taken there (Parris Island) in the middle of the night, denied sleep, and subjected to one humiliation after another as my identity was stripped from me layer by layer. It's amazing how similar my experience was to the experience described in the book. Of course my experience differed in that I wasn't shoved into a "box cell" and I knew that boot camp was only temporary! But it's worth pointing out the similarities such as the ritual shaving of the head, the barked orders to yell out your name repeatedly, strip down, shower, undergo body cavity search, etc. That sort of treatment very effectively and quickly gets the point across that from this point on, the former "you" ceases to exist, civilian life is over and that your strict obedience to all officials is mandatory! Those first 48 hours of boot camp were very disorienting for me and they now seem like a bad dream. Those chapters brought some of those memories back.
Now Volodin's crime was calling an old friend of his dead mother's and trying to give him advance warning him of a "sting" operation about to be launched against him. It was amazing how many resources that the Soviet government put into finding out who made that phone call. Ironically, it was the prisoners in the "sharaska" that narrowed down the suspects for the government (to 2 out of the 5 who were in a position to make that call). So you had prisoners helping the government catch more prisoners. In another twist, the prisoner's invention of "phonoscopy" actually saved the three others from going to prison also. The government would have happily imprisoned all five men if they were not sure who of them were responsible.
It appears that the best and brightest Russians were by and large wiped out during the Stalinist purges during the 1930s and 40s. That might explain why the nation seemed to be run by dull bureaucrats and populated with lazy workers with no apparent ambition and who were driven to alcohol abuse. Hey, who can blame them? Whoever stood out from the crowd and made a "name" for themselves usually got killed, exiled or sent to labor camps!
It's a miracle that Solzhenitsyn was able to escape all that and get his works printed. I believe Nikita Krushchev was a fan of his work and allowed them to be published in the 1960s. But once Krushschev was out of power, the Kremlin put the screws to Solzhenitsyn and eventually he was exiled from the country in 1974 (he returned in 1994 after the Soviet Union fell).
I believe Solzhenitsyn is still alive today. I could not find on the Internet whether he died or not. That would make him to be about 85 years old.
Best book on the subject is The Great Terror by Robert Conquest. It is about the big party purges of the 1930s. BTW, Stalin's frontman for those purges, Yezhoz, was himself purged. Almost ALL of the Old Bolsheviks were purged as well since they had knowledge of Stalin's limited role in the Russian Revolution. I recently read a book on that subject called Stalin In October. I wouldn't really recommend it since the book gets bogged down in Bolshevik arcania. However, it was interesting to note that Trotsky was actually a late comer to the Bolsheviks. He was neither Menshevik nor Bolshevik until about June 1917.
Another great fiction book that had scenes of Stalin was Fall of A Titan. It is a fictionalized account of Maxim Gorky, the writer, who was a Bolshevik fellow traveler until near the end when he was most likely liquidated by Stalin. It is interesting to note that book was written by Igor Gouzenko, perhaps the most important defector of the Cold War. He was a diplomat/spy who defected in 1945. Gouzenko had knowledge of how thoroughly the Soviets had penetrated British espionage. Fortunately the agent handling that case was "Intrepid" Robert Stevenson, who kept Gouzenko hidden from even his own agency. That episode alone would make for a great spy movie. Leftist critics here of Gouzenko pooh-poohed him as nothing more than a glorified file clerk. They shut up after his EXCELLENT book, Fall Of A Titan was published.
One of the reviewers of this book on Amazon has some very interesting comments. Stalin killed tens of millions of people - more than even Hitler - and yet it was very hard getting this story out. For one thing, the leftist media in the United States ignored or pooh-poohed the stories coming out of the Soviet Union. Many of these Marxist types would attempt to justify Stalin's purges by saying things like "You need to break a few eggs to make an omelet." I find this just incredible. Some omelet huh? Let's hope these type of people never come to power here in America.
According to this reviewer, whose father was a journalist who travelled to Russia in the 1960s and 70s, he discovered that the Soviet Union was "rotten to the core" and teetering on the brink of collapse. Of course, he couldn't gain much traction here in America with those stories because the liberal media here really wanted the "noble experiment" of Communism to succeed! Remember, this was a time in America when John Lennon was singing of "no religion" and "no possessions" and hippies were living in communes.
Well in Conquest's book, as you probably already know, he tells us of how Stalin and Molotov, during a "typical day at the office", would sign liquidation orders for thousands of innocent people by putting their signatures with the word "liquidate" at the bottom of a sheaf of papers that contained their names. And then, according to this reviewer, they would head for the cinema, a solid day's work done!
Anyway, I will be getting this book at some point. I just started tonight Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as my son just got it as a reading assignment for high school. I'm going to read it tonight after he goes to bed (it's a short book) so that I can quiz him on it after school tomorrow!
I met Ray Bradbury once. Oddly enough, even though he was a science fiction writer he was not really into technology himself. He didn't even drive a car.
The First Circle was published in 1968. Perhaps if the CIA had paid more attention to this book the assessment of the Soviet Union would have been different. The fact is that although the Soviet Union appeared to be invulnerable in the 1970s, the reality was that it was on the verge of collapse for years. Often you will get a truer picture of society from novels than you could from other sources.
Well, it appears that we are the only two who actually read The First Circle so congratulations on continuing to be the leading reader of the Freeper Reading Club. Perhaps you should join me in entering the writing contests.
I thought a Book Discussion thread would be a natural for this forum as we have a literate and intelligent crowd here for the most part. I don't understand why there isn't more participation. I guess everybody is too busy Freeping around here to pick up a book every now and then. I must say that I got something out of all the books you've recommended so far. I like having books assigned to me that I never would have read on my own. It opens new horizons.
Anyway, I'll read The Choirboys for next month. Maybe we'll get a couple of people to read it with us.
Solzhenitsyn was in exile in the U.S. for 20 years and returned to his homeland in 1994.
I think a lot of people have a weird fear of LITERATURE. They mistakenly think it will be incomprehensible or boring. Too bad more don't give it a crack since they would be pleasantly surprised. What I find are too many people using Tom Clancy or Stephen King as easy reads.
I guess everybody is too busy Freeping around here to pick up a book every now and then.
If you have a book with you at alltimes, it's amazing the time you can have to read it. For example, on plane rides, waiting on post office or bank lines, or even when you are a passenger on long car rides. I read over a hundred pages of the current book just as a passenger in a car.
Well good luck on your writing contests and let us know how you fare.
I'm already ahead of the game as compared to the 99% of the "writers" out there who rarely read true literature. You should give it a shot since I am certain you could win such contests as well.
Proudly posting since the Jurassic
Source of the "How we burned in the camps..." quote about belated realizations about resisting the Chekists.
Also there's a passage in there describing the education of one of the female guards which speaks of social promotions which occured because everybody knew that if a student did not pass, it was the teacher's fault, not the student's.
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