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Solzhenitsyn Is A Crybaby Solzhenitsyn is a crybaby. There is no other way to interpret the insipid whining coming forth from the book, Gulap Archipelago. First of all, let me say that I think the gulag system was a miserable, despicable system. They systematically picked people up off the streets and gave them prison terms after beating a confession out of them at one of Beria’s (Stalin’s evil eminence…how would you like to carry that moniker?} little fun-houses. There was a little something for everyone. Manicure, no problem. Bamboo, straght torch, or a little vise action to start? WE must start on those feet too, since you are here. Tired, sure, lie down. Oh, the room you are in will barely allow you to stand? Let us get back to you in three of four days. Electric shocks, blindings, amputations, murders, doctors keeping victims alive for a few more minutes of interrogation, it all happened. It all happened, and it is a horrible thing that it did. This is not to defend the soviet gulag system, but rather to point out some oddities in a book that has long been received as the word of God about Communist Russia. Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Gulag was received in the west with great acclaim. “The Horrors!” they screamed from their houses in the Hamptons. Northern Virginia and Connecticut were abuzz with the new star on the horizon. An insider, from the Gulags. One who had stood strong, and had come to tell the story. That may all be true, but someone should have been a better editor. Or maybe just told Al to lay off a bit. At times, he comes off a lot like my 12 year old whining about stuff. I quote: “Soon, the biologist, Timofeyev-Ressoyvsky, whom I have already mentioned, was brought here from Berlin. There was nothing at the Lubyanka, it appeared, which offended him as much as the spilling of the tea on the floor. He considered it striking evidence of the lack of professional pride on the part of the jailers, and all of us in our chosen work. He multiplied the 27 years of Lubyankas existence by the 730 times, (The two times daily we were brought tea, extrapolated for the year.) and then the existence of a prisoner for 730 times a year, (twice for each day of the year)and then by 111 cells---and he would seethe for a long time because it was easier to spill boiling water on the floor 2,1888,000times than to put a spout on the damn bucket.” I am as fervent an anti-communist as there is. I even have named my children Joe and McCarthy, and they are girls! Still though, I think one of the things the conservative right should stand for is for truth, and the truth be told, this book is by a crackpot. Maybe it is by a pot, cracked by the Soviet gulag system, and if so, a valuable propaganda weapon during the cold war, but it should have been billed as such, instead of being a scientific treatise of the justice system inside the Soviet system. In the US, Sakharov, Solzhenisyn, and several others were heroes to us. Mainly they were heroes because they escaped the evils of communism and came to our side. OK, that's well and good. In the big game of global checkers we were playing, we were winning the trades, and certainly the Soviets coming here to a life of relative celebrity and ease were winning, but in retrospect, the rest of us shouldn't feel so trustful of the conservative right. I expected a more critical reading by the towers of the right I grew up shading my beliefs behind. The Buckleys, the Safires, the Reagans. They should have presented this book for what it is. Ravings of a man, possibly driven mad my a terrible, cruel randomized system of terror that possessed a great country. Gulag sucks. Read it and see. Dave |