Solzhenitsyn's work and Gulag victims

Russia Today: http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/35365

December 28, 2008, 20:37
Solzhenitsyn's work a lasting tribute to Gulag victims
The Soviet Gulag system ruined the lives of millions, and memories of it remain disturbing to many Russians today. The late writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn immortalised the Gulag through his famous publications, which were read behind closed doors in the USSR for many years.

35 years ago, the first publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn`s Gulag Archipelago shook a generation - and the Soviet authorities - to the core.

They banned the book, which was a grim chronicle of the experience of the author and thousands of others sent to Soviet labour camps. It took Solzhenitsyn ten years to finish the three-volume work.

However, the writer himself paid a high price for his efforts. Accused of treason by the authorities, in 1974 he was expelled from the Soviet Union and exiled to the West, which meant he was at last able to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature which hed been awarded in 1970. He was not to return to Russia until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Many people back in the Soviet Union kept special bookshelves to hide forbidden literature. Sometimes people would cover books with paper to hide what they were reading inside.

Having a copy of one of Solzhenitsyn's works could get you into big trouble then. But even today, when the book can be openly read in public, it still provokes a deep and intense reaction with its devastating portrayal of life in the Gulag.

However, there are people who criticise the book. During the Gorbachev era, many secret archives of the Gulag labour camps were opened. History professor Viktor Zemskov was one of the first to read the files. He undertook research on several camps, but criticised the work of Solzhenitsyn for exaggerating the numbers sent to the camps.

The book was really directed against the regimes of Stalin and Lenin. The influence of the book outside the Soviet Union was much larger than within the country. A lot of people had so many problems at the end of the 1980s when it was eventually published in the Soviet Union that many didn't even notice it. But it did have influence of course, said Viktor Zemskov, a professor at the Institute of Russian History.

Most Gulag camps were located in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia and in the south-eastern parts of the Soviet Union.

Aleksey Pryadilov is one of the few last survivors of Stalin's gulags. He was only sixteen when he was accused of political crimes and sentenced to seven years in the Gulag. He ended up in seven different camps and then served a further seven years in exile in the Russian far east before being allowed home to Moscow.

At the end of school my friends and I started to publish a student newspaper. The authorities decided that many of the stories and poems we published in it were anti-Soviet. I got sent to the Lubyanka prison at sixteen and I came out when I was thirty years old. I can say the conditions in the camps at that time could differ. I've been to many and I've seen a lot, he said.

The memory of the Gulag system remains devastating, with many in Russia today touched in some way by its cruelty. Over 14 million people passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953, with a further seven million being deported and exiled to remote regions of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps its everlasting historical legacy, however, is provided by the Gulag Archipelago. And that could only be provided by the immense courage of its author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to collect the stories of the victims and let them live on forever in the pages of his book.

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• Solzhenitsyn
• Gulag

[ugha323a]

@jovanj777

Marx was NOT a Rabbi, he was a serial Jew hater.

You are an idiot

[ugha323a]

@valtih1978

We should have killed the Nazis AND the Commies, PERIOD. Patton was RIGHT

[valtih1978]

@valtih1978 Why should we listen to Dostoyevsky rather than Marx? We are not fascists to listen only our nation phylosophers. Solzenicin invoced USA to attack USSR. Do you imagine the losses that would result?

[valtih1978]

1. Today churches are growing like mashrooms after rain. Yet, civilization is destroyed. 2. Do not blame the real war against young Soviet government like something designed by Bolsheviks to exterminate their population. 3. USSR failed because Soviet government instead of moving closer to ideas started to restore capitalism. It promoted Solzhenitsyn-style lies. 4. I designed the ideal society and it turned out to be communism. Why Africans and Eurasians must have live differently?

[jovanj777]

Remember monastery Optina. Monastery in which Dostojevsky learned. Did aliens came and destroyed it? Or communists? Or maybe we are liars and monastery was never closed and desecrated?

Hunger of 1920? 10 million people starved. Long after "evil" Tzar had been killed. Why is that? Didn't communist promised feeding everyone? Or feeding "allied" Germany?

[jovanj777]

@valtih1978 Then why, why communism failed? Why it didn't conquered the world as Marx and Lenin predicted? Why capitalism stands victorious after 1989?

And why you people need to adopt some western teachings? Are you not smarter than that? Can't you see that EuroAsia can exists independent of whole western ideologies and taughts? That EuroAsian people have strength to build empire according to their own measures, not measures of some Rabbis like Marx.

[valtih1978]

@jovanj777 TrueCommunist said perfect sense and correct things. You will not change the situation by destroying the sense. There is no "communist" science in Russia. There are official historians. They cannot take Solzhenitsyn fiction seriously. Communists educated people very well. But, there are no "two sides" anymore.

[jovanj777]

@TrueCommunist You mean "communist" science? Or western science? After all, there's no much difference. Your comrades who destroyed Russia as well as capitalist dynasties who run US are from same tribe. No wonder science looks like this. Not to mention art or school systems. People on both sides are turned into brainless drunk grey mass who obeys their big brother.

[TrueCommunist]

His works were long time debunked, a.k.a. void of facts, data and records, let alone close to the truth.

And its widely known where does Solzhenitsyn's work stand, and what was their former usage. Its no wonder that he is 'forgotten' today in any academic (historical) science, as a source.