Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Leftie]

I was wondring what revlefters think of Solzhenitsyn and his works. I'm particularly intrested in hearing the answers of Marxist-Leninists and Stalinists.

[tir1944]

A mentally disturbed compulsive liar...

[DarkPast]

He was a right-wing Russian nationalist, monarchist and moderate anti-semite who wrote propaganda against what he thought was communism (and he attacked all communists, not just Stalin and the bolsheviks). He was also something of a religious nutter who criticized the west because he thought it was a sinful culture corrupted by atheism.

His works are rather average pieces of fiction that, while offering some insights into the workings of the Gulag also ridiculously inflate the number of people who were sent to and died in them (I'm not saying the Gulags were a good thing, mind you). The main reason for why the USSR failed according to him is because people "forgot God" - I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that.

However, note that when the USSR collapsed and he started harshly criticizing Western society, he suddenly became a lot less interesting to the American ruling class and was almost forgotten (everyone knows him as an anti-communist, but his other views are practically never mentioned in modern media).

[eyeheartlenin]

I do not dispute the fact that Solzhenitsyn is extremely reactionary. I read his Cancer Ward in translation, years and years ago, in the late sixties, I think, and I thought that was an impressive novel about Soviet society. (There must be other reactionary writers who produce good fiction.) Before Solzhenitsyn was deported (and thus, before his most extreme views became known), some writer (Brian something or other, IIRC) connected either with the USec (official "Trotskyism") or the (US) SWP, published an appreciation of Cancer Ward; I remember seeing it advertised.

Solzhenitsyn once wrote a short piece, Matryónin Dvor ("Matryona's Homestead"), about an elderly woman trying to survive by herself in the USSR, that was extremely moving, when we (Russian language majors) translated it into English, about 1970 or so.

I would be very interested in seeing a reference to research that backs up the claim that Gulag Archipelago exaggerates the realities of the Stalin-era concentration camps.