Solzhenitsyn dead!!!

[The Author]

Soviet dissident writer Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

21 minutes ago

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner, has died aged 89, the Interfax news agency reported on Sunday.
He died of a stroke, the agency said, quoting literary sources in Moscow.
Solzhenitsyn served with the Red Army in World War Two but became one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era, enduring labor camps, cancer and persecution by Soviet officialdom.
His experience in the network of labor camps was vividly described in his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
His major works, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought him world admiration and the 1970 Nobel Literature Prize.
Stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago," his monumental history of the Soviet police state, the writer settled in the United States, returning to post-Soviet Russia as a hero in 1994.
He was born on December 11 1918, studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University and became a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941.
(Reporting by Tim Pearce; Editing by Jon Boyle)




http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080803/wl_nm/russia_solzhenitsyn_dc


CHEERS!!!!!


:thumbup::thumbup1::laugh::lol:

[RedAnarchist]

I'm not going to miss the sad old fart. One less relic who thinks he knew what Communism was has been wiped away.

[bcbm]

Yeah, why would somebody who was imprisoned in a gulag by "communists" be a weeeee bit critical of it? Weird. :rolleyes:

[Joe Hill's Ghost]

Why are we happy that he's dead? He was the victim of Stalinist brutality.

[Post-Something]

Hey! I really like his stuff actually...

Oh well, I think it's a shame, he was a good writer.

[Trystan]

Weird . . . I was just reading about him last night.

Right-winger? Sure. But he exposed the Stalinist lie. Good for him. :)

[Jorge Miguel]

Yes. Long live Nazi collaborators! :blink:

[chimx]

He was a great author.

[#FF0000]

He was a great author.

but that doesn't matter because he doesn't think like us.

yay someone is dead!

:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup::thumbup::thumbup::thum bup:

[dirtycommiebastard]

He was very critical of capitalism.

His writings were criticisms of Stalinism.

[LiberaCHE]

he was a good FICTION writer.


* Fixed it for you :)

[Red October]

He was very critical of capitalism.

His writings were criticisms of Stalinism.

He was a right-wing Russian nationalist who criticized the west because he thought it was a sinful culture corrupted by atheism. He was also against all communists, not just Stalin or even Lenin and Trotsky. Granted, you can see how living the in the Gulag would fuck a person up, but he was still a shit.

[LiberaCHE]

Where was an ice axe when you needed one ?

[JimmyJazz]

He was a right-wing Russian nationalist who criticized the west because he thought it was a sinful culture corrupted by atheism. He was also against all communists, not just Stalin or even Lenin and Trotsky. Granted, you can see how living the in the Gulag would fuck a person up, but he was still a shit.

This. At least, if his Wiki is accurate. Didn't he also do quite a bit of fabricating of numbers?

I'm not happy that he's dead, btw; he wasn't having any effect anymore--good or bad--so it strikes me as silly to care about his death.

[LiberaCHE]

Didn't he also do quite a bit of fabricating of numbers?
If by "quite a bit" you mean ALL OF IT

[RedHal]

He was a right-wing Russian nationalist who criticized the west because he thought it was a sinful culture corrupted by atheism. He was also against all communists, not just Stalin or even Lenin and Trotsky. Granted, you can see how living the in the Gulag would fuck a person up, but he was still a shit.

it seems he deserved being in the gulags

[JimmyJazz]

If by "quite a bit" you mean ALL OF IT

I do. I only phrased it that way because he was primarily a fiction writer, not a historian.

[Decolonize The Left]

Hey! I really like his stuff actually...

Oh well, I think it's a shame, he was a good writer.

Agreed, he was a great writer. Lyrical and personal, carried the reader along very well.

I don't care what his politics are, I didn't read him for political insight. :lol:

- August

[turquino]

Remember this 'anti-Stalinists ' {anti-communists} who liked The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn also wrote Two Hundred Years Together, a Russian history about how communism and radicalism were Jewish communism and radicalism.

[Bilan]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080803/wl_nm/russia_solzhenitsyn_dc


CHEERS!!!!!


:thumbup::thumbup1::laugh::lol:



You're a creep.

[spartan]

Remember this 'anti-Stalinists ' {anti-communists} who liked The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn also wrote Two Hundred Years Together, a Russian history about how communism and radicalism were Jewish communism and radicalism.

And?

Bakunin was an anti-semite whilst Marx made some very questionable comments about a political rival using derogatory terms alluding to a possible African ancestry (as if that is something to be ashamed of).

No ones past is squeaky clean no matter how much we attempt to hide it (and yes that was a dig at Stalin and his very famous airbrushing of photos and suppression of information).

[LiberaCHE]

You're a creep.
Lemme guess ... in your future Anarchist Utopia ... that will be the ONLY thing against the law right ?

[Bilan]

Lemme guess ... in your future Anarchist Utopia ... that will be the ONLY thing against the law right ?

Being a creep?

Would you shut the fuck up, you troll.

[LiberaCHE]

(and yes that was a dig at Stalin and his very famous airbrushing of photos).

You mean to tell me that you've never cut an ex-girlfriend out of a picture before ?

It was an earlier version of photoshop.

[LiberaCHE]

Would you shut the fuck up, you troll.
It's nice to know the moderators here conduct themselves with such decorum.

If by troll you mean someone who disagrees with your views then yes ... but you are the one scowering the forum here hurling insults at people.

[Bilan]

It's nice to know the moderators here conduct themselves with such decorum.

I'm tired of your cocky, disgusting posts, and I'm not going to give you anymore respect than you deserve. Don't like it? Cut the fucking bullshit.



If by troll you mean someone who disagrees with your views then yes ... but you are the one scowering the forum here hurling insults at people.


I am attacking you.

[LiberaCHE]

I am attacking you.
I'm not the one you called a "creep" in this thread that started your little hissy fit here.

[turquino]

And?

Bakunin was an anti-semite whilst Marx made some very questionable comments about a political rival using derogatory terms alluding to a possible African ancestry (as if that is something to be ashamed of).

No ones past is squeaky clean no matter how much we attempt to hide it (and yes that was a dig at Stalin and his very famous airbrushing of photos and suppression of information).
Solzhenitsyn's antisemitism is well documented, and it's not inconsequential that he connects communism with the 'sins' of Russian Jews. The nazis (whom he collaborated with) also postured themselves as defenders of Europe from a 'Judeo-Bolshevik threat'. Even the right-wing magazine Reason picked up on his latent antisemitic beliefs (http://www.reason.com/news/show/29113.html).

Also, i believe he was in favor of invading Portugal after the Carnation Revolution, and re-invading Vietnam.

[spartan]

Solzhenitsyn's antisemitism is well documented, and it's not inconsequential that he connects communism with the 'sins' of Russian Jews. The nazis (who he collaborated with) also postured themselves as defenders of Europe from a 'Judeo-Bolshevik threat'. Even the right-wing magazine Reason picked up on his latent antisemitic beliefs (http://www.reason.com/news/show/29113.html (http://www.reason.com/news/show/29113.html)).
Collaborated with the Nazis?

I have never heard of this before.

He served in the red army during the great patriotic war fighting against the Nazis!

If you are alluding to his arrest in 1945 in east Prussia, which led to him being sent to the gulags, then that was because he wrote derogatory remarks about the Soviet leadership not because he collaborated with Nazis as far as i know.

[turquino]

I should say he was a sympathizer rather than an outright collaborator.

[The Author]

Ludo Martens:

"We would like to open a brief parenthesis for Solzhenitsyn. This man became the official voice for the fiver per cent of Tsarists, bourgeois, speculators, kulaks, pimps, maffiosi and Vlasovites, all justifiably repressed by the socialist state.

Solzhenitsyn the bourgeois literary hack lived through a cruel dilemna during the Nazi occupation. Chauvinist, he hated the German invaders. But he hated socialism even more passionately. So he had a soft spot for General Vlasov, the most famous of the Nazi collaborators. Although Solzhenitsyn did not approve of Vlasov's flirt with Hitler, he was laudatory about his hatred of Bolshevism.

General Vlasov collaborated with the Nazis after having being captured? Solzhenitsyn found a way to explain and justify the treason. He wrote:

`Vlasov's Second Shock Army ... was 46 miles (70 kilometres) deep inside the German lines! And from then on, the reckless Stalinist Supreme Command could find neither men nor ammunition to reinforce even those troops .... The army was without food and, at the same time, Vlasov was refused permission to retreat ....

`Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin's .... It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one's own marshal's uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?'

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918--1956. An Experiment in Literary Investigation I--II (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 253, note.

So Solzhenitsyn defended the traitor Vlasov against Stalin. Let us look at what really happened in early 1942. Several armies had received the order to break the German blockade of Leningrad. But the offensive quickly got bogged down and the front commander, Khozin, received the order from Stalin's headquarters to withdraw Vlasov's army. Marshal Vasilevsky writes:

`Vlasov, who did not possess many gifts as a commander and, in fact, vacillating and cowardly by nature, was thoroughly inactive. The grave situation for the army demoralised him ever further and he made no attempt to withdraw his troops quickly and covertly ....

`I can with some authority confirm the extremely serious concern which Stalin displayed daily for the 2nd Shock Army and for rendering every possible assistance to them. This is evidenced by a whole series of GHQ directives that I personally wrote primarily to Stalin's dictation'.

Vlasov joined the enemy while a considerable part of his army succeeded in breaching through the German trap and in escaping.

A. M. Vasilevsky, A Lifelong Cause (Moscow: Progress, 1973), pp. 139--141.

Russians were hired in the Nazi army to combat the Soviet people? But, exclaimed Solzhenitsyn, it was Stalin's criminal régime that pushed them to do it:

`(M)en could be induced to enter the Wehrmacht's Vlasov detachments only in the last extremity, only at the limit of desperation, only out of inexhaustible hatred of the Soviet regime.'

Solzhenitsyn.

Besides, said Solzhenitsyn, the Vlasovian collaborators were more anti-Communist than pro-Nazi:

`(O)nly in the fall of 1944 did they begin to form Vlasov divisions that were exclusively Russian .... their first and last independent action, dealt a blow --- to the Germans themselves .... Vlasov ordered his divisions to the aid of the Czech rebels.'


This is the fable that has been repeated by Nazi and other fascist criminals of all countries: when the German fascists were on the verge of defeat, they all discovered their `national and independent' vocation and remembered their `opposition' to Germany, looking for protection under the wings of U.S. imperialism!

Solzhenitsyn did not object to the Germans being fascists, but to the fact that they were stupid and blind fascists. If they had been more intelligent, the German Nazis would have recognized the value of their Russian brothers-in-arms and they would have allowed them a certain level of autonomy:

`The Germans, in their shallow stupidity and self-importance, allowed them only to die for the German Reich, but denied them the right to plan an independent destiny for Russia.'

The war was still raging, Nazism was not clearly defeated, and Solzhenitsyn was already crying for the `inhuman' lot reserved for the arrested Vlasovian criminals! He described a scene after the cleaning-up of a Nazi pocket on Soviet territory:

`A prisoner on foot in German britches was crying out to me in pure Russian. He was naked from the waist up, and his face, chest, shoulders, and back were all bloody, while a sergeant osobist ... drove him forward with a whip .... I was afraid to defend the Vlasov man against the osobist .... This picture will remain etched in my mind forever. This, after all, is almost a symbol of the Archipelago. It ought to be on the jacket of this book.'


We should thank Solzhenitsyn for his disconcerting candor: the man who best incarnated the `millions of victims of Stalinism' was a Nazi collaborator."

[Chapaev]

Solzhenitsyn was a traitor, a renegade, a Judas, a blasphemer, and a counterrevolutionary. As a man who extolled Vlasovite treachery, Solzhenitsyn shames his nation. He should have been permanently imprisoned for treason decades ago.

Solzhenitsyn's slanderous remarks against the progressive democratic movement during the aggression against Vietnam seriously undermine any moral credibility he may have had. It is quite difficult to reconcile one's failure to oppose a murderous war of aggression against a country of poor peasants while at the same time protesting prison conditions in another country.

[LiberaCHE]

American TV Talking head Reich-Wingers (in the U.S. where I am) are tripping over themselves in heaping praise ... while eulogizing this scum.

Now I'm just waiting for a Faux News Tribute. :rolleyes:

[Saorsa]

My tribute to the death of this great man. (http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=hMenB9Ywh2Q)

[Kwisatz Haderach]

89 years old? What took him so long? The filthy Tsarist bastard.

Checklist:

x Ronald Reagan
x Milton Friedman
x Augusto Pinochet
x Boris Yeltsin
x Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Margaret Thatcher
- Mikhail Gorbachev

[Dimentio]

I do not understand what makes him more legitimate than other pro-fascist writers, like Knut Hamsun or Sven Hedin. I do not hold much love for Stalin either, but could'nt they've at least found a better dissident? Sacharov at least held a moral core.

[Invader Zim]

Yes. Long live Nazi collaborators! :blink:

'Nazi collaborator'? The guy was a decorated soldier when fighting the Nazi's, and he was highly critical of the West in his historical writing for not starting another front, against the nazis, sooner.

Stalinists will come out with any old bullshit with which to smear their opponents. Its sad.

[Sam_b]

'Nazi collaborator'?

I believe this is what he was accused and sent to the prison camps for.
Long live the faultless leadership of Uncle Joe! :rolleyes:

[Das war einmal]

Hah atleast some good news in these dire times. Any self calling leftist defending this person has to know that this person was a chauvinist, a anti-semite and a extreme-orthodox nutcase...

[The Author]

It's sad that they don't. They only look at him as an example of "repression," never at his ideology. Never at the fact that the West used his lies as grist in the mill to spread disinformation among the working classes that the Soviet Union was much worse than capitalism, even worse than fascism. And these lies continue to be spread by not only the Soviet "critics," but by bourgeois scholars and their students enjoying the privileges and comforts of capitalism.

Such threads like these are a nice litmus test of who is on the side of revolutionaries and who is not.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I do not understand what makes him more legitimate than other pro-fascist writers, like Knut Hamsun or Sven Hedin. I do not hold much love for Stalin either, but could'nt they've at least found a better dissident? Sacharov at least held a moral core.

Sakharov (to correct your spelling) was indeed a better dissident by Western standards :)

[Post-Something]

I don't get it. The guy wrote good books. Nobody is claiming this guy has any credibility, that he has a historical high ground or that any of his bullshit ideology is to be believed. The simple fact of the mater is that he wrote works of fiction and non fiction of a pretty high standard. And If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have read more about Stalin, that's for sure. The guy was an artist, not a historian. He made art, and he did it with sincerity. What about Zamyatin? He wasn't allowed to publish his works under Stalin, and I think most of you will agree that he's a fantastic author. There are loads of examples, and not just in the realm of literature; what about Avro Part? He was a great composer. When he dies will you all rejoice like you did last night without even having listened to his music?

[Random Precision]

I don't get it. The guy wrote good books. Nobody is claiming this guy has any credibility, that he has a historical high ground or that any of his bullshit ideology is to be believed. The simple fact of the mater is that he wrote works of fiction and non fiction of a pretty high standard. And If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have read more about Stalin, that's for sure. The guy was an artist, not a historian. He made art, and he did it with sincerity. What about Zamyatin? He wasn't allowed to publish his works under Stalin, and I think most of you will agree that he's a fantastic author. There are loads of examples, and not just in the realm of literature; what about Avro Part? He was a great composer. When he dies will you all rejoice like you did last night without even having listened to his music?

But unlike Yevgeny Zamyatin or Arvo Pärt, Solzhenitsyn allowed his persecution to turn him into a politician over an artist. So I suppose in a sense the Brezhnevites succeeded; by persecuting him they made him rely more and more on his position as a "dissident" and his Western defenders instead of his own artistic merit. And like with most artists who exchange the world that feeds their art for one of politics, his writing became more and more irrelevant, and what skill he once had as an artist was forgotten. Just read any of the obituaries circulating the bourgeois press. He will not be remembered for his brilliant way of personalizing the Stalinist terror. He will be remembered for his rejection of communism, and his apologias for imperialism. Against this the fact that he was once an artist has done nothing more than serve as a laurel for everything we despise as communists.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So I suppose in a sense the Brezhnevites succeeded

^^^ Are you becoming an "anti-revisionist"? ;)

[Random Precision]

^^^ Are you becoming an "anti-revisionist"? ;)

No.

[RedHal]

I don't get it. The guy wrote good books. Nobody is claiming this guy has any credibility, that he has a historical high ground or that any of his bullshit ideology is to be believed. The simple fact of the mater is that he wrote works of fiction and non fiction of a pretty high standard. And If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have read more about Stalin, that's for sure. The guy was an artist, not a historian. He made art, and he did it with sincerity. What about Zamyatin? He wasn't allowed to publish his works under Stalin, and I think most of you will agree that he's a fantastic author. There are loads of examples, and not just in the realm of literature; what about Avro Part? He was a great composer. When he dies will you all rejoice like you did last night without even having listened to his music?

do you live in the real world? Listen to the news, you think this guy is being remembered for his "great" works of fiction? He's being remembered for his works on the soviet gulags, he's a symbol used by the imperialists to show how horrible communism is. And you think the masses are gonna differentiate from your version of communism and the one described by Solzhenitzyn? Because of people like Solzhenitzyn, the masses don't know what's worse, communism or nazism.

[#FF0000]

Threads celebrating someone's death are disgusting, I don't care who it is.

Stay classy, guys.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

do you live in the real world? Listen to the news, you think this guy is being remembered for his "great" works of fiction? He's being remembered for his works on the soviet gulags, he's a symbol used by the imperialists to show how horrible communism is. And you think the masses are gonna differentiate from your version of communism and the one described by Solzhenitzyn? Because of people like Solzhenitzyn, the masses don't know what's worse, communism or nazism.
Well said, very well said.

It's important to remember that a person's real actions are usually less important than a person's symbolic value. It doesn't matter to anyone that Solzhenitzyn was an artist. Ironically, it doesn't even matter to anyone that he was a Tsarist and a religious fanatic. He is remembered as a liberal anti-communist historian, though he was neither liberal nor a historian.

When evaluating whether a famous person was good or bad, and whether their death is good or bad, you can't look at the things that person actually said or did. You have to look at the things most people believe that person said or did. That is where a person's importance comes from - other people's opinions.

In the public mind, Solzhenitzyn was a liberal anti-communist historian, George Orwell was a capitalist, and the Soviet Union was communist. The truth is, sadly, irrelevant.

[Andres Marcos]

'Nazi collaborator'? The guy was a decorated soldier when fighting the Nazi's, and he was highly critical of the West in his historical writing for not starting another front, against the nazis, sooner.

Stalinists will come out with any old bullshit with which to smear their opponents. Its sad.

Solzhenitsyn also blamed WW2 on the Soviet Union for not making a "deal" with Hitler(which was why he was thrown in the GULAG in the first place), secondly Solzhenitsyn was a known fascist, right after Franco's death he gave a speech praising Franco and urged Juan Carlos to not allow democracy in Spain and threatened it would turn into the Soviet Union(just like Portugal was gunna join the Warsaw pact :rolleyes:) and was against the national democratic liberation movements in Africa. Being in the GULAG doesnt just make one a fascist or a staunch imperialist he had to be holding these views way before that.

[Chapaev]

Once in America and feted by Western leaders, Solzhenitsyn urged the the United States to continue bombing Vietnam. He applauded the U.S.-backed counterrevolution in Chile and supported General Franco.

Worse still, Solzhenitsyn was an anti-Semite. His work is filled with rabid anti-Jewish sentiment and implies that a Jewish cabal lies behind history.

[Post-Something]

But unlike Yevgeny Zamyatin or Arvo Pärt, Solzhenitsyn allowed his persecution to turn him into a politician over an artist. So I suppose in a sense the Brezhnevites succeeded; by persecuting him they made him rely more and more on his position as a "dissident" and his Western defenders instead of his own artistic merit. And like with most artists who exchange the world that feeds their art for one of politics, his writing became more and more irrelevant, and what skill he once had as an artist was forgotten. Just read any of the obituaries circulating the bourgeois press. He will not be remembered for his brilliant way of personalizing the Stalinist terror. He will be remembered for his rejection of communism, and his apologias for imperialism. Against this the fact that he was once an artist has done nothing more than serve as a laurel for everything we despise as communists.

I see and understand your point. As a result, I should probably concede. However, I seriously don't think this guy should have been censored. Nor any other artist that lived there. Secondly, I think his artistic merit far outweighed his political views. I never want to live in a society where I can't express or criticize. I mean, come on, us communists are the most critical guys on the planet! For me, that is the single most inhuman thing you can do. And if you were sent to a labor camp just because you criticized Stalin in a letter to a friend, I think you'd be pretty pissed off as well.

Anyway, you're right though, he will be seen as a hero, not because of his talent for writing, but because of his outright refusal and criticism of communism.


do you live in the real world? Listen to the news, you think this guy is being remembered for his "great" works of fiction? He's being remembered for his works on the soviet gulags, he's a symbol used by the imperialists to show how horrible communism is. And you think the masses are gonna differentiate from your version of communism and the one described by Solzhenitzyn? Because of people like Solzhenitzyn, the masses don't know what's worse, communism or nazism.

Yeah, fair enough, I just think rejoicing when a man dies is a pretty low thing to do to be honest.

And no, it's because of people like Stalin that the masses don't know what's worse. How many proletariat do you know that recognize Solzhenitsyn quicker than Stalin?



When evaluating whether a famous person was good or bad, and whether their death is good or bad, you can't look at the things that person actually said or did. You have to look at the things most people believe that person said or did. That is where a person's importance comes from - other people's opinions.

In the public mind, Solzhenitzyn was a liberal anti-communist historian, George Orwell was a capitalist, and the Soviet Union was communist. The truth is, sadly, irrelevant.

What the fuck!?!? This is a load of bullshit at best. I've seen broken phone booths using better logic than this.

According to your post:

Stalin was far worse than any liberal Bourgeois fuck could ever be.

Barrack Obama is a communist

God exists

Fox news is pretty accurate

All black people eat chicken and watermelons and steal.

Winston Churchill was a pretty cool guy

All Anarchists are 17 year old angsty fucks

Women are inferior to men

and, wait, what's this...

ALL COMMUNISTS ARE BLOODTHIRSTY FUCKS.

To be honest with you, Orwell wasn't a capitalist, and as a result, I wouldn't be happy when he died. Even if everyone symbolizes him as one. I honestly don't care about "importance", just truth.

[Socialismo_Libertario]

why should anyone feel sorry for the death of an anti-semite, an anti-communist, a pro-vietnam war writer that spent more time criticizing soviet "attrocities" in WW2 Germany than the Nazi regime itself! Solzhenitsyn was not a proponent of democracy he was a Czarist Russia nostalgic.

I urge you to read "Two Hundred Years Together", a book that confirms Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations.

The only reason, Solzhenitsyn is so glorified by the west is because he was an opponent of communism

Solzhenitsyn was not sent to the Gulags, because of his background in mathematics and physics, he was sent to a military research installation, often referred to as a sharashka, where he worked on secret state projects. Referred to as zeks, prisoners sent to these research stations were engineers and scientists. Living conditions were much better in the sharashka than in the camps where manual labor was performed. I also find it interesting that, after his release, Solzhenitsyn became a high school teacher in Kazakhstan, teaching mathematics and physics.

Also curious is the apparent fact that, in 1950, while at an camp in Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he was discovered to have a tumor which was removed. The cancer nonetheless spread and, near death, he was treated at a hospital in Tashkent and cured of cancer. He writes about these experiences Cancer Ward. Now, Why would a homicidal state apparatus, a thoroughly diabolical machine of repression responsible for mass murder, not only fail to execute this dangerous dissident, but cure him of cancer? Why not let him die? Instead, he is allowed to work at a highly classified state research installation, cured of cancer, released from prison, and appointed to teach high school students math and physics!

[Socialismo_Libertario]

Solzhenitsyn also blamed WW2 on the Soviet Union for not making a "deal" with Hitler(which was why he was thrown in the GULAG in the first place), secondly Solzhenitsyn was a known fascist, right after Franco's death he gave a speech praising Franco and urged Juan Carlos to not allow democracy in Spain and threatened it would turn into the Soviet Union(just like Portugal was gunna join the Warsaw pact :rolleyes:) and was against the national democratic liberation movements in Africa. Being in the GULAG doesnt just make one a fascist or a staunch imperialist he had to be holding these views way before that.

Exactly! I hate defending Stalinism but Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to a labor camp in 1946 because he distributed pro-Nazi propaganda at a time when his country was in a life-or-death struggle against a Nazi war of aggression of genocidal proportions. The Nazis killed 27 million Soviet citizens and Solzhenitsyn was locked up for being a pro-Nazi traitor.

Solzhenitsyn's "interpretation of history" - i.e. a Soviet labor camp seen through the eyes of a Nazi sympathizer - consisted of pulling numbers out of his arse: 44 million Russians killed in WWII (Stalin's fault, of course, not Hitler's), 25 million in the labor camps, 66 million killed in the purges. He managed to out-BS even the hired Home Office propagandist Robert Conquest who was spinning his numbers on the basis of "information" obtained from pro-Nazi East European émigrés - many of them war criminals - and creative demographic accounting.

[Raúl Duke]

Good Riddance

[Panda Tse Tung]

Solzhenitsyn was not sent to the Gulags, because of his background in mathematics and physics


Thats exactly what i wanted to add to the discussion ;).
I mean, really. Some people are driving it too far with their anti-Stalinism by supporting anything that opposes Stalin. Disagreeing with Stalin or 'Stalinism' is one thing...

[black magick hustla]

Solzhenitsyn was a big reactionary - however that didnt entitle him to be thrown to the gulag. when he was thrown in the gulag, he was transformed from not very reactionary to a big-time one - and it is understandable. i think its disgusting that the nerds here with a soviet fetish think the gulag is justifiable for being a writer with a dissenting ideas. i dont feel bad for Solzhenitsyn dying, but i do get grossed out by horrible anti-humanism of some people here.

[ships-cat]

Hmmm.... I dunno... I really don't.

I got the impression (very vaugly, and with no particular authority) that Solzhenitsyn simply wrote books; partialy autobiographical perhaps or - at least - allegorical. I wasn't aware of him promoting himself as being any great political writer or sage. I think that was done by other people. (as other posters have already suggested).

As for his writing... I found it somewhat heavy-going. Perhaps I'll dig out The Inner Circle and re-read it.

But from my memory of first reading it:
The trouble with Solzhenitsyn
Is that his books don't have any Titsyn :D

Meow Purr :)

[Panda Tse Tung]

He was never thrown into the gulags *sigh*. In fact his book the gulag archipel was based on his memories of conversations he had with people in Kazakhstan about the gulags. After his supposed 'gulag-visit' he was thrown back into soviet life and even had been a member of the writers union. The gulags themselves we're actually an emergency measure since tsarist Russia never had a vast system of prisons, jet they did have a vast system of labor camps. Fat is that by 1953 the percentage of people dying in the gulags was about the same as in the rest of the USSR, while the highest percentage of those that died, died during the great famine and WW2 (in which the gulag-prisoners we're offered a choice, either joining the red army or staying). A lot of the bad things going on in the gulags we're often actually breaches of the party-line. Such as the amount of people transported (of which it occurred that it was twice the amount of the party-line causing many to die on their way to the gulag).
I dont think having to do labor as a punishment for something would be a bad idea.

And i dont know why Solzhenytsin was imprisoned, and i doubt many of those stating they do actually researched it beyond some wikipedia article.

[Chapaev]

Solzhenitsyn was a mediocre and unoriginal proponent of authoritarian concepts whose apocalyptic ramblings and paranoid appeals were addressed to the mentally retarded. He fitted into every element of the formula for producing a “prominent author” as part of CIA subversion against Russia.

His entire primitive ideology merely parroted the tritest clichés of Western anti-Russia propaganda. He was a dedicated successor to the ideologists of fascism. He insisted that the Western world is “almost dying.” Solzhenitsyn attributes this crisis to the “philosophical system which was conceived during the Renaissance and reached its peak in the works of the 18th century Enlighteners.” The main thrust of all Solzhenitsyn’s writings is the attempt to prove that the future will be authoritarian and fascist. It was Goebbels who said, “We will strike 1789 out from history.”

Imperialist propaganda has long pictured Solzhenitsyn as a champion of “liberalization” and other slogans widely used in bourgeois countries. The ideological content of August 1914 destroys that pleasant stereotype. The rejection of political activity and parliamentarism and consequently the atomization of society, flattering remarks about the technocrats’ ability to govern—are the common philosophical ground of totalitarian, fascist regimes. All champions of barbarous fascist doctrines began, under capitalism, by eliminating all parties but their own and ended with the physical extermination of dissenters. Viewed from this angle, Obodovsky and Arkhangorodsky, the author’s favorite and quite loquacious heroes, are harbingers of what later endangered civilization throughout the world—fascism. The moment the people Solzhenitsyn describes and praises are given power, a bloodbath will result.

Smerdiakov hoped that a “clever” nation (the Germans) would put everything in order in Russia and wished that all its soldiers should be killed, so that no one would dare take up arms and hinder the teaching of the “stupid” nation. This regret that a “clever nation” failed to conquer “quite a stupid one” permeates August 1914. Solzhenitsyn uses this approach to describe the engagement of Russian and German armies in East Prussia in August 1914. Solzhenitsyn is petrified with admiration and kneeling before the German militarists. Solzhenitsyn’s words have a terrible and blasphemous ring. It is common knowledge that Solzhenitsyn had a regrettable penchant for extolling everything connected with imperial Germany. Having revived the corpse of the “Russo-German party”—an object of hatred among Slavs—which tried to force a great country to its knees before German imperialism, Solzhenitsyn gladly adopts its arguments.

During the war, in an hour of deadly peril, Solzhenitsyn reviled the Supreme High Command and was therefore removed from the army and sentenced under wartime laws. He remained a sympathizer with the enemy who was bent on conquering the Russian people by death and destruction.

[Comrade B]

Where was an ice axe when you needed one ?
Offensive little bastard there, aren't you. Trotsky may be dead, but at least his following still lives in the minds of the sane.

[Crux]

Another ultra-rightist gone.

[Sam_b]

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=15739



Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Witness to the Gulag

#picture {float: right;margin-left: 10px;margin-right: 5px;width: 250px;voice-family: ""}"";voice-family: inherit;margin-left: 7px;margin-right: 0px;}http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/chimage.php?image=2008/2114/tim_illo2114.jpg
(Pic: » Tim Sanders (http://www.timonline.info/))



Dave Crouch looks at the politics and work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great chronicler of Stalin’s Russia who died recently

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who died this month, was an unparalleled witness to the Gulag – Joseph Stalin’s system of slave labour camps.
His books are a savage indictment of Stalinism, but also a monument to the humanity of the six million people who passed through the camps from 1930 to the mid-1950s.
Solzhenitsyn was an enthusiastic Leninist in his youth. But he died a fanatical religious nationalist and friend of the far right. He backed the US war in Vietnam, railed against democracy, supported General Franco in Spain, and backed Russia’s invasions of Chechnya.
Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky before him, he failed as a political prophet, but his literary works are stunning achievements. It would be foolish to turn our back on Solzhenitsyn simply because of his politics.
He was born in 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution. A child prodigy, he was a brilliant student of mathematics, studying literature in his spare time.
When war broke out he became an elite artillery officer, but was arrested in 1945 after letters to a friend, in which he was critical of Stalin, were intercepted by counter-intelligence. He was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag.
Forbidden to put anything down on paper, he remembered what he saw in the form of poems. After serving his sentence, he became a maths teacher in a provincial town and started to write.
By the mid-1950s the slave labour camps had served their purpose for the Stalinist regime. They were hugely important in creating the primitive infrastructure for Soviet heavy industry, but as the economy developed the camps became inefficient.
This was the background to the 1956 “secret speech” by new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in which he denounced Stalin. This marked the beginning of a political “thaw” in Soviet life.
In 1962 Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, was published in a liberal journal. It evokes a single day in the 10,000-day sentence of a Gulag prisoner – it caused a sensation.
But the mild reforms set in motion by the thaw threatened to weaken the leadership’s control, and two years later Leonid Brezhnev led a renewed clampdown.
Solzhenitsyn’s next two novels – Cancer Ward, based on his experience of cancer as a prisoner, and The First Circle, describing life in a camp for technical specialists – were published abroad. It was the latter that won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.
In 1972 the KGB secret police forced one of Solzhenitsyn’s friends to reveal where he had buried a copy of his great historical work, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from Russia in 1974 and went into exile in the US.
Based on the testimony of 220 prisoners, The Gulag Archipelago is a devastating investigation of what the camps meant for the people who experienced them. The account is peppered with the author’s personal reflections and black humour.
One chapter describes the doomed but ecstatic 40-day revolt of the Kengir camp in Kazakhstan in 1954. Another documents the workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk eight years later.
Solzhenitsyn’s writing is infused with respect for his fellow prisoners and his disgust for the authorities. The result is profound sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, one of the most attractive features of his writing.
But The Gulag Archipelago is also an attempt to demonstrate that Lenin led directly to Stalin, and that the camps flowed directly from Marxist ideology and were present in embryo from the first days of the revolution.
Many of Solzhenitsyn’s arguments are quite simply wrong. In political terms his understanding of the Gulag is superficial.
What would we say of a historian of Nazism who explained its victory without taking account of the hyperinflation and economic collapse? Only an approach rooted in the social consequences of the isolation of the revolution in the 1920s can explain the horrors of the Gulag.
But we can forgive Solzhenitsyn a great deal. And even in The Gulag Archipelago there are shades of his youthful support for the revolution, when he asks rhetorically whether this was really what Lenin had in mind.
His religious conversion in a camp hospital is often cited as a turning point in Solzhenitsyn’s politics.
But this is to underestimate the optimism with which the Khrushchev thaw was greeted by most Russian intellectuals.
It was the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that finally killed all hope of reforming the Soviet system for Solzhenitsyn, opening the doors to his bizarre religious fanaticism.
Solzhenitsyn’s political journey ended pathetically last year when he accepted a lifetime achievement award from Vladimir Putin, the KGB official and Russian prime minister who resurrected so many authoritarian features of the Soviet system.
This was a final reminder that we must reject Solzhenitsyn the prophet – but celebrate him as a witness to Stalin’s crimes and the voice of his victims.

[Saorsa]

Lol why do Trotskyists blindly swallow the lies of the bourgeoisie about Stalin and the "Gulag Archipelago"?

[Cheung Mo]

The way I see it, the very people who ruined Solzhenitsyn would have been rotting away in Tito's filthiest jail cells had they been Yugoslav.

[Das war einmal]

@ 'Socialist' worker article: I stopped reading after
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer

Dumbass bastards, how low can you go in supporting fascism? The more bullshit Trotskyist crap out, the more respect I get for Stalin

[PRC-UTE]

Lol why do Trotskyists blindly swallow the lies of the bourgeoisie about Stalin and the "Gulag Archipelago"?

The SWP isn't Trotskyist, compare it to the likes of the IMT and you'll see what I mean.