" The Gulag Archapeligo" Excellent book.

I read most of his Gulag books (1, 2 and 3) in both English and Russian. I also liked his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I think a movie was made of out this.

He really exposed life in the Soviet prison system and how easy we have it over here. Even if we take a decade by decade comparison, our penal system was a whole lot easier than theirs ever was.

Finally.

^^prick^^.

Right in the middle of negotiating a book deal for Gitmo, too.

Bummer.

I have one, Skanc, but I am not one.

He was always so glum.

Read "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" years ago. great book, great author. I recall the part about the " fish soup" the prisoners where fed. If am eye ball was in a fish head you ate it. If you found an eyeball floating free you did not eat it, because you had know idea what creature the eyeball came from.

when was the last time you saw it, jomama?

This man did more toward ending the Cold war than Ronald Wilson Reagan who neither read nor wrote.

This must have given Bush & Cheney a Big Fucking Laugh!!!

It took more than a little courage for him to write so powerfully against the Soviet regime when it was still a well-muscled if clumsy machine capable of shattering dissidents' lives.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalins thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!--

Solzhenitsyn: He started out as an atheist and evolved into a Christian. Rest with the Saints.

History can (and usually does) repeat itself if the lesson isn't understood.

No country (including the US) is immune from oppression and tyranny.
Americans need to realize the "it can't happen here" mentality isn't realistic.
It can happen anywhere in the world, at any time.

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

If I remember correctly, the methods of torture he listed in Gulag #1 were quite similar to the kind of things that would be considered legal by the Bush administration.

Sleep deprivation, beating with rubber hoses, etc.... None leaves permanent physical damage but boy do they get people to confess.

The brilliant Victor Davis Hanson on Solzhenitsyn:

"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ended up bothering almost everyone. Liberals once welcomed him to our shores in the 1970s as a kindred voice of free expression and resistance to authority only to see him work at the Hoover Institution and then lecture them at Harvard in 1978 on the moral consequences of left-wing appeasement of the Soviet Union. And when he condemned protesters that had opposed the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg, and American popular culture, the estrangement from the American Left was complete. Who in the post-1960s wished to be reminded that a surrender to the appetites, material gratification, atheism, and an absence of pride in one's own nation were the classical ingredients of civilizational decadence and decline?

Yet many Reaganite supporters of democracy grew to become worried that he sounded ever more the ultra-Russian nationalist with all the baggage that it entails, from religious fundamentalism to anti-Semitism. Conservatives sometimes got the impression that he didn't like the West or the United States all that much, as he saw the proper antidote to both totalitarianism, and Western-style free-market capitalism and individualism, in a proud Czarist Orthodox, all-powerful state-something akin to what is fossilizing in Putin's Russia today.

No matter. Solzhenitsyn's life was a roadmap of the horrific 20th century the grainy picture of an enfeebled Solzhenitsyn with his Gulag-issue will forever haunt millions of his readers. It is hard to imagine how anyone other than Solzhenitsyn could have survived the Great Terror, World War II on the Eastern Front, the Gulag, cancer in the Soviet medical system, exile, the best efforts of Pravda, the KGB and the Kremlin to destroy him, and scorn and abuse from those liberals who once proclaimed him a genius-or have written about it all any more brilliantly in fiction, narrative history, and poetry for over sixty years.

In the end, his epitaph is that no one in the 20th-century did more than he to bring down an horrific and bloodthirsty system that sought at any price to destroy the free mind and all that it entails."

Sorry Skanc. 34". Sucks to be you.

"no one in the 20th-century did more than he to bring down an horrific and bloodthirsty system ..."

Except Gorbi, Yeltsin, Reagan, etc. Actually, many Russians believed, and still believe, he was a traitor. Anyhow, he did endure a hell of a lot and survived it without losing his will to battle for his beliefs. Still, his contribution to any change in the USSR is very overrated, because he was a hell of a lot more important to the West than to the Soviet citizenry and govt.

VD Hanson is "brilliant" ? WOW ! Does that mean he reaches the level of Thomas Sowell?

Still, his contribution to any change in the USSR is very overrated, because he was a hell of a lot more important to the West than to the Soviet citizenry and govt.

Except that sentence is kind of a non sequitur, isn't it, dipshit?

It is precisely because of his importance to the West---and the contributions he made in articulating the evil of Soviet totalitarianism-- that the West maintained an aggressive posture that inevitably led to the collapse of the USSR.

Solzhenitsyn's "importance" to the Soviet government---and particularly its citizenry---has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

VD Hanson is "brilliant" ?

Yeah, he's a pretty brilliant guy. That's not a particularly controversial topic.

Does that mean he reaches the level of Thomas Sowell?

I don't have any idea what you're talking about.

Come to think of it, neither do you.

"The death of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn is a heavy loss for the whole of Russia," said a statement from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin -- a former agent with the KGB security service that led the persecution campaign against Solzhenitsyn.

Gorbachev, who brought in reforms that spurred the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, said his name would live in Russia's history."

"He was one of the first people who spoke up about the inhumanity of Stalin's regime with a full voice, and about the people who lived through this but were not broken," Gorbachev told Interfax news agency.

Pretty nice things to say about a man "many Russians believed, and still believe, was a traitor".

"Except that sentence is kind of a non sequitur, isn't it, dipshit?"

No, because the Soviets were the primary causes of their demise, not the West. But if you'd studied that time period you would know that, wouldn't you.

Yeah, you would think VD was brilliant. Comes out in every one of your posts. Was just wondering if that made him anywhere close to the level of, say, Chomsky. Then, maybe, he'd be at a level where we could merely dismiss his rantings.

"Pretty nice things to say about a man ..."

It's called a eulogy. As to how Russians think of him, try reading some of their blog sites. Hell, even sites where they merely participate. Then you wouldn't be talking out of your ass, as you usually do.

BTW, pejoratives from a pseudo-condescending twit went out with the demise of the pseudo-intellectual left. Do keep up with the times.

"If I remember correctly, the methods of torture he listed in Gulag #1 were quite similar to the kind of things that would be considered legal by the Bush administration.

Sleep deprivation, beating with rubber hoses, etc.... None leaves permanent physical damage but boy do they get people to confess'

Dibblda that is quite a reach! The Gulag system went way further then that. The criminals sent there did more to the policial prisoners than the guards did and that made it easier for the interegations also. Funny how the blame Bush reaches into here. 50 below zero with no shoes is real torture. Being fed watered down gruel twice a day and having to build roads through mountains is real torture. Guess you will have to go back and read those books again to see what the Soviet system did to its political prisoners.

Ward,

I won't argue with that, it wasn't my point, and I wasn't trying to reach that far. Clearly the end results for people in the gulag system are far worse generally than our prisoners.

Some of the methods used to gain confessions from people such as the ones I brought up are not far from what we are currently using and what is allowed under our current administration.

At the time when I read the book, I thought that what I was reading sounded like methods of torture. Years after, I noticed the parallel to current methods used to obtain confessions from enemy combatants.