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- When Hell Freezes
- A human perspective
- A masterpiece in political, moral and philosophical thought
- Frightening Revelations
- communism, stalinist russia
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The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0060007761
Release Date: 2002-01-22 |
Book Description
Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully.
Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.
Customer Reviews:
When Hell Freezes.......2007-10-17
Solzhenitsyn gave the world a glimpse of man's darkness in the twentieth century far better than any fictional dystopia Orwell could dream up. Although this is an abridged version, it generally flows well and still hits with a punch. The book is a powerful testament to the best and worst qualities within the human race (mostly the worst). I must commend Solzhenitsyn on his brilliant combination of personal experience, history, dark humor, and at times optimism.
Solzhenitsyn isn't the first Christian author to portray the nightmare of totalitarism. Corrie Ten Boom's "The Hiding Place" and books by the Wurmbrands are quite powerful in their own right. I suppose one key difference is that Solzhenitsyn seems to be a more talented author (both an advantage and a disadvantage[sometimes personal experiences are better conveyed in more straight forward writing]).
Hopefully, readers (who weren't already aware) will realizes the tremendous harm and suffering political communism brought on the world. I get a little tired of the fact a certain dead communist revolutionary is considered "cool." Okay, so this book is about the U.S.S.R. and not about Latin America. Anyway, the sheer scope of the tragedy is difficult to even attempt to comprehend. Thankfully, the stories of at least some of those who suffered are available to enlighten future generations.
A human perspective.......2007-10-01
Often when one reads about an outrage of history the account is dry, numerical, and one sided. What is truly unique about Gulag is that it takes us inside the the minds of the victims and the perpetrators, revealing the central yet unspoken theme of the book. This is a story of human nature, revealed in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. As you read ask yourself, "What would I have done?" The answers may horrify you.
On the political side of things Gulag reveals that the Soviet system elucidated the evil in people. Gulag is a call for us to see politics in a different way. Beware of those advancing class envy/warfare. The Soviets adjusted their definition of "rich" down as the people became poorer. The freedom possessed does not seem near as valuable as freedom lost.
Gulag demonstrates that faith is the only useful possession that can not be taken. Gulag cites many examples of superhuman courage, toughness, and triumph by those of deep religious devotion. An unspoken theme is that the Soviet system could not exist amongst nation of the faithful.
Read this book.
I would recommend these books a well for the reader interested in Communism.
The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedon to Overcome Tyranny And Terror
The Road to Serfdom Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
A masterpiece in political, moral and philosophical thought.......2007-09-27
What can be said about Solzhenitsyn's work? It's so huge, so sprawling, so detailed that on a certain level it must be taken in generally, just as an impressionist painting must be viewed from a distance rather than each paint stroke. Here's my own impression, filtered, of course, through my own political and moral prism.
You read about the massive Gulag system and the first thing you think of is "Wow. Practically any crime can be gotten away with if it's done in the name of the people." But it's so much more than that. It's not just hoodwinking, propagandizing or frightening the populace into allowing a system of political prisoner camps 20 million strong to exist for decades. Stalin could never have done what he did without the tacit consent and approval of the Russian people. I don't believe they were too cowed or ignorant, just like I don't believe the Germans were too cowed or ignorant to know what Hitler was doing during WW II.
And the same mindset that produced the Gulag continues to the present day. Humanity hasn't changed. Stalin's murderous reign of terror is now purposely overlooked* or even celebrated throughout the world. This is a testament to the inner sickness extant in every human being, not just those who lead or carry out the evil themselves. People like Stalin would never have been able to get away with what they did if it weren't for that secret, sometimes unconscious desire for death and destruction of others and of oneself that exists in the human soul, the "death instinct" referred to by Freud and present in many people and groups, from Palestinian suicide bombers to American university professors.
* Have you ever seen an anti-Stalin Hollywood-produced movie?
Frightening Revelations.......2007-09-06
As I read "Gulag. . . " I kept thinking of the old cliche, "those who do not study history, are doomed to repeat it." It has been difficult to read of a society so evil, so base that it views human beings as mere things--disposable assets. It is an amazing story that any human being has experienced this and lived, and smiled. I find it incredible that Solzhenitsyn still loved his Russia despite his imprisonment. This is an excellent book, difficult to read at times, but well worth the effort. It should be on the required reading list for every high school-aged child. It should be required reading by every senator, congressman, etc. This book is too valuable to simply be placed on the back of a shelf.
communism, stalinist russia.......2007-07-26
What an eye opener! It describes the dispair and horror of stalin's russia. If you want an insight as to why the USA is so staunchly and fanatically anti-communist, read this book! Stalin and his communists tried to build their workers paradise through slavery. Millions were arrested and sent to labor camps because the commies needed slaves, so they arrested them and condemned them for at least 10 years ('a tenner').
A stunning, very well written, page turner that shows there are things worse than death! They crammed 40 people into cells designed for 2 people. Torture, arbitrary doubling of your sentence (from 10 to 20 years), sadistic guards, all for no crime whatsoever! Makes the West look like heaven on earth.
And Solzhenitsyn keeps it interesting, even humorous. Like when a crowd was applauding Stalin, and everyone was afraid to be the first one to stop applauding because they knew they would be arrested! So the applause went on for 1/2 hour, with nobody daring to stop! Finally, a brave soul stopped, and he was arrested and sent away the next day.
It's a great book. I highly recommend it, especially to lefties who need to see what marxism turns into.
Customer Reviews:
A Literary Mount Everest.......2007-06-20
The wit and wisdom of this book is almost beyond comprehension. I defy anyone to read the chapter, "The Ascent", and then tell me they have read a better twenty pages of literature....from any era.
Customer Reviews:
Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.......2005-04-13
The Archipelago refers to many great ports scattered from the
Bering Strait to Bosporus.There were thousands of small islands where people were transported for varying periods of time.
In addition, there were transit prisons at Ust-Usa and portable
confinements by rail.
Prisoners were subjected to extensive methods of interrogation
including sleep deprivation at night, persuasion, humiliation,
cursing, long periods of standing, sound effects, lighting and
general confusion. Trials were quick and often it was difficult
to access witnesses because they were scattered or in prison
themselves.
People in every station of life were imprisoned for a variety
of reasons- most of them directed to criticism of the State.
Tanya Khodkevich was imprisoned for saying:
" you can pray freely,
But just so G-d alone can hear'
Students were arrested for criticism of the system.
Historians; such as, Platonov and Gotye were arrested.
The Buryat-Monguls were imprisoned in Kazakhstan. Tribal
members of the Northern Caucasus were jailed. People were
convicted by analogy, place of birth/origin or contact
with persons considered "dangerous" to the State.
The work is a testament to the implementation of power in the
Soviet State from Lenin onward. It is written in a
belles lettres style-much like a continuous story. The volume is
highly recommended for a wide audience of college students,
historians, journalists and readers of great literature.
Customer Reviews:
Eloquent Expose of Stalinist Tyranny.......2007-09-26
I read this book, both volumes and part of the third, years ago in the wake of this work becoming a political slogan and football bandied about so much during the Reagan years, as it turns out by people who obviously had not read it. While intially approaching that task with some skepticism, I quickly concluded that it was very well written and informed, being worth the time spent in reading it.
"Gulag" is an acronym in Russian for an agency that was known as the Central Administration of Corrective Labor Camps which the author, a former Red Army officer, entered in 1945 as a "zek" or prisoner. The book(s) is a very absorbing chronicle of the history of this system in general and through the personal stories of specific individuals that became known to the author. While Solshinitsyn is very explicit, obviously, in making his bitterly and well earned anti-communist outlook known, this work is not a hysterial rant or screed, but a serious memoir and work of historical literature, one that is neither boring nor tendentious. Moreover, while the author's affinity for Russia's Orthodox traditions shines through, a certain social-revolutionary sensiblity that has also been a hallmark of that culture during the last century and half of upheaval also emerges. As Herzen observed about Bakunin, who endured his own stuggles with Russian Tsarist tyranny in the previous century, it seems that the Gulag's author was not born under any ordinary star, but a comet.
The forced labor camp system set up by Stalin was designed to purge his political opponents, set up a system of cheap forced labor to subsize his economic development and industrialization programs and as a vehicle for the implementation of his own peculiar take on ostensible Marxist-Leninist social cleansing and transformation. Thus the first section is entitled "The history of our sewage disposal sytem," detailing how a quarter of "Leningrad" was "cleaned out" in the political and psuedo legal context of the newly adopted Soviet Constitution (Article 10 as I recall) that criminalized the formerly privileged classes and "socially hostile elements." In the camp context this meant that the common criminal element, "the socially friendly", that may have been present was pandered to while being incited against political enemies of the state, parts of this story being reminiscent of MacKinlay Kantor's fictional descrition of POW life in "Andersonville", although in this context it was a concious policy pursued as part of the "institutionalization of the dictatorship of the proletariat." And how does one recognize the socially friendly? The presence of tatoos on their bodies, for one thing, the author astutely observes.
The first camp that was set up was in the Solovetsky Islands during the era of the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20s and was not particulary egregious by prison standards of the time. The theme was set by the slogan on the Herring Gate which stated the theme, "For the Workers and Peasants!", a context in which one not atypical prisoner arrived garbed in a tuxedo. Later, in the days of the Great Purge and thereafter, privileged seeming arrivals would be jeeringly greeted at the Kolyma by the socially friendly with comments like "Welcome to Vorkuta, Fascist Gentlemen!" At this point, however, the definition of socially privileged was dramatically lowered to include "kulaks" or landed peasants; the campaign of the Russian state against whom was an unmitigated moral and economic disaster.
The Gulag system in its maturity was set up under the leadership one Neftely Frenkel, a former Turkish businessman who oversaw the creation of a large network or "archipelago" of camps all over the Soviet Union, reaching to the remotest parts of Eastern Siberia. He supervised this vast fiefdom from his personal railroad car in which he traveled where he willed in the manner of a robber baron.
Solshenitsyn describes the pathological paronoia that set in during the era of the Great Purge and the arbitrary predations of Stalin's petty "Chekist" hacks, whose own subsequent demise provides some sweet irony to the author. All this actually weakened Russia, from the destruction of its officer corps to the inefficient and shoddy projects completed by convict labor, such as the Belamor Canal which Stalin forced to be built by hand and which turned out to be too shallow. Given the meagre rations that were based on Frenkel's concept of the "differentiated ration pot" which meant that, in theory, food was given out on the basis of labor expended, but in reality meant the socially friendly and others with relative privileges got more, survival meant getting out of "general assignment" into some special assignment outside of working in the main labor project. This the author managed to do by getting a job in camp administration based on his education. Otherwise he would have faced the prospect, leaving execution aside, of slow starvation after he fell out as one of the camp's "last leggers." Although executions are described in these camps, including en masse, they were not death camps on the Nazi model, as Stalin's regime, for the most part, didn't wait to ship people off it had already marked for death before killing them.
While the author disparges Marxism and atheism, he gives some grudging respect to Bolshevik and revolutionary traditions when linked with the struggles of the common folk and Russian patriotism. Thus we have the story of the Cossack who polevaulted over the camp walls to join the front line fight against the German invaders and Volume 2 concludes with the story of the Red Army veteran in 1945 who walks off a job cleaning up war rubble in protest of not having any shoes. When confronted by a cop with a threat of arrest and deportation to camp, he responds angrily that he is veteran of the war and a Bolshevik, willing to make further great sacrifices, but insists on at least having shoes. The cop backs off. Thus the theme is returned to that opened the work when the author, indignantly informs those arresting him, for writing comments critical of Stalin in personal letters, of his status as a Red Army tanker. Then of course there was his angry implication in reponse to the students that heckled him at Harvard in the late 70s that those privileged socially hostile elements could perhaps use some corrective labor.
I am surprised that Solshentisyn has not emerged more as a public figure in post-Soviet Russia. It seems that he would have a lot to contribute. I encourage people to read this work. It fully deserves the awards and accolades it has achieved.
If It Sounds Too Good to be True, It Probably Is!.......2007-04-05
Gulag Archipelago is the award winning expose that shocked the world with its revelations about the true nature of life in the, "worker's paradise," a.k.a, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) The author, a once dedicated Communist himself, shows how millions of Soviet citizens were arrested, tortured into "confessing" various "crimes against the state" and imprisoned for long periods to satisfy Josef Stalin's paranoia concerning the threat posed by his "enemies" both real and imagined. His personal experience forms the basis for this saga, perhaps, the saddest of all time.
Solzhenitsyn takes the reader through the arrest and brutal interrogation process that broke the strongest of men. He then carries them with him in grossly overcrowded "Stolypin" prison rail cars and prison ships called "Black Maria's" into transit camps where prisoners were deprived of almost all the basic necessities of life. God help the attractive, female prisoner sentenced to ride in either!
At the transit camps prisoners are fed only "gruel" which often had to be eaten by hand as no eating utensils were provided. The strongest men ate well. The weak starved. A trip to the latrine was the highlight of ones day! Almost unbelievable is the fact, the worst was yet to come.
Life in the camps was unbearably hard. Prisoners performed back-breaking labor including digging canals and logging forests by hand in sub-zero temperatures wearing only summer weight clothing. Their "crimes:" One man got a tenner (i.e. a ten year prison sentence) for being the first to stop applauding after a Stalin speech. Others included being a Priest/Nun who refused to renounce his/her faith. A third was being female and telling a State Security Officer, "No!" A Soviet jailer said it best: "The punishment for doing absolutely nothing is ten years!"
Archipelago is the work that showed the world the difference between what Communism promised and what it actually delivered. It deserves recognition as one of the most effective pieces of social literature ever published and serves as a tribute to the millions who perished under the most repressive regime of all time. It should be required reading for everyone aspiring to a government leadership position because, God forbid, it CAN happen again! Five Stars!!
Harold Y. Grooms
Customer Reviews:
Honor By Deeds: A Confederate View.......2004-05-06
General Jo Shelby's Final Review is re-enacted yearly in Chatfield, a small town near Corsicana, about 45 miles southeast of Dallas, Texas, in April. Shelby was the commander of the Missouri Cavalry Division in what was known as the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War. His men distinguished themselves, often outnumbered, in battle after battle with the invading Yankees.
What is not well-known is that General Shelby did not surrender his forces to swear allegiance to the United States. Rather, he asked, "who will go with me to Mexico?" and led his men south of the Rio Grande, to uncertain futures in a post-Confederate world. These non-political soldiers were weary of the years of deprivation in the Lost Cause. This book chronicles some of their adventures, first told to the author as part of oral familial history of the Iron Brigade. The author met several people in Mexico City in the 1940s who claimed to have witnessed the Last Review.
Those who fought under "Old Jo" intended to maintain their sacred honor and "hatred of oppression" brought about by the invasion of the Southern states by what they felt was a mercenary army--and strangulation through blockade by an distained navy that deprived their countrymen, women, and children of basic necessities of life.
This is very interesting reading to any student of the American Civil War. General Shelby and his men finally found themselves caught in a political situation--the desire of Mexico to maintain peace with the United States after a victory over the French--commemorated yearly in the festivals of Cinco de Mayo (recalling May 5, 1862) across the southwestern U.S.
Their services refused, Shelby's last review was held in Mexico City, the Rebel Yell last heard amongst the ghosts of the Conquistadores, the Cavalry Guidon lowered, the battle flag having been buried somewhere on the border.
These last Confederates dispersed, many going to colonies of expatriates in foreign lands, from Brazil to China. Many could not reconcile to live under the domination of what they considered a foreign occupation, politely called Reconstruction.
A classic belonging in the library of any Civil War enthusiast.
Book Description
With the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the most controversial question in world politics fast became whether the United States stands within the order of international law or outside it. Does America still play by the rules it helped create? American Exceptionalism and Human Rights addresses this question as it applies to U.S. behavior in relation to international human rights. With essays by eleven leading experts in such fields as international relations and international law, it seeks to show and explain how America's approach to human rights differs from that of most other Western nations.
In his introduction, Michael Ignatieff identifies three main types of exceptionalism: exemptionalism (supporting treaties as long as Americans are exempt from them); double standards (criticizing "others for not heeding the findings of international human rights bodies, but ignoring what these bodies say of the United States); and legal isolationism (the tendency of American judges to ignore other jurisdictions). The contributors use Ignatieff's essay as a jumping-off point to discuss specific types of exceptionalism--America's approach to capital punishment and to free speech, for example--or to explore the social, cultural, and institutional roots of exceptionalism.
These essays--most of which appear in print here for the first time, and all of which have been revised or updated since being presented in a year-long lecture series on American exceptionalism at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government--are by Stanley Hoffmann, Paul Kahn, Harold Koh, Frank Michelman, Andrew Moravcsik, John Ruggie, Frederick Schauer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Carol Steiker, and Cass Sunstein.
Book Description
The rapid growth in our understanding of how stars form owes a lot to recent developments in techniques for carrying out infrared and millimeter-wave astronomy. Thus Star Formation and Techniques in mm-Wave Astronomy were natural joint themes for the Fifth EADN Predoctoral Astrophysics School held at the Technische Universität Berlin. The lecture courses by six world-class experts are aimed at postgraduate students and scientists with a non-specialist interest in the field. Topics include molecular clouds, T Tauri stars, OB stars, observation methods in infrared and mm astronomy, as well as high resolution techniques.
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