Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot.
"Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
"Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
>Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex...
There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today.
>Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353
(Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
... in 1974, while living in the USSR at the prime of Andropov's KGB.
On a 0-10 scale, how much freedom do you think she had to form an opinion and express that to a foreign journalist?
If you like those horror stories check out the North Korean ones, they have oodles of stuff about people dying and reappearing, being shot out of cannons, eating human faeces, and whatever else the human imagination can come up with.
Unlike North Korea, I was born in the USSR and saw all that with my own eyes, and I personally know several dissidents who were imprisoned in the 1980s. To suggest that she had any freedom of speech, particularly to a foreign journalist, is deeply ignorant of the conditions at the time. People were scared to openly talk even with their relatives from the West. In 1974, a foreign journalist heard only what the KGB wanted them to hear.