Comment by RedCondor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RedCondor | Hacker News Reader

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Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system:

>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.)

> Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore,"

... 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?

Whatever ranking you assign to her, she has less reason to lie than an antisemitic exile getting paid to lie by the American propaganda establishment.

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.

It's not about her. Mid-1970s were the golden days of the KGB. All communication in and out of the USSR was under total KGB control. All foreigners in the USSR and the people they were in contact with were monitored around the clock. You couldn't get something as basic as a copy of the New York Times in the USSR nor send a personal letter out of the USSR without a government censor going over it with a sharpie blanking out every unsuitable word. If you stepped out of the line and did or said something that the KGB didn't approve of, then there was a scale of things that happened to you. The mildest form was social ostracism. Since there was no private enterprise in the USSR, all jobs in the USSR were government jobs. You were kicked to the lowest ranks, to jobs like street sweeper that barely provided sustenance. Since there was no private property either, your apartment was taken from you and you had to move in with your relatives (if you had any) or survive in a tiny damp room of a communal apartment, sharing kitchen and bathroom with total strangers. If you had kids, their lives were ruined too: couldn't get into good schools, career prospects were limited, and so forth. On the far end of the scale, people who even then kept annoying the KGB like many dissidents did, were locked up in mental hospitals and pumped full of drugs until they became vegetables or imprisoned in forced labor camps. The last forced labor camp was closed only in 1987 during Perestroika under Gorbachev's attempts to reform the rotten country.

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.

The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.

It's more than you've got.

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