The Gulag Archipelago

this is pretty much russian humor

HOW CAN DRUMPFTARDS EVER RECOVER FROM THIS?

He was sent to Siberia in a work camp. It was a penal colony.

"Yet Another Red Scare Book, vol. 75"

You don't realize how retarded you look to people who were or whos parents were citizens in the soviet union

> citizens in the soviet union
*Balts and Hohols

holy... i want more

I agree, it is alongside being extremely moving in many other ways, extremely funny. Solzenytsin is unironically the funniest author I ever read, without even trying to be funny half the time.

i've read it twice. it's really fucking bleak - almost disturbing how nonchalantly he describes the most horrific scenes.
definitely worth reading for its historical merit, or if you just want to be reminded how evil people can be.

Is it comparable to Ce questo un huomo or whatever thats called, by Primo Levi? I liked that one, read it three times

Did you read abridged without the real nice Orthodox existentialism? Because he really doesn't focus only on the bad things.

You mean Se questo è un uomo. It's hard to compare the two. Levi's book is ~250 pages (IIRC, it's been a while), Solzhenitsyn's trilogy clocks in at about 1800. The scope is wildly different. And as another user said, Alexander Isayevitch is genuinely hilarious at times. Levi isn't, or not as often.
They do share the urge to document a horrific system, lest we forget. Try reading a chapter -- any chapter, really -- and see whether you like it.

I will do that sir, thank you

That's allright my good sir, tally ho! I say, when does the narwhal bacon?

It was a frightening look into the realities of communism.

I liked it and im a marxist

Slozhenitsyn doesn't really turn it ideological, he's obviously very critical of the totalitarian regime he suffered under but I don't remember him ever really condemning socialism as an idea. As I recall he was actually quite critical of the excesses of western capitalism.

It's good but it's not a great work. His great work is In The First Circle

It's actually funny how quickly he was dropped by the Western liberal intelligentsia after he criticized it in his speech at Harvard. He basically called them out that their support for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War was partially responsible for all the deaths after the conquest of South Vietnam, and they weren't conforted by it.

He was an ultramonarchist and wanted to reestablish the tsarist totalitarian regime, which is why he was against both socialism and capitalism.

You are the only one looking retarded here.

The first of Solzhenitsyn's books to be allowed publication in the soviet union was one about the gulags. This issue isn't factually controversial in the slightest. Fucking retards.

He was a Plato kind of guy.

He also loved Putin in his last years after returning to Russia. Eddie Limonov wrote some funny stuff about what a loser Solzhenitsyn was after leaving the USA, even if it was barely accurate.

The tsarist government was never totalitarian because the state apparatus was not even close to the one you would have to have for one.
It didn't actually predate the birth of totalitarian regimes.

Spring break! Hahahhahaha!

Tsars were totalitarian?

give him some credit. he did the best he could in a nation where official lying wasn't just endemic, it was party policy.

"Even when Soviet factories produced something useful or necessary, central planning bunged it up. The government in Moscow would send commands called gross-output targets to all manufacturing facilities. The gross-output target told the factory manager what to make and how much of it. Anyone who has dealt with bureaucrats who are accountable only to other bureaucrats knows what happened next.

The trouble wasn’t that the factory managers disobeyed orders. The trouble was that they obeyed them precisely. If a shoe factory was told to produce 1,000 shoes, it produced 1,000 baby shoes, because these were the cheapest and easiest to make. If it was told to produce 1,000 men’s shoes, it made them all one size. If it was told to produce 1,000 shoes in a variety for men, women, and children, it produced 998 baby shoes, one pump, and a wing tip. If it was told to produce 3,000 pounds of shoes, it produced one enormous pair of concrete sneakers.

The factory managers weren’t doing this because they were evil or stupid. They did it because their livelihoods, their futures, and sometimes their necks were at stake. They didn’t have to satisfy customers. They didn’t have to please stockholders. What they had to do was meet the gross-output target, no matter what."
- P.J.O'Rourke, "Eat The Rich"

"Red Scare" was when the American government tried to make the Russians look like a credible threat. Solzhenitsyn makes them look like the ineffective clowns they really were.

>If it was told to produce 3,000 pounds of shoes, it produced one enormous pair of concrete sneakers.

For sale: 1,000 baby shoes, never worn.

Don't you mean six million, goy? You're not an antisemite are you?

Would be funnier if so many westerners didn't believe it as fact

Why make posts like this? What do you gain?

It's called subversion kiddo, I am just spreading the redpill for the coming racewar

So, would I be missing out on a lot if I read the abridged edition? Or does the abridged edition faithfully capture the gulag experience?

fucking kek

Isn't the gulag in siberia?

Is there a different color of Cheeto besides orange?

The keyword is archipelago. The gulag was a widespread system of camps that spread across the country, some in Siberia, most not.

Ex commie country citizen here.
I have absolutely no reason to disbelieve it.

you do know who P.J.O'Rourke is, don't you?

Unless you're like 100 years old your experience is irrelevant

When someone tells me they're a communist I immediately lose a bit of respect for them.

I do not see how anyone can justify totalitarianism for equality.

When you tell me that totalitarianism is not real communism I must ask how you will preserve your revolution without it? Fuck these people who think they can decide for the rest of us because they believe right.

Why are you still a marxist?

There are 100 year old people who I know who tell stories whose experience is then not irrelevant and comminism hasn't really ended since the power structures stayed in power.

ABRIDGED
B
R
I

might makes right

Tbf most people I've met who are communists are just people who haven't achieved as much as they hoped to and want something/someone to blame.

Slavic people don't live to 100, shut up

On the contrary I get embarrassed when I hear people say things like this. Just the fact that there are people prancing around who take pride in their judgments and don't know that the vast majority of liberal history is fabrication.

Read the last chapter here 'Freedom in a Complex Society': inctpped.ie.ufrj.br/spiderweb/pdf_4/Great_Transformation.pdf

It's very shocking for people who think the world is obvious when they find out that they've been lied to. Usually they automatically reject anything that disagrees with how they see the world. Make note of this when you read.

Read Szymanski's Is the Red Flag Flying, and Human Rights in the Soviet Union to understand that the image presented to you about red totalitarianism is fiction. Also read Graeber's Debt since you're at an extremely low level of political consciousness. If you want to understand the relationship between states, classes and repression read Lenin's The State and Revolution.

None of this means you have to be a communist but at least don't be a stupid anti-communist.

>Who is everybody?

commies always playing the victim

Seeing as no one is playing the victim I'm going to have to ask what you're talking about.

dont play dumb now you

Please explain a little more how the Soviet Union wasn't a totalitarian regime.

You sound like the anti Yuri Bezmetov, his views but the diametric opposite

Sides: gone.

>What is projecting?

That sounds like replacing one form of propaganda for another.
Of course communist propaganda paints communism in a positive light.

*twelve million

What you linked refers not to revolutionary Marxism, but to a gradual movement away from the free market and towards a more centrally planned system. I do not dispute the necessity of this. If you had read my post (which was admittedly hyperbolic and a bit vitriolic, but hey, this is Veeky Forums, that's the lingo) you would know that my issue is with the means of revolution, and the human cost thereof.

Try to be less of a condescending prick in future.

I get embarrassed when I read stuff like this. A movement predicated upon historical trends towards the Marxist historical endpoint should be more cognizant of history.

SAY IT WITH ME

MADAM

>Marx’s dark prophecy came no closer to being realized than Ricardo’s. In the last third of the nineteenth century, wages finally began to increase: the improvement in the purchasing power of workers spread everywhere, and this changed the situation radically, even if extreme inequalities persisted and in some respects continued to increase until World War I. The communist revolution did indeed take place, but in the most backward country in Europe, Russia, where the Industrial Revolution had scarcely begun, whereas the most advanced European countries explored other, social democratic avenues—fortunately for their citizens. Like his predecessors, Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing productivity, which is a force that can to some extent serve as a counterweight to the process of accumulation and concentration of private capital. >He no doubt lacked the statistical data needed to refine his predictions. He probably suffered as well from having decided on his conclusions in 1848, before embarking on the research needed to justify them. Marx evidently wrote in great political fervor, which at times led him to issue hasty pronouncements from which it was difficult to escape. That is why economic theory needs to be rooted in historical sources that are as complete as possible, and in this respect Marx did not exploit all the possibilities available to him.8 What is more, he devoted little thought to the question of how a society in which private capital had been totally abolished would be organized politically and economically—a complex issue if ever there was one, as shown by the tragic totalitarian experiments undertaken in states where private capital was abolished.

-Piketty

Marxists BTFO

Source on that writing please.

>
>You overdid it with your irony and your post became a parody of itself. >Feelsbadman.

You overdid it with your irony and your post became a parody of itself. Feelsbadman.

>How accurate is it?

It's fucking ridiculous and over the toppest of tops, only read nowadays to get a feeling of the hell that was the gulag.

Zemskov is the one you're looking for if you want accuracy.

You overdid it with your post and your irony became a parody of your man. Feels,Batman.

>muh anecdotes

Ideally under a communist government, counterrevolutionary thought should only preclude you from serving in government.

The problem with the USSR under Stalin, and eventually in the 80s, was that it failed to bring much of a benefit to the people it supported. Stalin's response to his government's failure was to use extreme brutality to scare people into submission.

>see someone misinterpeting what communism is about because of how historical leftist movements devolved in authoritarianism
>someone replies
>it's a fucking apologist sourcing "human rights in the ussr"

I do not want to live in a world where holding power requires you to hold a certain ideology.

In what world can you consider this in any way good?

Lol
Grow up

You are the one who needs to grow up my one party system loving friend.
Maybe you can go to live in China.

Nonsense. Jeremy Corbyn is the fucking head of the British labour party. You can hold power, it just doesn't do you any good unless you're in the majority.

But hey, that's democracy.

If a communist government includes people actively trying to sabotage state efforts, lots of people will suffer.

If a communist government contains only communistic ideologues it may also end up making people suffer. Are you seriously arguing against the existence of opposition in government?

If you have only one party and idealogy that is allowed to hold power, then by nature the party makes the decision as to which idealogies can hold power, and who is allowed to be a part of the communistic government.

Under this logic the government can arbitrarily create an in group of people and leave power entirely impenetrable to everyone else. In what way will this not lead to the re-establishment of class?

Of course not, but a socialist government needs to be socialist. The US does this too. If a president is elected who desires to abolish the constitution, the US military has the legal right to depose him.

Certain ideals must be preserved.

The mass line and democratic elections prevent this. The problem with the USSR was that regular people were hugely alienated not only from their production, but also from their government.

I understand what you're saying in that you argue that the central ethos of the state should be protected, and that any state/regime will do so. However in this scenario the military exists such that it can check the power of the state. Do you propose a system of checks and balances to the power of a communist government? I would agree with this, but it may endanger the revolution every bit as much entirely restricted government.

I'd be very interested in reading some more about how a democratic communist government might be structured to sustain-ably exist with the checks and balances to prevent the aforementioned all controlling in group issue.

This is a pattern that is seen in many socialist revolutions, they wreck the economy and end up ruining the lives of the people they wanted to help.

Military juntas and the like at least have the virtue of often managing to preserve the interests of the people that support them. (Church, industrialist etc.)

Half of those weren't even communist texts.

>Being this much of a brainlet.

Pay attention to his multifaceted analysis of the concept of freedom. It bears on your idea of totalitarianism, he says rightly that from the perspective of capital increasing freedom in society is taken to be a reduction in freedom because it's predicated on the restriction of free enterprises caprice.

This is at the core of the totalitarian image, when free enterprise feels restricted it begins to equate its situation with even slavery and the fabrications begin. It's actually absolutely neurotic and the fact that people interpret it as sincere is quite sad.

how can white bois even compete?

This is funny because Piketty has admitted to never having read Marx.

You've been lied to. Aren't you interested to know how and why?

>thinking you can publicly advocate communism and not have cointelbro in your anus
>have to be a christian to be president

If you think something is bad compare it objectively to your current situation and you'll realize that first of all it's not very different and second of all that you actually don't care.

I don't dispute this. I essentially agree with what you posted. Increased market control to remove poverty with iron clad human rights and other essential freedoms. Fine, this is probably the right path.

I have been arguing primarily against the means of violent revolution this entire time, and you have been consistently trying to accuse me of being stupid because I am opposed to the essential tenets of market regulation and wealth distribution. I am not, and these things I do think can be centralised without a loss of liberty.

My argument is, and always has been that the violent means of revolution will inevitably undermine the goals of said revolution, at least when it comes to communism.

That a move to a more centrally planned system was not desirable I never said.

Well @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president!

Ooga booga if if if uhh uhh ahh ahh if if if

Okie doke!