{"id":6623,"date":"2018-03-31T11:19:55","date_gmt":"2018-03-31T11:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/?p=6623"},"modified":"2019-10-06T08:06:40","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T08:06:40","slug":"gulag-archipelago-exposing-the-anticommunist-fabrications-of-solzhenitsyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/articulos\/gulag-archipelago-exposing-the-anticommunist-fabrications-of-solzhenitsyn","title":{"rendered":"\u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d: Exposing the anticommunist fabrications of Solzhenitsyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nikos Mottas*<\/strong>.
\nOriginally published in\u00a0atexnos.gr.
\nTranslated from Greek.<\/p>\n

One of the most famous and celebrated works of\u00a0Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d, has been for a long time a kind of \u201choly bible\u201d for every anticommunist. Firstly published in 1973, it- supposedly- consists an analytical record of the conditions existed in the so-called \u201clabour camps\u201d of the Soviet Union. Within the framework of the slanderous anticommunist campaign, bourgeois historiography has extensively promoted Solzhenitsyn\u2019s work as a source of arguments about the so-called \u201cStalinist dictatorship\u201d and \u201ccommunist crimes\u201d in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

However, there is a fundamental problem in the work of the deeply reactionary Solzhenitsyn: Gulag Archipelago is a completely antiscientific book, based almost entirely in rumors, speculations, third party opinions as well as interpretations of opinions by Solzenitsyn himself! In other words, the reader of this book becomes \u201chostage\u201d of a novel type, unverifiable, recording to alleged events by Solzenitsyn and others who supposedly \u201csaw\u201d, \u201cheard\u201d or \u201clearned\u201d something.<\/p>\n

Even people who have nothing friendly to say about Stalin admit that Solzhenitsyn\u2019s work is nothing but fairy tales. Let\u2019s see what trotskyite historian and writer Vadim Z. Rogovin writes:\u00a0\u201cSolzhenitsyn\u2019s work, much like the more objective works of R. Medvedev, belong to the genre which the West calls \u201coral history,\u201d i.e., research which is based almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts of participants in the events being described. Moreover, using the circumstance that the memoirs from prisoners in Stalin\u2019s camps which had been given to him to read had never been published, Solzhenitsyn took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them\u201d\u00a0[1]. In fact, Solzenitsyn edited and cited, according to his own reactionary views, third parties\u2019 testimonials in which he added anticommunist fabrications thus creating the \u201cArchipelago\u201d fairy tale.<\/p>\n

Solzhenitsyn\u2019s first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya, seems to confirm the fact that \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d consists a fictional and completely non-scientific book. In her autobiography published in 1974 under the title \u201cSanya: My Life with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn\u201d, Reshetovskaya actually challenges the validity of what Solzenitsyn writes in \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d. According to Reshetovskaya, she was \u201cperplexed\u201d by the fact that the the book was accepted by the western (capitalist) world as \u201cthe solemn, ultimate truth\u201d, saying that the significance of his ex-husband\u2019s work had been \u201coverestimated and wrongly appraised\u201d. [2]. Furthermore, Reshetovskaya unveiled that Solzhenitsyn himself did not regard the book as \u201chistorical research, or scientific research, but it was rather a \u201ccamp folklore\u201d collection!<\/p>\n

More or less, Reshetovskaya actually says that \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d isn\u2019t a work that should be taken seriously or accepted as a valid source. The fact that Solzhenitsyn\u2019s book is full of lies and inaccuracies is something that can be confirmed by a comparison of the data presented in the \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d with the real numbers. There lies a significant problem for the credibility of the much celebrated \u201cnobelist\u201d and former Nazi collaborator Solzhenitsyn:\u00a0He presents fake numbers!<\/p>\n

The following chart, published at the official journal of the Union of American Historians, includes the overall statistical data for the custodial population in the USSR from\u00a01934\u00a0to\u00a01953, during a period of Joseph Stalin\u2019s leadership. Let\u2019s now see how the numbers, researched and checked by bourgeois scientists and published at the American Historical Review, refute Solzhenitsyn\u2019s anticommunist fabrications.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1st<\/sup>\u00a0:\u00a0Alexander Solzhenitsyn\u2019s argument about 60 million deaths (!) at the Soviet labour camps consists a product of his deeply anticommunist fantasy and profound lie.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
2st :\u00a0Solzhenitsyn\u2019s argument about 25 million detained people at the labour camps (\u201cgulags\u201d) in 1953 is a vulgar lie. In\u00a01953<\/b>, the overall number of the imprisoned people was not over\u00a02.5 million<\/b>.\u00a0Two million<\/b>\u00a0were criminal prisoners, convicted for crimes or ordinary criminal law.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
3rd:\u00a0In the peak of his anticommunist paranoia, Solzhenitsyn had claimed that the total number of victims during Stalin\u2019s period were\u2026 110 million people! If this ridiculous claim was correct then, normally, the Soviet Union\u2019s population during Stalin\u2019s leadership (1924-1953) should have been decreased significantly. However, statistical data about the USSR\u2019s population\u00a0prove exactly the opposite!<\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
On\u00a0January 1926<\/b>, the population of the Soviet Union was\u00a0148.6 million<\/b>\u00a0people. Fifteen years later, onJune 1941<\/b>\u00a0the population had been increased to 196.7 million. A decrease in USSR\u2019s population took place between\u00a01941<\/b>\u00a0and\u00a01946<\/b>\u00a0(170.5 million), which is explainable by the huge casualties of the country during the Second World War. After the War, during the period\u00a01946-1951<\/b>, the Soviet Union\u2019s population increased again, reaching\u00a0182.3 million<\/b>\u00a0people on\u00a0January 1951<\/b>\u00a0[4]. As for the annual birth rate in the USSR between\u00a01920<\/b>\u00a0and\u00a01950<\/b>, it is extremely insufficient in order to overlap (in terms of population) the number of the supposed \u201cmillion deaths\u201d of the Stalin era [5].<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Solzhenitsyn is proved to be a blatant liar.<\/b>\u00a0Nonetheless, if someone isn\u2019t convinced yet about the anticommunist fabrications of Solzenitsyn and the other \u201cstalinologists\u201d (e.g. Robert Conquest), there is more to come.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
After the victory of counterrevolution and the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, the bourgeois government of Boris Yeltsin decided to open the official soviet state archives, hoping that they would find evidence about the \u201cmillion victims of the stalinist era\u201d. But, what did the official soviet state archives reveal? They revealed that the actual number of those who were sentenced to death during the period of Stalin\u2019s leadership, from\u00a01923<\/b>\u00a0to\u00a01952<\/b>, is between\u00a0776,000<\/b>\u00a0and\u00a0786,000<\/b>\u00a0people [6]. The \u201cmillion victims of stalinism\u201d that Solzhenitsyn, Conquest and other pathetic anticommunists wrote about, consist propagandistic fairy tales.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Taking all the above into account, we can now ask a final question: How credible is an anticommunist fairy tale that is full of inaccuracies and monstrous lies? How serious must someone take the fabrications of Solzhenitsyn about Socialism, the USSR and Stalin? We leave on literature critics to evaluate \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d as a novel. But what is clear and beyond doubt is that Solzhenitsyn\u2019s book is a non-scientific, anticommunist fabrication full of lies and slanders. In a few words, nothing more or less than\u00a0the spiritual product of a nazi collaborator, a reactionary and a fascist.<\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
NOTES:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
[1]\u00a0Rogovin, Vadim.\u00a01937: Stalin\u2019s Year of Terror,\u00a0Mehring Books, 1998.<\/div>\n
[2]\u00a0Reshetovskaya, Natalya.\u00a0Sanya:\u00a0My Life With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Indianapolis\/New York, Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1974.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/06\/06\/world\/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html<\/a>.<\/div>\n
[3]\u00a0The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1017-1049.<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
[4]\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Andreev, E.M.,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>et al.<\/i><\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Naselenie Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1922-1991<\/i><\/span><\/em>. Moscow, Nauka, 1993.<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
[5]\u00a0<\/span><\/em>BT.Urlanis, Trends in fertility level in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the years of Soviet rule, 1980.<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
[6]\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Getty J.A, Rittersporn G, Zemskov V.\u00a0Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,\u00a0American Historical Review, 98:4, Oct. 1993.<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

*\u00a0Nikos Mottas<\/b>\u00a0is the Editor-in-Chief of \u2018In Defense of Communism\u2019.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Fuentes<\/strong><\/span>:<\/p>\n

\u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d: Exposing the anticommunist fabrications of Solzhenitsyn<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nikos Mottas*. Originally published in\u00a0atexnos.gr. Translated from Greek. One of the most famous and celebrated works of\u00a0Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d, has been for a long time a kind of \u201choly bible\u201d for every anticommunist. Firstly published in 1973, it- supposedly- consists an analytical record of the conditions existed in the so-called \u201clabour camps\u201d of … Continuar leyendo \u00ab\u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d: Exposing the anticommunist fabrications of Solzhenitsyn\u00bb<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[74,415,410,68,14,211],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6623"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autistici.org\/poderobrero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}