Starting to get that feeling in the first 26 pages. It’s great and have wanted to read it for a while now. But wondering what the take is here on it overall.
The line he literally wrote about the population size of Russia being unsuitable for socialism is like verbatim RW criticism used today and typically repeated when saying that it while it may work in small European counties it won’t here.
Need also to brush up on the Russian Revolution, having only read some of John Reed’s account.
gulag archipelago is a work of fiction with a clear political agenda, yes. we had to read excerpts in school. at some point i got halfway through maybe, but its just too damn long. anyway, it was a pretty effective anti-soviet propaganda piece, lots of people even in russia believe it as fact still. no actual historians worth their salt take it seriously though
The author's own ex-wife who helped him write it said it was a complete work of fiction. IIRC it's entirely just accounts from random people that Solzhenitsyn takes at face value as well as stuff he pulls out of his ass. He strikes me as a kindred spirit of Adrian Zenz, they share a similar approach.
I believe he was put in prison because he wrote a letter critical of Stalin and sympathetic to the Nazis (dude just loved fascists, especially Franco), though there is reasonable speculation that he did that with full knowledge of the consequences so he could avoid serving in the Red Army in WW2.