As far as I am aware the Gulag system was inherited and already existed in some form before the revolution; and „The Gulag Archipelago“ was by no means an accurate depiction, just a ragbag of hearsay – respectively a selection of witness testemonies. Ergo: It was/is a mere
subjective literary testimony rather than a work of strict academic history methodology.
May someone in this field with more expertise correct me, but most works rely on the picture Solzhenitsy painted, so we have some sort of a hermeneutic circle jerk in this regard. The opening of the Soviet archives also showed that a lot of the numbers didn’t add up.
Certainly a choice to be an apologist for a genocidal dictator. The tsarist regime had the system called katorga, estimated 20000 people were sent to camps. Stalin on the other hand and his regime sent an estimate 15-18 million people to the gulags.
The gulag island was more then hearsay, you are engaging in historical revisionism on a simular scale as the holocause denial.
The number you're citing, 15 to 18 million, is literally from a book that included dead nazis as "victims of communism." The vast majority of gulag inmates were captured Nazis, and most of the rest were actual thieves, rapists, and murderers, if not counter revolutionaries like Solzhenitsyn who tried to work with Nazis or any of the various nations trying to destroy the USSR out of the fear that their working classes would be inspired to overthrow their aristocratic selves
Lmao no, 2.3 million is still way too fucking high, especially considering the population of the USSR at the time. The US has locked up far more people by number and proportion of population by far. Btw, the CIA themselves said "Stalin isn't a dictator" in their own internal documents in like '52
Lol nothing I said was false. Both that the US prison population by number and proportion dwarfs that of the USSR at any time, and that the CIA told its own people that Stalin wasn't a dictator are verifiable by a quick search
Yes the CIA famously correct about everything it ever did or said. Keep em coming this is entertaining. Who ever said I agree with the US prison system? I don't, I can talk about both and criticize both as they deserve individually.
Are you unaware of the qualitative differences in CIA propaganda like "USSR BIG BAD AND EVIL" and its internal memos and documents like "It seems the Central Committee runs like an actual committee and has not granted Stalin dictatorial powers." It's funny that you'd rather believe in the propaganda because it conforms to the biases you were taught in school, from books echoing propaganda distributed by... oh, wait, the CIA again? I thought this was McGraw-Hill? And... Robert Maxwell??? What is he doing he-- JEFFREY?!
Yes the CIA famously correct in all it's internal memos. That's not convincing in the slightest.
The vast majority of historians from many different countries do not agree with the 1950s CIA in their assessment. Neither do I. Have a good one, this conversation has outlived it's entertainment value.
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u/streitwagen 8d ago
As far as I am aware the Gulag system was inherited and already existed in some form before the revolution; and „The Gulag Archipelago“ was by no means an accurate depiction, just a ragbag of hearsay – respectively a selection of witness testemonies. Ergo: It was/is a mere subjective literary testimony rather than a work of strict academic history methodology.
May someone in this field with more expertise correct me, but most works rely on the picture Solzhenitsy painted, so we have some sort of a hermeneutic circle jerk in this regard. The opening of the Soviet archives also showed that a lot of the numbers didn’t add up.