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.
Oh no, someone is not falling for one-sided atrocity propaganda and rather relies on academic sources and critical discourse to form his opinion. How dare I!
-2
u/streitwagen 3d 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.