Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918, Kislovodsk, Tersk region, RSFSR - August 3, 2008, Moscow, Russia) was a Russian novelist and political dissident who lived and worked in the USSR, Switzerland, USA and Russian Federation. An outspoken critic of the USSR and communism, he is best-known for writing The Gulag Archipelago.

The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume book written between 1958 and 1968. Though the book is widely believed to be a rather reliable and authoritative account of the Gulag system by the uninformed, it is in fact has little credibility. Solzhenitsyn's own wife, Natalia, admitted that the book's contents are nothing more than mere folklore based on unreliable information, and that she was "perplexed" that the West had accepted The Gulag Archipelago as "the solemn, ultimate truth", saying its significance had been "overestimated and wrongly appraised". Pointing out that the book's subtitle is "An Experiment in Literary Investigation", she said that her husband did not regard the work as either historical or scientific research.

Khrushchev encouraged people like Solzhenitsyn to write books describing Stalin negatively. Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his book in the Soviet Union also because he hadn't come out as an anti-socialist and blatant reactionary. His other book, The Life of Ivan Denisovich, was seen by Khrushchev as helping to accelerate de-Stalinization even though it went a good deal further than other "thaw" literature. As Khrushchev privately put it, "If it had been written with less talent it would perhaps have been an erroneous thing [to publish it], but in its present form it has got to be beneficial." Suslov and other Politburo members had opposed its publication, and obviously history vindicated them. After Khrushchev was deposed, Solzhenitsyn fell out with the party, after which he was kicked out of the country. He also wrote another book which was basically a memoir whose main character was a self-insert living in a gulag, which is portrayed as just a regular prison, since he was describing his own experience. In comparison to Archipelago there is a vast difference.

The reason why Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag in the first place was for two reasons: making derogatory remarks about the conduct of the war by Stalin and planning an officers coup. He got treated rather well for such — in the gulag he got sick with pancreatic cancer and received successful medical treatment for it within the camp.

Reliability and bias

To quote Solzhenitsyn at Harvard by Ronald Berman:

Solzhenitsyn has no belief in what he called at Harvard "the way of western pluralistic democracy." People lived for centuries without democracy, he wrote in 1973, "and were not always worse off." Russia under authoritarian rule [i.e., Tsarism] "did not experience episodes of self-destruction like those of the 20th century, and for 10 centuries millions of our peasant forebears died feeling that their lives had not been too unbearable."

Roy Medvedev, no friend of the CPSU, noted that Solzhenitsyn "proposed founding an authoritarian, theocratic state in the USSR and transferring the whole Russian population to uninhabited territories in northeast Siberia, there to begin a new life without cities, big industries, railroads, automobiles, and democracy." He was a literal reactionary, condemning the modern world. He also argued that the US lost the Vietnam War because it didn't try hard enough, and was on top of this an anti-Semite. As far as The Gulag Archipelago goes, there are a number of articles that argue against it presenting the typical experience, one of which is Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De-Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia.