
The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/opinion/solzhenitsyn-soviet-union-putin.html
======
locacorten
Solzhenitsyn's writings gave hope to people, to their minds and souls. Like
Voice of America and other channels of information from outside the curtain.
But saying that they destroyed an empire is an overclaim.

In my opinion, no single factor destroyed the empire. However, if I were to
pick the most important one I'd say Gorbachev.

~~~
briandear
It was Reagan. The arms race bankrupted the Soviets. Gorbachev deserves credit
for acting rational in the face of Reagan’s pressure, pressure, to be
historically honest, was begun by Jimmy Carter (and dramatically expanded
under Reagan.)

The Americans destroyed the Soviet Empire, that’s just a fact. Gorbachev was
reacting, not acting. “Tear down this wall” — and that’s exactly what
happened.

~~~
yongjik
Carl Sagan was highly skeptical against the arms race theory. According to
him: The Star Wars plan was nothing more than a boondoggle based on
questionable technology, and the Soviet at that time correctly concluded that
if it ever worked they just needed to have more missiles. The whole story is
basically a retcon to explain why America wasted so much money on SDI that
never went anywhere.

~~~
kingofhdds
Soviet Union was trying very hard to keep up with the US military advances - I
know it for sure, because as an engineer my father was involved in such
efforts. And, by the way, "just" producing more missiles wasn't easy thing to
do also. So, Reagan's policy probably added a lot to Soviet troubles. I
suppose Sagan simply needed to be publicly skeptical, because he was in
different ideological trenches.

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nopriorarrests
Worth noting that his "Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Harvard Commencement Address"
will get him trump supporter and far-right labels easily. A couple of my
friends joked that this is a deplatforming material in 2018.

~~~
leoh
Having trouble understanding -- can you explain?

~~~
nopriorarrests
Well, you can read it here in full --
[https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenit...](https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm)

It's not that long actually. For example, here is Solzhenitsin about western
press (keep in mind, this is 1978):

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and
more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is,
however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries,
more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary.
And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is
it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a
state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how
long a time, and with what prerogatives?

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lake99
> and the satisfaction of being proved right in his predictions of disaster.

Any brief accounts of what his predictions were? I don't want to read The
Gulag Archipelago. Something I could read, watch or listen to in 30 minutes
would be ideal.

I have come across a few accounts of how the USSR collapsed. Some of them
mentioned Solzhenitsyn briefly. As I recall, the major factors were political
scheming and manipulation, followed by opposition of dissent, followed by
opening up of the press, which finally showed the citizens how bad they really
had it there. Gorbachev tried various measures to handle the situation, but
they all proved ineffective. That's the version I know.

Solzhenitsyn may have been a great writer. But as far as I know, his role in
the collapse of the USSR was minor. The end result would have followed pretty
much the same timeline.

This is the best short explanation I have come across:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqt3U48MFcY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqt3U48MFcY)

------
pseudolus
There's a great long form essay on Solzhenitsyn available on the Times
Literary Supplement website. It was the subject of an earlier discussion on
Hacker News [0].

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622644)

------
turc1656
Amusingly enough, The Gulag Archipelago was already the next book on my list
of books to read. Interesting coincidence that it's his 100th birthday. Or
maybe not. Maybe I've been running across his name this year for that exact
reason.

------
EdSharkey
I'm listening to the Gulag Archipelago vol. 2. It's read by Frederick
Davidson, who is perfect for the role. Definitely check it out the audiobook
from your local library if they carry it.

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otras
I posted this in another thread recently, but highly recommend the article _A
Tiny Village in Vermont Was the Perfect Spot to Hide Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn_
[0] to learn more about his life in Vermont.

[0]: [https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/summer/statement/tiny-
vi...](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/summer/statement/tiny-village-in-
vermont-was-the-perfect-spot-hide-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn)

------
fujimotos
I've recently read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".

IMHO, this novel does a very good job at capturing one key aspect of gulag; It
was not just all about "oppressor vs oppressed", but was a complex society
with a particular set of rules.

If you likes the works of Primo Levi, I'd highly recommend you to take a copy.

------
mindcrash
If you are currently ideologically flirting with Marxism I can heartly
recommend reading his masterpiece the Gulag Archipelago to know how Marxism
will work out in practice.

I can also guarantee that after reading you are done believing Marxism will
bring any good to civilization forever.

And also don't be surprised when you get some very heavy emotional responses
while reading. Yes -- what he went through was _that_ bad.

------
usermac
I never knew this timeline. Fascinating and horrific.

------
aestetix
I'm currently halfway through Volume 1 of the Gulag Archipelago. I find most
criticism of it-- the ones that say it is too literary-- clearly have not
actually read it, because many of his assertions reference specific names,
events and documents that can be verified.

In any case, I very much recommend it to anyone flirting with socialism or
communism, because it is a very sobering account of things that can go wrong,
most of which most of us cannot begin to imagine.

------
EdwardDiego
Posting Gulag Archipelago to /r/communism when people ask for suggested
readings on communism is a great way to get banned from that subreddit.

~~~
anoncake
No community likes trolls.

~~~
EdwardDiego
I'd argue that the Gulag Archipelago is an excellent reflection of applied
Communism.

------
gtt
From the title I though it ought to be about Karl Marx.

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squozzer
He probably captured best the malaise and hypocrisy of the USSR.

My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and not
communism itself, destroyed the USSR.

In particular, success - especially political or military success, became more
dangerous to achieve than failure.

Not even Georgy Zhukov was spared a certain level of wrath, which was probably
more of a warning to potential coup plotters than anything to do with Zhukov
himself.

~~~
jerf
"My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and
not communism itself, destroyed the USSR."

There's a sense in which that is true. The problem is, "the conditions imposed
in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not
a political system that works for human beings as they are. So the imposition
of massive amount of force, and the subsequent second- and third- and so-on-
order effects that come with that might as well be accounted as part of
Communism, because otherwise people don't conform to Communism.

I can imagine hypothetical intelligent species for which Communism might work
fairly well, based on looking at social structures seen on Earth and
extrapolating to what they may look like if the species in question were
human-level intelligent. But it would be something like bees or ants, writ
large. Trying to impose a bee or ant system on humans is utterly doomed to
failure. That's not a value judgment. Maybe it's a terrible thing. It's just a
true statement; humans, fundamentally, aren't bees or ants. You need that
aspect of direct relationship for this to be stable.

Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and
you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly
related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is
just doomed, evolutionarily. It's pretty easy to see why it would fail if you
try to imagine some animal species working that way; even if you somehow
imposed that system onto a population of bacteria or something, I absolutely
guarantee it would evolve away in a handful of generations. It's beyond
unstable into the actively self-sabotaging. Adding lots of human intelligence
doesn't really change that characteristic of communism.

(Now, when it gets _really_ scary is when people start deciding they just need
to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather
than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest
evils of our time.)

~~~
carlob
You make all these sweeping claims, yet in Norway 37% of the population works
in the public sector (compare with around 50% in Belarus and China), taxes are
very high, and inequality is very low according to most measures.

Another point a Trotskyst might make is that Communism can only succeed if
adopted all over the world. I don't think that a country like Cuba makes for a
good data point on anything except embargoes.

~~~
SaintGhurka
"I don't think that a country like Cuba makes for a good data point on
anything except embargoes."

Neither is Norway a good data point from which we can extrapolate the
viability of Communism. Norway has a population of 5.5 million - smaller than
the San Francisco Bay Area. It's also swimming in oil money.

It's probably easier to motivate people to work for the benefit of the whole
community if the community is defined as a small number of people with whom
you share a culture and background and live close to you.

Maybe that's why communism works occasionally on communes, but anything more
expansive requires the brutal application of force to keep people in line.

~~~
skookumchuck
The voluntary ones implode within a year or two as the participants get fed up
and leave.

