/edu/ - Education

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was openly anti-Semitic. There’s a reason why crypto anti-semites like Jordan Peterson call him "one the greatest minds to have ever lived". The man was a fascist who described the Nazis as a "liberating force of Europe" and wanted the monarchy back in Russia.

It’s obvious to anyone who reads The Gulag Archipelago and then reads modern historical research on the USSR that Solzhenitsyn’s narrative is simply wrong. You can also look at the research of a number of historians including J Arch Getty. Even the author's wife admitted that book was fiction.
Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies debunks inconsistencies within the book too.
>https://archive.org/details/ArchipelagoOfLies/mode/2up

While his book was an exaggeration and not a comprehensive survey of the gulag system, it nevertheless contains valuable accounts of life within gulags.

If you want a better critique of the soviet gulags and other abuses under the Soviet system, without falling to anti-communist propaganda, I recommend The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky.
>https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm

It pretty much rips apart the direction the USSR took in 1923-1936, and pretty much applies to China today as well. It does start off very praising of the initial 5 years after the revolution "What a surprise as those were Lenin and Trotsky's years of power", but from chapter 5 onward it goes into the failings of the Soviet Union by redeveloping inequality, social antagonisms, the rise of elitist power members and workers as a class, going from full sexual and bodily rights to forced motherhood and illegalized abortions, disenfranchisement of the youth, forced national culture, its cooperation with capitalist states, the reinstitution of a Tsarist military structure, and how the central bureaucracy became a new ruling class oppresing the people.

If you want my opinion, Stalin was severely misguided as a marxist, a totalitarian who committed reprehensible acts to justify ends that weren't determined with the common working people in mind.

>>2054
beautifully put

>>2054
>If you want my opinion, Stalin was severely misguided as a marxist, a totalitarian who committed reprehensible acts to justify ends that weren't determined with the common working people in mind.
why do you say that? if anything everything about his writing suggests that he was largely paranoid about reactionaries more than anything else.

>>2054
>why crypto anti-semites like Jordan Peterson
Okay, easy there Alex Jones. Got proof of that?

>reads modern historical research on the USSR
What exactly is that?

>>2056
The irony is that Stalin's paranoia about the fragility of the communist project is what made the project so fragile.

>>2309
Considering that it lasted more than 2x his life-time and was the second world superpower of its time… nope.

>>2316
Considering that people starved in the 30s and eventually it failed… yep.

>>2339
Considering natural and regular famines were eliminated (along with homelessness, illiteracy, etc.) and only came back after US neoliberal sabotage… nope.

The Soviet Union wasn't perfect, but if you compare it with most third world government then AND now, it was surprisingly functional and much better. Are people who criticize the Soviet Union all rich cunts from the third world and fist world middle upper class? Nigga, they're kidnapping our sisters and daughters and selling them, we're getting shot at on the regular, either by "clean cops", regular dirty cops, drug dealers, by petty thieves who are usually kids, by politicians who don't like "activists", we're getting run over by cars, dying from shitty food (because healthy food is expensive), overwork, stress, anxiety, lack of access to medicine and medics. All these things did not exist for the majority of the people in the soviet union for the vast majority of its existence.

Yeah maybe Stalin was a paranoid cunt and a totalitarian leader, but ffs, the quality of life was much much better than it is now for MOST OF US. Fucking privileged pricks, I swear.

>>2054
> a better critique of the soviet gulags and other abuses under the Soviet system, without falling to anti-communist propaganda, I recommend The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky.
LOL the same Trotsky who referred to Stalin as an uncultured beast… push off