What are your thoughts and feelings on this book?

It is. His own wife said it was all made up, called it "campfire tales" and rough outlines for pulp he was going to write until he realized he could sell it to reactionaries as true stories because he had been in a gulag himself, which would give them an air of legitimacy. Like so many other right-wing fearmongers, he was just a conman making a fast buck off of gullible idiots.

Source?

At best, his book is completely undocumented hear-say, and that's not getting into his wife's testimony that he made the whole fucking thing up.

Read the wikipedia article, for god's sake. You don't even have to dig deep to find out how much of a sham that book is.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

Fucking kek and to think I've had Holla Forumstards explicitly tell me to read this book to get an "idea of what I am supporting"

mobile.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html
>In 1974, when Mr. Solzhenitsyn was living in exile in the United States and preparing to publish The Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet authorities persuaded Miss Reshetovskaya to intervene with her former husband to try to get him to stop publication.
Read this article, and it becomes obvious that she did this to spite Solzhenitsyn after their divorce, she was asked to do so by the Soviet authorities (and if you think they're reliable in this matter then you're a fucking imbecile), and that even if she was correct, the occasional exaggeration =/= 'the entire book is made of lies,' which is essentially what most posters in this thread are claiming.
I'm not surprised that forty year old propaganda is the best that Holla Forumsyps can offer when political systems based on their ideology are questioned for their human rights abuses. I see little difference between you and the pathetic neo-nazis on Holla Forums who joke about or deny the Holocaust.

>The Associated Press cited a 2002 interview with the newspaper Argumenti i Fakti in which she said: It's possible that it may seem strange and even improper to someone, but, alas, I love him right up to this moment. And the thought never leaves me – will I really never see him again?
That doesn't sound like someone who's just trying to sabotage her husband out of spite.

Selective quoting. Her memoirs were written shortly after the divorce, while the interview/circumstances you're referring to took place years later.

People do things to spite and hurt even those they love deeply if they feel sufficiently betrayed. You would understand this if you weren't autistic.

Even in the book its made clear It is not eye witness account of the author, but instead come from essentially unverifiable second hand sources.

Everyone in highschool is taught to ask who it is that wrote this, where their circumstances were and if it is a primary or secondary source.

I know, it's inconceivable that a hard-right Tsarist and Nazi sympathizer would make shit up about the Soviet Union and publish it as fact. His bitch wife must have been lying in her own memoirs and only put it in to personally hurt Solzhenitsyn. I bet she modified those internal documents personally to make it look like there were only ever around 2 million people in gulag at the most at any one point in time rather than 100 million just to make him look bad..

Lies upon lies.

You think you've proven something with this post, but just so you know, you haven't.

Again, lies upon lies. Your changes didn't make your post any less terrible.

I could have accused you of exactly the same thing in your post since you selectively quoted only a single paragraph. That, or I just assumed you were quoting what you regarded as relevant instead of assuming you were consciously trying to mislead me.

My point is that you didn't demonstrate anything beyond imagining what her motives were. Your imaginings of her feelings may or may not have really existed at the time, and they certainly didn't seem to exist in the end.

I can dispense moth-eaten truisms about love as well, but that doesn't make me a master of human understanding. Such pretensions some people have.

It's the truth my dude.

He was a Tsarist and Nazi sympathizer who published completely unverified secondhand accounts of the gulag and made absurd and verifiably untrue statements like that there were 100 million people in gulag.

The people in the gulag usually deserved it anyway.

Here is sample

I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your post.

Unfunny.

And? The Soviet authorities didn't want him writing a hit piece on them that could be used as propaganda by reaction (you know, like it was)

If you're suggesting she was somehow being forced to do it, why didn't she recant after the fall of the USSR?

And? Where does that demonstrate your point that she was trying to "spite and hurt" him because she felt betrayed? From the description, it seems like she was reluctant to intervene which suggests she did still feel positively toward him at the time.

Because your first and third points were embarrassingly idiotic. You quote a single paragraph, I quote three, but I'm the one selectively quoting? What a stupid accusation. Then you offer a truism as profundity. Ludicrous.

One necrology press article who doesn't mention its sources is a bit short when it comes to historical topics.

amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j2un8/is_solzhenitsyn_considered_a_reliable_source/

This is your brain on liberal ideology.

Author was a great liar. Btw it is just a fiction not some scientific work on history based on documents

Not relevant to this discussion but i want to say it.

In your link theres a link to this

reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gmjjb/do_we_have_any_reliable_economic_data_on_the/ctzqzww/

which asks about the veracity of soviet econ stats.

Just want to say, if the stats they were using internally were fake, then it would explain why the soviet economy was less than awesome and therefore the sub par performance would not discredit planned economics.

I take every chance I get to shit on the soviet union but you are beyond delusional.

"the key point is that the Soviet leadership did not maintain a set of parallel 'secret books'. That is, with a few exceptions, the Soviets tended to omit economic set-backs from their published figures, rather than simply falsifying them.

This means that the raw data that we have available today is the same data used by Soviet planners. It's far from perfect but it's an important starting point."

I only mention it as a rhetorical point.

There are more people in American prisons than there were in gulags at the height of the archipelago.

The fact he lived to publish it is a bigger indictment of the Gulag system than anything within it's pages could be.

To be fair, this guy served in the Red Army, marched into East Prussia, got arrested because he didn't kiss Stalin's ass, goes to the Gulags and then relocated to Kazakhstan. I'd be a little pissed off too.

There are also more people in the world now too if you didn't notice…

I'm pretty sure it actually is still higher as a % of total population