Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn

You're the one that made the argument, don't attempt to flip the burden of proof

We don't do "moral superiority". Marxism is not "moral". It is correct.

You do realize the book is a fiction?

What part of "pet of Khrushchev" confuses you? It was only through Khrushchev (whose authority was primarily based on bashing Stalin and removing his political opponents by calling them Stalinists) that Solzhenitsyn was able to publish his "works". Once Khrushchev got kicked out, nobody would print Solzhenitsyn's bullshit - which is how he defected to the West.

In absolute numbers. IIRC relative numbers exceeded gulag peak some time during the 90/00s.

Oh wait that didn't happen.

You don't even know what the fuck you are talking about.

He acknowledged that the famine wasn't a genocide targeted at Ukrainians but still claimed it was orchestrated by the Soviet government. It was Robert Conquest who said the famine wasn't intentional while never referring to it as a genocide.

Seems pretty real for a book of fiction. Have you read it or are you just spouting what you read in marxists.org? Also
I don't know but generally speaking one should take this with a pinch of salt especially if the name of the provider of information happens to be ideologically driven. I could direct you to a website named solzhenitzyn-was-right.com and you would be equally suspicious

The gulag archipelago is well known to be absolute bollocks: based on rumour, myths and Aleksandr actually making shit up. Legit he claims to be places he was documented as never being (and if the soviets did one thing, it was keep records of who was in the gulags and where they where). Also, his own wife said most of it was bullshit.

If you want to read about the abuses of the Stalin regime, read Thomas Snyder: Bloodlands is good shit.

Also question for the hisanons, what the % morality rate for US inmates during the same period? I looked into it and it was like 3% in the gulags.

I thought everyone knew this, Solzhenitzyn's first books were published under Khruschev and Khruschev even plugged "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in order to "prove" how evil Stalin was.

Solz was also a notable liar, plagiarist, and a fascist as well: northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

This pretty much

Bloodlands is an absolute fraud, Snyder lies, mistranslates and misrepresents events all throughout his book.

If he was writing about American history he would his reputation would have been in absolute ruins after the absolute BTFO he got from Furr. I'm quite serious about this, he would never be allowed to publish again, historians who are actually critical of the Western order have to be ten times better and factually precise than those who just go with the flow. Hell, even if you write a book about LBJ that says nothing new or controversial, if your caught making shit up or not sourcing claims by the legions of autistic historians and biographers out there then you'd get torn to shreds.

libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=4F13589002A3DFA4B0139B332FEF54AD

The author was a Trotskyist and critical of Stalin; in that article he's similarly critical of Solzhenitsyn's attempts to conflate Marxism in general with the Stalinist counterrevolution - because, believe it or not, not all communists are Marxist-Leninists. Generally speaking one should at least look at a source before acting like they understand the first fucking thing about it, no?

Strong rebuttal

I did in fact read it, it just so happens that the name of the website doesn't inspire much credibility, rather suspicion.

So you base a source not on its content, but the name of the URL?..

Why do I have the feeling the guy ain't here in good faith

Not fully no but you do see why one would be sceptical do you not?

I would if Marxist.org was a stalinist website: Hint, it isn't.

I too wonder about this, I mean obviously the book is real. So how would one try to explain why their still communist to someone else?

Why is this obvious?
After Napoleon plunged Europe into war, how can anyone possibly still advocate liberal democracy?

How can you be so sure though? Everyone has an agenda

...

I agree, just like Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn.

This is how I know that you didn't actually come here in good faith as another user pointed out. You make a thread about Solzhenitsyn, who was one of the most extreme anti-communists to ever live–who even went so far as to claim on several occasions that between 60-100 million people died in the USSR hint:this not only has no proof but it is actually an impossibility and then get miffed about having to read an article from Marxists.org from anti-Stalinist author.

Honestly, if the user had recommended you Grover Furr or someone similar it would be a fair counter-balance but in fact that user is more than meeting you half way and you won't even engage with them.

Marxists.org is a reliable source, all it does is host works related to Marxism on it including the work of authors directly opposed to Mandel. Would you find the source suspect if someone linked you to the work of Thomas Hobbes on the site? There are many non-Marxist writers whose works are reproduced on that website…

Well, for one can you really claim that every source he has here is some made up russian dood in bumfuck russia? A lot of the responses I've gotten here come from what I presume to be anons that haven't read the book yet and simply disregard the literature as fake due to the opinions of others. Much like Holla Forums will deny anything holocaust related

Well I figure it to be obvious because between Holla Forums and Holla Forums it just seems everybody says everything else is fake when in reality if you talk to historians the facts tend to be a bit different.
Well… that was a long time ago. Affects of such events have worn down in the modern era. Just saying how can someone explain to someone else how their still communist when communists commit atrocities too.

In their main hub area which catalogues the different schools/groups of Marxism they mention the purges in a obviously negative light under the Stalin little tab description, a Stalinist or whatever website would never do that.

If I had come here in bad faith I would just make a low energy troll thread like any Holla Forumstard would do. I'm just conflicted after reading this.

I, apart from this article, havent read anything on this website so I thats why Im skeptical coming in. I'd have to read more to process the information and form an opinion

It literally just catalogues writings from a ton of marxists, it has no spin its like an online library

Morally, Communism is wrong. You don't legally take something someone else worked for and disperse it. That's stealing. Stealing someone's life and time.

Multiple people here have told you that they have indeed read the book and are telling you point-blank that they disagree with the supposed facts presented. If you think everyone is just lying than stop being a coward and just say so, otherwise move on to your next point of contention if there even is one.

where? Judging from the responses I got in this thread I haven't seen any user claim what you say

Now that the Soviet archives have been opened the claims made by Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest and other hardline Cold War Sovietologists have failed to meet the evidentiary standards of modern historians. To put it simply, their claims are not documentable and that isn't "Marxist crazy-talk", that is a very mainstream position now, even among anti-communist authors. I actually have in my position an original copy of Robert Thurston's Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia: 1934-1941 and in it he thanks the US state department for sending him to Russia to do his research.

It's funny because I've seen people claim that Thurston was a communist sympathizer whose intention was to cover up Stalin's atrocities and so on. Where to begin? With the fact that only a far-rightist could sincerely believe the US state department would pay for a commie scholar to show that Stalin was a gud boi or the fact that anything that isn't written in that blatant sexy Cold War yellow journalistic style is immediately considered suspect by some? If you actually read the New School of Sovietologists they are actually very critical of Stalin and largely retain their bourgeois anti-communism in both outlook and in their historical methods of analysis.

The difference between them and the Solzhenitsyns is that when the archives were opened and the Soviet Union fell it turned out that the former were much closer to the truth. I got into communism in part because a lot of the things I had heard parroted in mainstream media were at odds with what I saw being done in respectable academic histories tbqh

*in my possession

Complaining about gulags and famines is the anti-communist equivalent of whining about how evil muh chattel slavery and muh colonialism were. It's a surface level critique for children and the mentally retarded. More seriously, it's an easy way of dismissing every single anti-capitalist ideology without having to engage with a single one of their ideas. This has obvious appeal in a time when liberals can't be fucked to skim On Liberty, much less learn about something they disagree with.
The difference between a successful, capitalist liberal democracy and a failed, authoritarian communist country is that in the first, freedom of thought is destroyed and truth is subverted and people don't realize it and in the second, freedom of thought is destroyed and truth is subverted and no one can deny that it's happening. I'll take the second. The more people like you I interact with online and irl, the more willing I am to throw bourgeois freedom into the trash.

How does your brain even work?

No, it has a spin. They are pretty openly anti-Stalinist and do not hesitate to reproduce quite a bit of slander there (just recently some user pointed me to the bit where they state - with no basis - that it was Stalin's decision to dissolve ComIntern).

It's just they hadn't been caught falsifying actual texts, that's all.

There are literally more Americans in prison today than there were people incarcerated at the height of the gulag system.

Wrong on both counts

You could just as easily change the wording a bit and suddenly you have an incisive and ironic derision of capitalism. The point of that being that acquiescing to empty platitudes begets naught but greater reliance on empty platitudes. You've said nothing.

For someone who is entering as a studious and open person, you've maintained a great number of essential assumptions about what it is you claim to have not engaged in prior, or so it seems.

As opposed to when you steal it and keep it for yourself. That's just hard work.

Using prisoners per 100k in the population, which is likely a better standard, the US is below the height of the gulag system, but might incarcerate people at higher rate than North Korea.

Bruh…

It's hard work to exploit the whole world; by his logic, I suppose that still counts as justification

...

wasn't he a trot

He was, as well as the author and a principle theorist of the idea of late capitalism in its economic sense

...

Someone post the PDF of 'The Sexual Jungle'

Capitalism.

America has gulags too user

THIS

Khrushchev was a mistake

...

He made it up. If the fact that none of his claims come even close to what we know about the history of the Soviet Union and that he was a Tzarist and Nazi sympathizer isn't enough, his own ex-wife said that the stories in Gulag Archipelago were "camp fire tales" and she was astonished the West took them so seriously.

This.

How indeed? For Marxism argues for productive superiority, as it offers a solution that would be beneficial for majority of people individually, and society as a whole. Morality comes from economic relation, so there is no sense arguing about moral superiority at all.

The fact that it's literally fiction does a lot to discredit it, methinks.

The current American prison rates are higher than the average rate of the Gulag system's entire lifespan. The latter's population varied wildly throughout the years.

This thing about morality being a spook is getting on my nerves.

He isn't exactly the most open-minded critic either. It's great that he uses primary sources, but he does the same things Conquest, Service and co. do in order to reinforce a narrative: carefully choose which sources to not present, and never doubt their veracity.

While we're here, have you heard of one Frank Dikötter? He has been writing for a while now but I only heard recently about him. He reached intelligentsia status with books about Red China's mortality. The interesting part is, he claims he got his material by touring villages accross the immense Chinese countryside (I can't imagine a better way of keeping your supposed sources hidden from anyone trying to verify them) and reading documents from the local party archives. God knows these propagandists love bloody anecdotes, but this guy wrote some very, very unlikely episodes. I have read it claimed that these archives had been recently opened by Beijing, and elsewhere it was claimed that he was one of the very very few people granted access. Oh, and the clincher: he's a professor in Hong Kong.

Not at all suspicious, right?

too obvious nigga

have a (you)

morally homosexuals should be executed, thiefs should have their hands cut off, people of other religions killed, women should wear burkas and stay at home and so on.
and if you dont agree with these morals you yourself are immoral and should be killed.

/islamypol/

Also it even has quite a lot of non and even anti-Marxist thinkers/philosophers/economists etc who are related to or referenced in the huge corpus of Marxist thought