Things I Learned in the Gulag

Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by anticodon on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @01:54AM (#17300585)

Parent comment was saying that these are the books to read if you want to know life under communist rule. I wanted to say that it's not true. This kind of literature describe only a small part of a life.

Not everybody was living in a prison camp in USSR, not even a majority of the population. This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.

Person who judges life in USSR by these kind of books will have a very skewed opinion.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by cwyers on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @02:17AM (#17300685)

> This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.

I mean, I'd agree that the material is a thin slice of the society, but come on. These are real personal narratives of people who lived through these experiences. The implication that "the West" is why these books exist, not just why we're able to read them, is absurd.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by jhbadger on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @09:55AM (#17303045)

There was real injustice, but it is important to also realize the vast usefulness these narratives had to the West (and in more recent times descriptions of the injustice of Saddam Hussein's Iraq were used in part to justify his overthrow). And conversely, the Soviets published many descriptions of the horrors of the Jim Crow US South for similar reasons.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by pvg on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @10:35AM (#17303445)

Soviets published many descriptions of the horrors of the Jim Crow US South for similar reasons.

Can you think of some that weren't, I dunno, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or Huck Finn? The notion that a survivor's memoir like Shalamov's is some kind of Western plot was absurd in its time and plainly disgusting now.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by jhbadger on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @12:18PM (#17304482)

I'm talking about contemporary descriptions of US racism during the Soviet period. Things like lynching of black men because they supposedly looked at a white woman and the murder of civil rights leaders like MLK jr. These obviously were terrible things, but why were they reported in Russian? To make Soviet citizens feel that their land was morally superior. And likewise with Gulag literature in the West. It's easier to complain that your neighbors' house is dirty than to clean your own.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by pvg on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @12:31PM (#17304605)

And likewise with Gulag literature in the West.

No no no no no no. How do you jump from one to the other? That's like saying Anne Frank's diary's credibility is tainted by the injustice of the internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by anticodon on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @08:21PM (#17308203)

I didn't say that it's a western plot in my comment.

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by pvg on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @02:12AM (#17300671)

This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.

I think the parent comment is reductive in a the-opposite-of-insightful way but no, that literature was not "funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse."

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Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag by Fins on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @12:01PM (#17304307)

No, not everybody had passed through camps. Pretty much everybody had a relative who did, though. That's not even counting entire nations summarily sent to balmy Gulag resorts. And even in the 80s (hell, even now) a lot of national culture and character were based on the prison society.

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