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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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.
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.
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.