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Solzhenitsyn's writings gave hope to people, to their minds and souls. Like Voice of America and other channels of information from outside the curtain. But saying that they destroyed an empire is an overclaim.
In my opinion, no single factor destroyed the empire. However, if I were to pick the most important one I'd say Gorbachev.
Agreed, I think the author oversells his case by say that Solzhenitsyn was more important that Gorbachev. Gorbachev is one of the most under-appreciated figures in modern history in my opinion.
Gorbachev tried to save the empire. Eltzin destroyed it.
He did refuse to use force to suppress the unfolding events. Allowing Germany to bring down the wall and the Soviet republics to separate.
He did refuse the force, indeed. But he was in a state of deer caught in the headlights, rather then acting consciously. He was a good man, but we give him too much credit for things he hasn't done. The USSR crumbled, unexpectedly for everyone inside. A lesson to rest of the world - if you think you know what is going to happen tomorrow, think twice.
I think you're under-estimating how important his refusal to use force was. This was an unprecedented reversal of 50+ years of policy of using force.
More importantly, it was humane. We sit in comfy chairs with Starbucks lattes in front of us arguing the pros and cons of Communism. But in Communism, people died for no good reason. People had no free will. People had no ability to express a thought freely. Gorbachev's policies (implemented from within the regime!) signaled a change. That's no small feat.
I recall reading an article many years ago that said that a repeated pattern in history is that an oppressive government attempts to be somewhat less oppressive, but this creates a feedback loop where being less oppressive creates self-awareness and increased desire to be less oppressive, and thus those persons that try to preserve such regimes by creating incremental reform tend to bring out their collapse.
IIRC, this article also stated that the subsequent pains as even the dependable/reliable parts of society become unreliable tends to lead to a new oppressive regime, which is why truly straightforward oppressive->relatively democratic regime changes are so rare.
I'm likely torturing the actual article with my twisted memories (this would be, like, 15 years ago), but those are the points that stuck with me. If that article was accurate, you could then credit Gorbachev AND assume he wasn't intending the future that came about.
It is depressing though, because if true, it's an argument against incremental reforms.
Two things helped to destroy the empire. First, it was the attempt of the Soviets to keep up with Reagan's Star Wars. They lacked the resources.
But also, Congressional Representative Charlie Wilson, single-handedly helped to get appropriations (matched by Saudi Arabia) to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan with CIA funding of the Mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War [1]. This was the Soviet Vietnam.
Tom Hanks starred as Charlie Wilson in the 2007 movie, Charlie Wilson's War[2].
The movie was based on the 2003 book, "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History"[3]
Both the film and the book are worth watching/reading. Truly an incredible story.
Public facing Charlie Wilson was a playboy. Privately behind he scenes he was on two Congressional subcommittees that doled out black-ops funding to the CIA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-Extraordinary-Ope...
I am surprised no one here is talking about the price of oil and its relation to the downfall of the Soviet empire. To me, it is by far the biggest factor.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/01/21/oil-pric...
It was Reagan. The arms race bankrupted the Soviets. Gorbachev deserves credit for acting rational in the face of Reagan’s pressure, pressure, to be historically honest, was begun by Jimmy Carter (and dramatically expanded under Reagan.)
The Americans destroyed the Soviet Empire, that’s just a fact. Gorbachev was reacting, not acting. “Tear down this wall” — and that’s exactly what happened.
Carl Sagan was highly skeptical against the arms race theory. According to him: The Star Wars plan was nothing more than a boondoggle based on questionable technology, and the Soviet at that time correctly concluded that if it ever worked they just needed to have more missiles. The whole story is basically a retcon to explain why America wasted so much money on SDI that never went anywhere.
Soviet Union was trying very hard to keep up with the US military advances - I know it for sure, because as an engineer my father was involved in such efforts. And, by the way, "just" producing more missiles wasn't easy thing to do also. So, Reagan's policy probably added a lot to Soviet troubles. I suppose Sagan simply needed to be publicly skeptical, because he was in different ideological trenches.
There are a lot of people invested in this view for domestic political reasons, but the evidence doesn't support it.
Look up Leonid Brezhnev's era. 18 years of rot and stagnation. It was all over except the crying before Reagan even took office.
Worth noting that his "Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Harvard Commencement Address" will get him trump supporter and far-right labels easily. A couple of my friends joked that this is a deplatforming material in 2018.
Having trouble understanding -- can you explain?
Well, you can read it here in full -- https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenit...
It's not that long actually. For example, here is Solzhenitsin about western press (keep in mind, this is 1978):
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?
> and the satisfaction of being proved right in his predictions of disaster.
Any brief accounts of what his predictions were? I don't want to read The Gulag Archipelago. Something I could read, watch or listen to in 30 minutes would be ideal.
I have come across a few accounts of how the USSR collapsed. Some of them mentioned Solzhenitsyn briefly. As I recall, the major factors were political scheming and manipulation, followed by opposition of dissent, followed by opening up of the press, which finally showed the citizens how bad they really had it there. Gorbachev tried various measures to handle the situation, but they all proved ineffective. That's the version I know.
Solzhenitsyn may have been a great writer. But as far as I know, his role in the collapse of the USSR was minor. The end result would have followed pretty much the same timeline.
This is the best short explanation I have come across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqt3U48MFcY
There's a great long form essay on Solzhenitsyn available on the Times Literary Supplement website. It was the subject of an earlier discussion on Hacker News [0].
Amusingly enough, The Gulag Archipelago was already the next book on my list of books to read. Interesting coincidence that it's his 100th birthday. Or maybe not. Maybe I've been running across his name this year for that exact reason.
I'm listening to the Gulag Archipelago vol. 2. It's read by Frederick Davidson, who is perfect for the role. Definitely check it out the audiobook from your local library if they carry it.
I posted this in another thread recently, but highly recommend the article A Tiny Village in Vermont Was the Perfect Spot to Hide Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn[0] to learn more about his life in Vermont.
[0]: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/summer/statement/tiny-vi...
I've recently read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".
IMHO, this novel does a very good job at capturing one key aspect of gulag; It was not just all about "oppressor vs oppressed", but was a complex society with a particular set of rules.
If you likes the works of Primo Levi, I'd highly recommend you to take a copy.
If you are currently ideologically flirting with Marxism I can heartly recommend reading his masterpiece the Gulag Archipelago to know how Marxism will work out in practice.
I can also guarantee that after reading you are done believing Marxism will bring any good to civilization forever.
And also don't be surprised when you get some very heavy emotional responses while reading. Yes -- what he went through was that bad.
I never knew this timeline. Fascinating and horrific.
I'm currently halfway through Volume 1 of the Gulag Archipelago. I find most criticism of it-- the ones that say it is too literary-- clearly have not actually read it, because many of his assertions reference specific names, events and documents that can be verified.
In any case, I very much recommend it to anyone flirting with socialism or communism, because it is a very sobering account of things that can go wrong, most of which most of us cannot begin to imagine.
Posting Gulag Archipelago to /r/communism when people ask for suggested readings on communism is a great way to get banned from that subreddit.
No community likes trolls.
I'd argue that the Gulag Archipelago is an excellent reflection of applied Communism.
From the title I though it ought to be about Karl Marx.
He probably captured best the malaise and hypocrisy of the USSR.
My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and not communism itself, destroyed the USSR.
In particular, success - especially political or military success, became more dangerous to achieve than failure.
Not even Georgy Zhukov was spared a certain level of wrath, which was probably more of a warning to potential coup plotters than anything to do with Zhukov himself.
"My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and not communism itself, destroyed the USSR."
There's a sense in which that is true. The problem is, "the conditions imposed in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not a political system that works for human beings as they are. So the imposition of massive amount of force, and the subsequent second- and third- and so-on-order effects that come with that might as well be accounted as part of Communism, because otherwise people don't conform to Communism.
I can imagine hypothetical intelligent species for which Communism might work fairly well, based on looking at social structures seen on Earth and extrapolating to what they may look like if the species in question were human-level intelligent. But it would be something like bees or ants, writ large. Trying to impose a bee or ant system on humans is utterly doomed to failure. That's not a value judgment. Maybe it's a terrible thing. It's just a true statement; humans, fundamentally, aren't bees or ants. You need that aspect of direct relationship for this to be stable.
Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is just doomed, evolutionarily. It's pretty easy to see why it would fail if you try to imagine some animal species working that way; even if you somehow imposed that system onto a population of bacteria or something, I absolutely guarantee it would evolve away in a handful of generations. It's beyond unstable into the actively self-sabotaging. Adding lots of human intelligence doesn't really change that characteristic of communism.
(Now, when it gets really scary is when people start deciding they just need to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
An interesting appeal to nature. Would you paint all socialist with this brush or just the Bolsheviks?
> The problem is, "the conditions imposed in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not a political system that works for human beings as they are.
And what would that be? The following?
>Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is just doomed, evolutionarily.
The short historical period where this could be somewhat true would be first few years after the Russian revolution and during the civil war where the Bolshevik government had nothing to give the farmers for their produce. They did however get rather useless money notes IIRC. The use of force that followed by the bolsheviks was in no way universally accepted among communists & socialist at that time or since.
> (Now, when it gets really scary is when people start deciding they just need to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
While I agree with this in some sense, I also think it's quite obvious that what's sometimes called human nature varies drastically, and are in fact nurture rather than nature. Some societies have no concept of money, some no concept of marriage, no concept of a nuclear family, some despise competitiveness, and so on.
You make all these sweeping claims, yet in Norway 37% of the population works in the public sector (compare with around 50% in Belarus and China), taxes are very high, and inequality is very low according to most measures.
Another point a Trotskyst might make is that Communism can only succeed if adopted all over the world. I don't think that a country like Cuba makes for a good data point on anything except embargoes.
if the success of your political system depends on there being literally no alternatives to it elsewhere in the world, doesn't that suggest that something might be wrong with it?
Norway is well-funded by their oil.
> if adopted all over the world
Not a chance.
"I don't think that a country like Cuba makes for a good data point on anything except embargoes."
Neither is Norway a good data point from which we can extrapolate the viability of Communism. Norway has a population of 5.5 million - smaller than the San Francisco Bay Area. It's also swimming in oil money.
It's probably easier to motivate people to work for the benefit of the whole community if the community is defined as a small number of people with whom you share a culture and background and live close to you.
Maybe that's why communism works occasionally on communes, but anything more expansive requires the brutal application of force to keep people in line.
The voluntary ones implode within a year or two as the participants get fed up and leave.
I forgot someone even more crucial to my argument.
Yes, it's a hypothesis. A hypothesis that has been invalidated by data again, and again, and again, and again.
Then what exactly made Mr. Solzhenitsyn's work so powerful? Was he a capitalist stooge?
Isn't the false dichotomy between capitalism and communism exactly the kind of thing an aspiring writer might choose to illuminate?
The hypocrisy he mentions in his work in Russia seems to be observed because he grew under communism. If he'd grown up in America, he might have written about some other injustices.
Communism has been tried repeatedly, under all sorts of conditions. It has failed 100% of the time.
It is perfect... for families and small communities. But it does not scale well...
I wouldn't call parents feeding their children "communism". I don't know any small communities that successfully adopted communism (although it has been tried often).
People who compare families with communism have no idea what actual communism looks like. To make a family an equivalent of communism...
...for starters, all family members other than the father would be locked at home 24/7, forbidden from speaking to people outside the family, and sometimes even from looking out of the window. They would be randomly abused for no reason. Every day they would have to sing a song about how their family is the best in the world... and because they would have no information about what happens outside the house, half of them would actually believe it.
People, please read The Gulag Archipelago and stop making such absurd analogies! Yeah, the book has many pages, but it explains a system that tortured millions of people to death, and has many sympathizers worldwide even today, so it's not like your time will be wasted on something irrelevant.
There are communities that exist without private property, like communes and Monasteries and Kibbutz. I wouldn't really call them communist though and the hallmark of all of them is that they exist in a larger societal context, rather than being a separate society.
These conditions are the natural consequence of any attempt of imposing communism on a country scale. Red Khmers weren't much nicer either.