WSJ: Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. (in 2010)
I thought about the Gulag Archipelago and also Tarkofsky's film SOLARIS, both of which are incredible indictments of the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn went into exile, his typist was tortured and soon thereafter hung herselg. Tarkofsky, whoses dad was also a great Russian poet, worked in exile in Paris. So the most damning criticism can be created as art, and yes, there is hell to pay.
Hopefully the Russian scholar whose book is reviewed by the Wall Street Journal is a madman. Otherwise....
From Wikipedia:
Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet government in fact could not govern without the very real threat of imprisonment, and that the Soviet economy depended on the productivity of the forced labor camps, especially insofar as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned.
This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system. In Western Europe the book came, in time, to force a rethinking of the historical role of Lenin. With The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin's political and historical legacy became problematic, and the fractions of Western communist parties who still based their economic and political ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof against them. George F. Kennan, perhaps the most influential of U.S. diplomats, called The Gulag Archipelago, "the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times."[2
s shorter, anyway, in Russian tradition than in many Western European literatures, although an analogy might be drawn between Russian and French-Enlightened publishing traditions by public intellectuals). However, with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it is his best-known and most popular work, at least in the West.
Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal representative, Dr Kurt Heeb of Zürich, to await publication (a later paper copy, also smuggled out, was signed by Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against possible accusations of a falsified work).
