Book review: The Gulag Archipelago

[gfish]

This was a brutal, fascinating, horrific nightmare of a masterpiece. I felt darkly honored to be able to read it, for the barest echo of understanding of the extremes of human experience. Highly recommended, for both content and style, with the significant caveat that it is a very long, very emotionally bruising ride. If you're not up for that, at least read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Having just finished it (not to mention the Hannah Arendt books I read earlier in the year) sure did put this weekend's events in sharp contrast. I'm not sure there is any greater civic obligation than standing up to these fascist fucks in any way possible.

One semi-tangential thought: The Soviet Union did literally everything possible to ruin their economy, to make any creative or productive act not only impossible, but actively punished. Yet while they did manage to starve several million people to death in the process, shit still got done. They fought off the Nazis and were in space just 20 years later. That's an extreme contrast that deserves explanation! It makes me wonder if the modern obsession with productivity and incentives might be completely unfounded.

Comments

[ivy]

Yeah, I read it a couple years ago, right when In the First Circle came out in English. It's a moral imperative to stop this shit; I'm with you on that.

[randomdreams]

I think there is a different sort of incentivization that arises from having a comfortable life taken from you, being locked in the gulags, and then told that if you work hard enough you might be given some of your life back: Theremin built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) for the government while locked up in Siberia.
Every time I see a news article about a North Korean missile launch or weapons test that failed, I think about the project managers and engineers whose entire families were machine-gunned that night, to demonstrate the cost of failure.
I'm not saying that in a yay-capitalism mode, either: we have become our own bourgeoise, oppressing ourselves into long hours for low pay on the conviction that maybe it'll get better if we just work a little harder.