By Nikos Mottas*.
One
of the most famous and celebrated works of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the
“Gulag Archipelago”, has been for a long time a kind of “holy
bible” for every anticommunist. Firstly published in 1973, it-
supposedly- consists an analytical record of the conditions existed
in the so-called “labour camps” of the Soviet Union. Within the
framework of the slanderous anticommunist campaign, bourgeois
historiography has extensively promoted Solzhenitsyn's work as a
source of arguments about the so-called “Stalinist dictatorship”
and “communist crimes” in the Soviet Union.
However,
there is a fundamental problem in the work of the deeply reactionary
Solzhenitsyn: Gulag Archipelago is a completely antiscientific book,
based almost entirely in rumors, speculations, third party opinions
as well as interpretations of opinions by Solzenitsyn himself! In
other words, the reader of this book becomes “hostage” of a novel
type, unverifiable, recording to alleged events by Solzenitsyn and
others who supposedly “saw”, “heard” or “learned”
something.
Even
people who have nothing friendly to say about Stalin admit that
Solzhenitsyn's work is nothing but fairy tales. Let's see what
trotskyite historian and writer Vadim Z. Rogovin writes:
“Solzhenitsyn’s
work, much like the more objective works of R. Medvedev, belong to
the genre which the West calls "oral history," i.e.,
research which is based almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts of
participants in the events being described. Moreover, using the
circumstance that the memoirs from prisoners in Stalin’s camps
which had been given to him to read had never been published,
Solzhenitsyn took plenty of license in outlining their contents and
interpreting them”
[1]. In fact, Solzenitsyn edited and cited, according to his own
reactionary views, third parties' testimonials in which he added
anticommunist fabrications thus creating the “Archipelago” fairy
tale.
Solzhenitsyn's
first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya, seems to confirm the fact that
“Gulag Archipelago” consists a fictional and completely
non-scientific book. In her autobiography published in 1974 under the
title “Sanya: My Life with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn”, Reshetovskaya
actually challenges the validity of what Solzenitsyn writes in “Gulag
Archipelago”. According to Reshetovskaya, she was “perplexed”
by the fact that the the book was accepted by the western
(capitalist) world as “the solemn, ultimate truth”, saying that
the significance of his ex-husband's work had been “overestimated
and wrongly appraised”. [2].
Furthermore, Reshetovskaya unveiled that Solzhenitsyn himself did not
regard the book as “historical research, or scientific research,
but it was rather a “camp folklore” collection!
More or less,
Reshetovskaya actually says that “Gulag Archipelago” isn't a work
that should be taken seriously or accepted as a valid source. The
fact that Solzhenitsyn's book is full of lies and inaccuracies is
something that can be confirmed by a comparison of the data presented
in the “Gulag Archipelago” with the real numbers. There lies a
significant problem for the credibility of the much celebrated
“nobelist” and former Nazi collaborator Solzhenitsyn: He presents
fake numbers!
The following
chart, published at the official journal of the Union of American
Historians, includes the overall statistical data for the custodial
population in the USSR from 1934 to 1953, during a period of Joseph
Stalin's leadership. Let's now see how the numbers, researched and
checked by bourgeois scientists and published at the American
Historical Review, refute Solzhenitsyn's anticommunist fabrications.
1st
: Alexander Solzhenitsyn's argument about 60 million deaths (!) at
the Soviet labour camps consists a product of his deeply
anticommunist fantasy and profound lie.
2st :
Solzhenitsyn's argument about 25 million detained people at the
labour camps (“gulags”) in 1953 is a vulgar lie. In 1953, the
overall number of the imprisoned people was not over 2.5 million. Two
million were criminal prisoners, convicted for crimes or ordinary
criminal law.
3rd: In the
peak of his anticommunist paranoia, Solzhenitsyn had claimed that the
total number of victims during Stalin's period were... 110 million
people! If this ridiculous claim was correct then, normally, the
Soviet Union's population during Stalin's leadership (1924-1953)
should have been decreased significantly. However, statistical data
about the USSR's population prove exactly the opposite!
On January
1926, the population of the Soviet Union was 148.6 million people.
Fifteen years later, on June 1941 the population had been increased
to 196.7 million. A decrease in USSR's population took place between
1941 and 1946 (170.5 million), which is explainable by the huge
casualties of the country during the Second World War. After the War,
during the period 1946-1951, the Soviet Union's population increased
again, reaching 182.3 million people on January 1951 [4]. As for the
annual birth rate in the USSR between 1920 and 1950, it is extremely
insufficient in order to overlap (in terms of population) the number
of the supposed “million deaths” of the Stalin era [5].
Solzhenitsyn
is proved to be a blatant liar. Nonetheless, if someone isn't
convinced yet about the anticommunist fabrications of Solzenitsyn and
the other “stalinologists” (e.g. Robert Conquest), there is more
to come.
After the
victory of counterrevolution and the overthrow of socialism in the
USSR, the bourgeois government of Boris Yeltsin decided to open the
official soviet state archives, hoping that they would find evidence
about the “million victims of the stalinist era”. But, what did
the official soviet state archives reveal? They revealed that the
actual number of those who were sentenced to death during the period
of Stalin's leadership, from 1923 to 1952, is between 776,000 and
786,000 people [6]. The “million victims of stalinism” that
Solzhenitsyn, Conquest and other pathetic anticommunists wrote about,
consist propagandistic fairy tales.
Taking all the
above into account, we can now ask a final question: How credible is
an anticommunist fairy tale that is full of inaccuracies and
monstrous lies? How serious must someone take the fabrications of
Solzhenitsyn about Socialism, the USSR and Stalin? We leave on
literature critics to evaluate “Gulag Archipelago” as a novel.
But what is clear and beyond doubt is that Solzhenitsyn's book is a
non-scientific, anticommunist fabrication full of lies and slanders.
In a few words, nothing more or less than the spiritual product of a
nazi collaborator, a reactionary and a fascist.
NOTES:
[1] Rogovin,
Vadim. 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, Mehring Books,
1998.
[2] Reshetovskaya,
Natalya. Sanya: My Life With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Indianapolis/New York, Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1974. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html.
[3] The
American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp.
1017-1049.
[4] Andreev,
E.M., et
al., Naselenie
Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1922-1991.
Moscow, Nauka, 1993.
[5] BT.Urlanis,
Trends in fertility level in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
during the years of Soviet rule, 1980.
[6] Getty
J.A, Rittersporn G, Zemskov V. Victims of the Soviet Penal
System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival
Evidence, American Historical Review, 98:4, Oct. 1993.
Originally published in atexnos.gr.
Translated from Greek.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of 'In Defense of Communism'.
