https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=63NG7LbBRA4
I’m going to tell you a story from the Soviet Union that Solzhenitsyn told. He introduces it with a poem from the Russian poet, Mayakovsky. He’s a Soviet sympathizer. With cohesion, construction, grit, and repression, ring the neck of this gang-run riot. It’s a nice poem. Solzhenitsyn wondered, who was the gang? That’s the question. As I said, he estimated 66 million people died in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1959. Solzhenitsyn also estimated that a substantially larger number perished in communist China. No one really knows the stats on that. Now, this is a debatable statistic, as Solzhenitsyn points out in his book. This is from the Gulag Archipelago. As he said, as soon as the official statistics are released, he’ll revise his estimates. This includes, for example, several million peasants pushed into the tundra, forced relocation in the early 20s. Six million Ukrainians, leave it with six million, dead in the famines in the 1930s. Let me read you the story. Okay, so this is the situation. Solzhenitsyn should tell you a little bit about his life story. The Gulag Archipelago is a three-volume book, the second volume of which you will read. It’s his story about the Gulag. The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps that were set up in the Soviet Union soon after Lenin died. In fact, I guess some of them were set up before he died. And upon which the Soviet economy really ran for much of what constituted its life. Solzhenitsyn started his travels through the Gulag originally as a Russian front-line soldier. It’s a neat story in a sense. He got thrown into a German prisoner of war camp. And when he was repatriated to the Soviet Union, Stalin threw him in a concentration camp. And the reason was, as he did with all the returned Russian prisoners of war, who were treated, by the way, terribly in the German prisoners of war camps because Stalin refused to sign the Geneva Convention. On the treatment of prisoners. So not only were they in prisoners of war camps, which was miserable enough, but they were starved to the degree that the other Allied prisoners used to give them food. They didn’t have much food themselves. So he was a front-line soldier, then he got thrown into a German prisoner of war camp. And then when he finally returned to Russia, Stalin threw him in a concentration camp. And the reason for that was that the Russians who were in German prisoners of war camp had been contaminated by their exposure to Western ideas. That was his rationale. So anyways, then he spent a decade and a half, or thereabouts, in concentration camps. But when he got out, he developed stomach cancer. So that’s a brief summary of some of the highlights of his life. Okay, in this scene, he’s being transported from one camp to another in a railway car that’s being roughly outbidded for transporting human beings. He’s sitting with a friend that he calls Pannon. I’m just going to read you this story. My friend Pannon and I are lying on the middle shelf of a Stalopin compartment. That’s what cattle cars basically are refitted for human transport. And I’ve set ourselves up comfortably, tucked our salt herring in our pocket so we don’t need water and can go to sleep. But at some station or other, they shove into our compartment a Marxist scholar. We can tell this from his goatee inspectors. He doesn’t hide the fact, so he’s been arrested. He’s a devout communist, but he’s been arrested by the communists. He doesn’t hide the fact he’s a former professor of the Communist Academy. We hang head down in the square cutout, and from his very first words, we see that he is impenetrable. But we have been serving time for a very long time and have a long time left to serve. And we value a merry joke. We must find a way to have a bit of fun. There’s ample space left in the compartment, so we exchange places with someone and crowd in. Hello. Hello. You’re not too crowded? No, it’s all right. Have you been in the jug a long time? Long enough. Are you past the halfway mark? Just… Look over there how poverty-stricken our villages are. Straw thatch, crooked huts. That’s an inheritance from the Tsarist regime. But we’ve already had 30 Soviet years. That’s an insignificant period historically. It’s terrible that the collective farmers are starving, but if you look in all the rubble, just ask any collective farmer in our compartment. Well, everyone in jail is embittered and prejudiced. But I’ve seen collective farms myself. That means they were uncharacteristic. The goatee had never been in any of them. That way it was simpler. Just ask the old folks. Under the Tsar, they were well fed, well clothed, and they used to have many holidays. I’m not even going to ask. It’s a subjective trait of human memory to praise everything in the past. The cow that died is the one that gave twice the milk. Sometimes even cited problems. And our people don’t like holidays. They like to work. Why is there a shortage of bread in many cities? When? Right before the war, for example. Not true. Before the war, everything, in fact, had been worked out. Listen, at that time, in all the cities on the bullgut, there were queues of thousands of people. A local failure in supply. More likely your memory is failing you. But there’s a shortage now. Old wives tales. We have from 7 to 8 billion bushels of grain. But the grain is rotten. Not so. We’ve been very successful in developing new species of grain. And so forth. He’s imperturbable. He speaks in a language which requires no effort of the mind. And arguing with him is like walking through a desert. It’s about people like that that they say, he made the rounds of all the blacksmiths and came home unshawed. And when they write in their obituaries, perished tragically during the period of the Stalinist cult. This should be corrected to read, perished comically. But if his fate had worked out differently, we would have never learned what a dry and significant little man he really was. We would have respectfully read his name in the newspaper. He would have become a people’s commissar, and he would have even ventured to represent all Russia abroad. To argue with him was useless. It was much more interesting to play with him. Not at chess, but at the game of comrades. It really is such a game. It’s a very simple game. Play up to him a couple of times, or so use some of his own pet words and phrases. But like that. For he’s grown accustomed to find that all around him are enemies. He’s become weary of Stalin, and doesn’t like to tell his stories because all of them will be twisted and thrown right back into his face. But if he takes you for one of his own, he will quite humanly disclose to you what he has seen at the station. People are passing by, talking, laughing, life goes on. The party is providing leadership. People are being moved from job to job. Yet you and I are languishing here in prison. There are only a handful of us. And we must write and write petitions, begging a review of our cases, begging for pardon. Or he will tell you something interesting. In the Communist Academy, they decided to devour one comrade. They decided he wasn’t quite genuine, got one of our own, but somehow they couldn’t manage it. There were no errors in his essays, and his biography was clean. Then all of a sudden, going through the archives, what a find! They ran across an old brochure, written by this comrade, that had held in his hands, and in the margin of which he had written in his own handwriting, the notation, as in an economist is shit. Well, now you understand our commandant’s mild confidentiality. But after that, it’s no trouble at all to make short work of that muddlehead imposter, who was expelled from the Academy, and deprived of his scalded rank. The Communist professor in the SSJH, he doesn’t think, doesn’t have to think, because he has an ideological system that’s entirely worked out. He won’t admit that any evidence whatsoever exists to suggest that some of his presuppositions are wrong. For every bit of evidence that exists, there is a counterargument that justifies it, or excuses it, or makes it disappear in some way. That’s the first part of the story. The second part of the story is that being like this, he’s also extraordinarily clannish, in a sense. He tells a brief story about being in the Communist Academy, where everyone shares ideology, and finding the outsider so that he can be essentially destroyed. There are specific reasons why the two halves of that narrative were stuck together, because the first attitude leads inexorably to the second attitude, which is to say, the adoption of authoritarian ideology, which is basically the presumption of omniscience, in the sense that if you’re an ideologue, you think that what you think is the right thing to think. There isn’t anything else that needs to be thought. It’s you that has the answer. Now, you might not think it’s you, you might not think that it’s your leader, or the ideology in and of itself, but the point is you’re the one that’s in possession of the absolute truth. And every fact that might exist to dispute that is eliminated. The problem with eliminating facts is that sometimes they come in embodied form, which is to say, we tend to think of ideas as disembodied abstracted entities, but the truth of the matter is that ideas are representations of human patterns of action, and sometimes the enemy idea is actually the enemy. And there’s very little difference from the practical perspective between repressing facts that are uncomfortable and repressing people, whose viewpoints, or even styles of existence, are equal.