https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=w84uRYq0Uc8
So I want to tell you about a book today. The book is called the Gulag Archipelago. You ready? The book is called the Gulag Archipelago, and it’s by a Russian author, a Soviet author named Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was in the Gulag Archipelago concentration camp system for a very long time. He had a very hard life. He was on the Russian front when the Germans invaded Soviet Union in the early stages of World War Two. Now Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union anyway, and from what I’ve been able to understand, the Soviets had prepared an invasion force for Europe at that point, but were not concerned with having to defend their territory, and so they were caught completely unawares by Hitler’s move and conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful, and Solzhenitsyn was a soldier on the Russian front and he wrote some letters to one of his friends which were intercepted complaining about the lack of preparation and using bitter dark humor to describe the situation and the consequences of that was that he was thrown into a work camp. The Soviet system relied on work camps and so those were large labor camps of people who were essentially enslaved, many of whom were worked to death, often froze to death, working in conditions that were so dreadful that they’re virtually unimaginable. Solzhenitsyn spent a very large number of years in these camps sometimes in a more privileged camp because he was an educated man and sometimes in worse camps he also developed cancer later and wrote a book about that called Cancer Ward, which is a brilliant book so he had a very hard life there’s just no way around that, to be on the front and then to be in a concentration camp and then to have cancer that’s pretty rough. Now he wrote the Gulag Archipelago He wrote a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich first that was published in the early 1960s when there was a brief thaw Stalin was pretty much out of the picture by the end of the 1950s. There’s some indication that he was murdered by Khrushchev and Khrushchev became premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin and there’s some indication perhaps that Stalin was either murdered by Khrushchev and a set of his cronies or when he was very ill just before he died was not helped at least by wasn’t provided with any medical attention because of the intervention of Khrushchev and his cronies. Now there’s some indication as well at that point that Stalin who was an absolute absolutely barbaric and arrogant at that point that Stalin who was an absolute absolutely barbaric in every possible way you could imagine was planning to start a third world war and he was certainly capable of doing such things because he had already imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people now just after Stalin died there was a bit of a thaw in the Soviet Union with regards to internal repression in the early 1960s Solzhenitsyn published a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which was a story about one day in the life his life really inside one of these so-called Gulag archipelago camps now he called it the Gulag archipelago because an archipelago is a chain of islands and so Solzhenitsyn likened the work camp system in the Soviet Union which is made up of isolated camps distributed across the entire state he likened that to a series of islands and hence hence the metaphor and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was one of the first publications released in the Soviet Union that dared make public What had happened inside these camps at least? Initially now that thought didn’t last very long, but that book had a tremendous effect. It’s a short book. It’s worth reading After that he spent he wrote a number of other books which are also great He’s a great literary figure in the same category I would say as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky which is like really saying something You know those those two are perhaps the greatest literary figures who ever lived with the possible exception of Shakespeare He wrote this book called the Gulag Archipelago, which is published in three volumes each of which is about 700 pages long The first one details the origin of the oppressive Soviet system at least in part under Lenin and then its full-fledged implementation under Stalin and the deaths of well Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in Internal repression in the Soviet Union at something approximating 60 million between 1919 and 1959 Now that doesn’t count the death toll in the Second World War by the way now people have disputed those figures But they’re certainly in the tens of millions and the low end bounds are probably 20 million and the high end bounds are nearer What Solzhenitsyn estimated he also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China Cost a hundred million lives and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures Again are subject to dispute, but somewhere between 50 and a hundred million people and one of the things that’s really Surprising to me and that that I think is absolutely reprehensible Absolutely reprehensible is the fact that this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West any of this and it’s because your education Your historical education if you started to describe it as appalling you would barely scratch the surface These were the most important events of the 20th century, and they’re barely covered at all in standard historical curriculum You know of something I would presume about World War two and about the terrible situation in Nazi Germany and the death of six million Gypsies and Jews and homosexuals in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany But my experience with students has been that none of them know anything about what happened as a consequence of The repression of the radical left in the 20th century, and I believe the reason for that is that the communist And I believe the reason for that is that the communist system had extensive networks of admirers in the West especially among intellectuals and and still in fact does which is also equally reprehensible And I believe that one of the consequences of that is that this element of history has been under under what would you say under examined and Certainly very little attention has been brought to it in the public school curricula And there’s absolutely no excuse for that It was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century and that’s really saying something because the 20th century was about as bad as it gets and so and the fact that these these massive these deaths on massive scale occurred and the fact that we don’t know that deep inside our bones is a Testament to the absolute rot of the education system So now you might think this is a strange thing to discuss in a personality course but I have my reasons for doing it the fundamental reason is that Solzhenitsyn you might regard as an existentialist now He says many of the same things that Viktor Frankl says Viktor Frankl wrote a book called man’s search for meaning which I would highly recommend And it’s a description of the corruption that he saw leading into the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp systems especially within the concentration camps itself because Frankl was very interested in what sort of psychological catastrophe had to befall a given individual before that person was capable of acting as an agent say of the Nazis in the concentration camp system and he Concentrated particularly on these people he called that were known as trustees Within the concentration camp system who were generally Jewish individuals who were aiding the Nazis in their death work inside the camps Now what Frankl did because he was also Existentially oriented was attempt to draw a parallel between the individual psychology and the mass Pathologies of the state and so the reason that I believe that this is important in a personality class is because it’s necessary to analyze the relationship between the psychological integrity of the individuals with within a society and the propensity of that society to engage in Say acts of mass atrocity or to go to go completely off the rails and then to engage in acts of mass atrocity and So it was Frankl’s contention and also Solzhenitsyn’s contention and I would say also the contention of Vaklav Havel who eventually who was a Author and playwright in Czechoslovakia and eventually became president that the fundamental linkage between the pathology and the state the pathology of the state and the individual was the individuals propensity to Deceive him or herself and to so to to fail to act in an authentic manner in a genuine and authentic matter manner and to become as a consequence either nihilistic, let’s say or because because of the incremental weakening of character that’s part and parcel of of adopting an inauthentic mode of being or to turn to ideological and totalitarian solutions as an alternative to living appropriately and with responsibility as an individual so Solzhenitsyn in particular laid At the feet of the Soviet citizenry the burden of the absolute catastrophes that characterized that system because of their because of the each individuals propensity or proclivity within the state to lie and deceive constantly about what they thought and what they said and to be afraid to Speak and to be afraid to think and to be afraid to criticize and it was no wonder because criticism of course Was at least at least became an offense that was punishable by death But these things start much more slowly than that and they start with people abandoning their their own identities and adopting a pathological group identity Well for it for any number of reasons, but one of them certainly is their desire to shrink for in from individual responsibility And their desire for ready-made ideological solutions And so I’m going what I’m going to do today is I’m going to read you a little bit about the Gulag Archipelago and then I’m going to show you a sequence of videos about a recent event that I think does a very good job of illustrating how this sort of thing works and Then I’m going to read you some of the some of what I’ve culled from the Gulag Archipelago So that you get a sense of what the writing is like so Solzhenitsyn basically He committed a huge part of the Gulag Archipelago to memory Which is really something given that it’s 2100 pages long and Printed in like seven point font and the book is written at an unbelievable level of emotional intensity It’s it’s I remember there was a study once about how rats respond to cats free living rats in their burrows if they’re exposed to a cat or even to cat odor will run back to their burrow and Stick their nose out and scream for 48 hours Right which is about the equivalent of you screaming for three months because rats don’t only live about two years and well that rat Is screaming all the other rats stay in their burrow and don’t go anywhere and so they scream ultrasonically So you have to record it and then slow it down in order to hear it But they’re not very happy about that about cats and they actually Don’t need to be exposed to cats to learn how to be afraid of their odor They’re naturally afraid of it anyways Solzhenitsyn’s book the Gulag Archipelago is like a 2100 page scream It’s very very intense. It’s a very difficult thing to read, but it’s absolutely crucial reading It’s actually now part of the curriculum in Russia in high school Which also says something about Russian high schools compared to say North American high schools Because I doubt if the typical North American high school student reads 2100 pages Of anything during their entire education in high school and certainly not something like the Gulag Archipelago So I’m going to read you a little bit of background about the story first of all and this is a nice summary I’ve swiped it from Wikipedia, but The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn He won a Nobel Prize for that for the book by the way and richly deserved it about the Soviet forced labor camp system The three volume book is a narrative Relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material as well as the author’s own experiences in a Gulag labor camp written between 1958 and 1968 It was published in the West in 1973 And thereafter circulated in Samizdat or underground publication form in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1989 in which a third of the work was published over three years So the Samizdat or the underground press was basically photocopies or sometimes photo stats of banned works that people would compile and then hand from person to person Of course the punishment for being caught with something like that was extraordinarily severe But the Samizdat was a, I suppose it was a precursor to the internet That’s one way of thinking about it, a slow precursor to the internet Gulag or G-U-L-A-G or Gulag is an acronym for a Russian term Chief administration of corrective labor camps, the bureaucratic name of the governing board of the Soviet labor camp system And by metonymy the camp system itself The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast chain of islands Known only to those who were in the Soviet Union Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published and included in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading Structurally the text comprises seven sections divided in most printed volumes into three Parts one to two, three and four, and five to seven At one level the Gulag Archipelago is a part of the Russian Federation At one level the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labor camps That existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956 Starting with Lenin’s original decrees shortly after the October Revolution Establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor One of the things that’s quite interesting about the Gulag camps And this is something that’s very relevant to understanding of modern Russia Is that so ordinary criminals were put into the camps and so were political prisoners But the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let’s say As well as thieves who were engaged in theft as an occupation Those were regarded by the Soviets as socially friendly elements And the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime Was because of the oppressive nature of the previous tsarist slash capitalist system And that the only reason that these criminals existed was because they had been oppressed They were oppressed victims of that system And so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine Was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps And these were very, very seriously bad people And so you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners Who were regarded as socially hostile elements Sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts But more often merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity Or the fact that they were related by birth to say people who had been successful under the previous system So who had any association with nobility or any association with what were known as the kulaks Who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union Because they were regarded as privileged You may have heard that word more recently They were regarded as privileged and therefore as enemies of the state And it didn’t matter if it was your father or your grandfather or your great grandfather Who happened to be privileged But the mere fact that you were a member of that group Was sufficient reason to put you into a camp And we’re talking hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people who underwent that fate And so the idea in the Soviet Union was Just because you were the member of a class Even as a consequence of your familial association You were immediately sufficiently guilty to be put into a camp and punished And the terms for the camps were often 10 years, 15 years long And if you were very fortunate you got to have two or three of those So the Soviets really implemented and perfected the idea of class and ethnicity based guilt And it’s a very bad road to walk down And it’s something that we’re very much engaged in at the moment Because there’s discussion everywhere in North America now About the idea of, well, race predicated guilt for example And ethnic predicated guilt And it’s a very bad idea to classify an entire group of people as guilty of anything Based on their group membership So these sorts of things are things we haven’t yet learned And certainly should have Now the other thing that was very interesting about the Soviet Especially about the Gulag Archipelago You see, it was released in the West in about 1973 or thereabouts Now, the student movement of the 1960s was very much influenced by Marxist and Communist doctrine And that was especially the case in France Where the most reprehensible intellectuals of the 20th century have emerged Including all the damned postmodernists Who’ve occupied the universities now as far as I can tell And what happened essentially in France was that The Marxists slash Communist students were attempting to foment revolution But what happened, and that peaked in about 1968 And what happened was, at least in part, as a consequence of Solzhenitsyn’s revelations The idea that the Soviet model, or the Maoist model for example Could be used as an example of the working people’s utopia Was completely and catastrophically, and at least in principle, finally undermined Now, there had been, see, because the Western leftist intellectuals Right from 1919 forward turned a blind eye to what was happening in the Soviet Union Now and then they were invited there Even people, well, people who were very well regarded in the West Were often invited, and who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union Were often invited there for a visit And the Soviets would do the same thing the North Koreans do now When they invite foreigners to visit Which is that they would set up fake places for them to visit Called Potemkin villages Where everyone was thriving and doing well The Nazis did the same thing with the concentration camps to begin with Especially the ones they established for children And they would invite dim-witted leftist Western intellectuals To come to the Soviet Union and see the wonderful paradise that had been set up for everyone Which was a complete and utter facade and sham And then they would go back to the West and report on how the utopia was progressing Precisely according to the Marxist doctrines And we knew from the 1930s forward Because Malcolm Muggeridge did this to begin with Who investigated what was going on in the Soviet Union I think for the Manchester Guardian And he started reporting in the late 1910s and then the early 1920s If I remember correctly, it was approximately in that period, maybe a bit later He recorded what was happening when the Soviets attempted to collectivize the peasant farmers And so what they did was take all these people who were previously serfs Right, only a couple of decades previously Which was not much better than being a slave You were basically property And that was happening until about 1880 or thereabouts The serfs were emancipated Many of them ended up holding their own land Right, so the land was distributed from the nobles to the peasantry That was something that Tolstoy was, Leo Tolstoy was involved in And by the time the Soviet revolution came around Which would be at the latter part of the 1910s After the first world war The peasant class had actually established farms Of course varying productivity Some of the peasant farmers were very good at being farmers And produced a huge proportion of Russia’s and the Ukraine’s food Because one of the things We’ll talk about this later as the class progresses One of the things that you’ll find If you look at creative production In any domain, it doesn’t matter Artistic domain, food production Novels written Novels sold Money generated, number of companies generated Number of goals scored in hockey Et cetera Number of paintings painted Number of compositions written Anything like that Where the fundamental underlying measure is human productivity What you find is that a very tiny percentage of people Produce almost all the output It’s called a Pareto distribution P-A-R-E-T-O And it was studied in detail in scientific productivity By someone named DeSola Price It’s a square root law So here’s the law fundamentally If you look at the number of people Who are doing Who are in a given domain Who are producing in a given domain The square root of the people produce half the product So that means if you have 10 employees, 3 of them do half the work But if you have 10,000 employees 100 of them do half the work Right? It’s a very very vicious statistic And you won’t learn about that In psychology for reasons I have no idea about Because you learn about the normal distribution And not the Pareto distribution But Pareto distributions govern For example, the distribution of money Which is why 1% of the People in the general population Have the overwhelming amount of money And 1 tenth of that 1% Has almost all of that So I think it’s like the richest 100 people in the world Have as much money as the bottom 2.5 billion And you think, well that’s a terrible thing And perhaps it is, but what you have to understand Is that that law Governs the distribution of creative production Across all creative domains Right? It’s something like a natural law And we’ll talk about that more But imagine what happens when you play monopoly You’ve all played monopoly What happens when you play monopoly? One person ends up with all the money Then you play another game of monopoly What happens? One person ends up with all the money It’s actually the inevitable consequence Of multiple trades That are conducted randomly So if you take a thousand people And you get them to play a trading game You each give them 10 And they have to trade with another person By flipping a coin I win the coin toss, you give me a dollar You win, I give you a dollar If we all play that long enough, one person will end up With zero money and everyone else will end up with zero So it’s a deeply built Feature Of systems of creative production And no one really knows what to do about it Because of course the danger is that all the resources Get funneled to a tiny minority Of people at the top And a huge section of the population stacks up at zero But to blame that on The oppressive nature of a given system Is to radically underestimate The complexity of the problem No one actually knows how To effectively shovel resources From the minority that That controls almost everything To the majority that has almost nothing In any consistent way Because as you shovel money down It tends to move right back up And it’s a big problem Anyways, the reason I’m telling you about that is because After the peasants were granted their land And started to become farmers A tiny minority of them became extremely successful And those people produced almost all of the food For Russia and the Ukraine So what happened in the 1920s When Bloody Lenin came along And collectivized the farms Was that they defined the kulaks Who were these tiny minority of successful farmers Who maybe had a brick house And were able to hire a couple of people And had some land and some livestock And were very productive people They defined them as socially unfriendly elements And they sent groups of intellectuals Out into the towns to collectivize the farms And so the idea was That while you would pool your land And everyone would farm it collectively And the land was taken away Of course from the tiny minority of people Who were actually productive And had actually managed to own much of the land So you have to imagine how that would occur Okay, so it’s in the 1920s It’s after the world After World War I Russia’s in pretty bad shape The villages are full of brutalized men Who have post-traumatic stress disorder And lots of people who are not doing well at all And the bloody intellectuals come into the town And they say, you know those successful farmers Up the street that you’ve always been Pretty jealous about In your useless manner Well they’re actually pigs and demons Who are stealing from you So why don’t you come out and we’ll form a nice little mob And we’ll take everything they’ve got And that’s exactly what happened And all those people were killed or raped Or set off to Siberia in the middle of the bloody winter Where there wasn’t even anything for them To anywhere for them to live or anything for them to eat So they all died And the consequence of that was a few years later Six million people starved to death in the Ukraine And Malcolm Muggeridge had been reporting on that since the 1930s And so that was the first wind really that the West got Of exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union But even at that point The bloody left-wing intellectuals in North America Were so damn clueless and in Europe That they never paid much attention to it With the exception of a certain number of people Like George Orwell Who wrote 1984 And the book was called The Great War of the Dead And Animal Farm Which is of course a discussion The main pig in Animal Farm Is Stalin of course And it’s a story, an allegory about The Russian Revolution Whose basic motif is We’re all equal but of course some All animals are equal but some are more equal Than others And that’s the motif of Animal Farm So there had been warnings all the way through Right from the beginning of the Russian Revolution To the West about exactly what was going on But because communist and Marxist ideology Is very good at adling The weak minds of idiot intellectuals There was a huge section of the population Who was fomenting I suppose Against the standard What would you call it? Political, psychological and social order Who were absolutely committed To the ethic that’s encased In statements like From each according to his ability To each according to his need Which sounds perfectly wonderful And that’s the story of Animal Farm Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Which is a very interesting story Because the countryside full of farmers Was where the primary production was taking place And they regarded the city dwellers as parasites On that fundamental production So they basically emptied out the cities And sent all the people in the cities Out to work in the country As forced labor and 6 million people died there And the chief architect of that Bloody project got his PhD From the Sorbonne And said exactly what he was going to do When he went back to Cambodia Was cheered along by the French intellectuals And he was going to do something Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very 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Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Which was a very interesting story Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences Regardless of the wide cultural differences And the reason for that is that 50, 60 years of Barbaric, communist, despotic Barbaric, communist, despotic rule means a country that’s Barbaric, communist, despotic rule means a country that’s completely unindustrialized Barbaric, communist, despotic rule means a country that’s completely unindustrialized where every single person is malnourished Barbaric, communist, despotic rule means a country that’s completely unindustrialized where every single person is malnourished or starving to death Barbaric, communist, despotic rule means a country that’s completely unindustrialized where every single person is malnourished or starving to death where everyone lives in terror all the time Where there’s nothing but the continual Where there’s nothing but the continual production of labor in labor camps Just like in the Soviet Union and Maoist China Just like in the Soviet Union and Maoist China And we can still see examples of that today And that’s not an anomaly North Korea is exactly what you’d expect Given the doctrines upon which it’s founded Given the doctrines upon which it’s founded So, alright, so more on the Gulag At one level, the Gulag Archipelago Traces the history of forced labor camps That existed in the Soviet Union From 1918 to 1956 Started with Lenin’s original decrees Shortly after the October Revolution Establishing the legal and practical Framework for a series of camps Where political prisoners and ordinary criminals Would be sentenced to forced labor It describes and discusses the waves of Purges, assembling the Show trials in context of The development of the greater Gulag system With particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic Development The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956 The time of Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret speech at the 20th Party Congress Denouncing Stalin’s personality cult His autocratic power and the surveillance That pervaded the Stalin era Though the speech was not Published in the USSR for a long Time, it was a break with the most Atrocious practices of the Gulag system Solzhenitsyn was aware, however That the outlines of the system Had survived and could be Revived and expanded by future leaders Despite the Efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others To confront the legacy of the Gulag The reality of the camps remained taboo Until the 1980s While Khrushchev, the Communist Party And the Soviet Union supporters in the West, viewed the Gulag as a deviation Of Stalin Solzhenitsyn and many among the opposition Tended to view it as a systematic fault Of Soviet political culture And an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik Political project Parallel to this historical and legal Narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the Typical course of a Zek A slang term for inmate Derived from the widely used abbreviation Z slash K for Zalyuchenyi Zaklyuchenyi, I guess Prisoner through the Gulag Starting with arrest Show trial and initial internment Transport To the archipelago, treatment of Prisoners and general living conditions Slave labor gangs and the technical Prison camp system, camp rebellions And strikes, the practice of internal Exile following completion Of the original prison sentence And the ultimate but not guaranteed release Of the prisoner Along the way Solzhenitsyn’s examinations Detailed the trivial and commonplace Events of an average prisoner’s Of life Of an average prisoner’s life As well as specific and noteworthy Events during the history of the Gulag system Including revolts and uprising Aside from using his experiences As an inmate At a scientific prison Solzhenitsyn draws The testimony, draws from the testimony Of 227 fellow prisoners The first hand accounts Which base the work One chapter of the third volume of the book Is written by a prisoner named George Yorgi probably, Tenno Whose exploits enraptured Solzhenitsyn To the extent that he offered to name Tenno As co-author of the book Tenno declined Solzhenitsyn also poetically reintroduces His character of Ivan Danisevich toward the conclusion of The book. When questioned By the book’s author if he has faithfully Recounted the story of the Gulag Danisevich, now apparently Freed from the camps, replies that You, the author Have not even begun The sheer volume of first hand Testimony and primary documentation That Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble In the Gulag archipelago Made all subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work Useless. Much of the impact Of the treatise Stems from the closely detailed stories Of interrogation routines Prison indignities And especially in section 3 Camp massacres And inhuman practices There had been works about the Soviet Prison camp system before And its existence had been known to the western public Since the 1930s. However Never before had the general reading public Been brought face to face with the horrors Of the Gulag in this way The controversy surrounding this Text in particular was largely Due to the way Solzhenitsyn Definitively and painstakingly Laid the theoretical Legal and practical origins of The Gulag system at Lenin’s feet Not Stalin’s. According to Solzhenitsyn Testimony, Stalin Merely amplified a concentration camp System that was already in place This is significant as many Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet Concentration camp system as A Stalinist aberration Solzhenitsyn documented that the Soviet Government could not govern without The threat of imprisonment and that 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 Eventually contributed strongly to a need For rethinking of the historical Role of Lenin. With the Gulag archipelago, Lenin’s political And historical legacy became problematic Yeah, problematic And those factions Of western communist parties who still Based their economic and political ideology On Lenin were faced Were left with a heavy burden of proof Against them. George F. Kennan The influential US diplomat Called the Gulag archipelago The most powerful single indictment Of a political regime ever to be Levied in modern times The book was published at a time when many Communists in the west were already Rethinking their relationships with the USSR As many were deeply disappointed By the invasion of Czechoslovakia In 1968 In Germany it sparked discussions Not only about Leninism but also how to Deal with the memory of World War II In an interview with German Weekly Die Zeit, British historian Orlando Fijes Asserted that many Gulag inmates He interviewed for his research identified So strongly with the book’s contents That they became unable to distinguish Between their own experiences and what they read The Gulag archipelago Spoke for a whole nation and was the voice Of those who had suffered After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn’s materials in Moscow During 1957 to 1967 The preparatory drafts Of the Gulag archipelago were turned Into finished manuscripts Sometimes in hiding At his friend’s homes in the Moscow region And elsewhere Well held at the KGB’s Ljubljanka Prison in 1945 Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi A lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education Who had been taken captive after the Soviet Union Occupied Estonia in 1940 Solzhenitsyn entrusted Susi with the original Typed and proofread manuscript Of the finished work After copies had been made of it both on paper And on microfilm Arnold Susi’s daughter, Heli Susi Subsequently kept the master copy Hidden from the KGB in Estonia Until the dissolution Of the Soviet Union in 1991 The KGB seized One of the only three extant copies Of the text still on Soviet soil And the people who were there Were unaware of the existence of the other copies This they achieved after Interrogating Elizaveta Voronskayana One of Solzhenitsyn’s trusted Typists Who knew where the typed copy was hidden Within days of release By the KGB She hanged herself The first edition of the work Was published in Russian by the French publishing house Editions Du Soi A few days after Christmas 1973 They had received a go ahead from Solzhenitsyn But had decided to release the work About ten days earlier Than he had expected News of the nature of the work Immediately caused a stir And translations into many other languages Followed within the next few months Sometimes produced in a race against time American Thomas Whitney Produced the English version The English and French translations of volume one Appeared in the spring and summer of 1974 Solzhenitsyn had wanted The manuscript to be published in Russia First but knew this was impossible Under conditions then extant The work made a profound impact internationally Not only did it provoke Energetic debate in the west A mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself Was forced into exile Because possession of the manuscript incurred the risk Of a long prison sentence For anti-Soviet activities Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form Since he was under constant KGB surveillance he worked on only one part Of the manuscript at a time So as not to put the full book into jeopardy If he happened to be arrested For this reason he secreted the various parts Of the work throughout Moscow and the surrounding Countryside in the care of trusted Friends sometimes purportedly Visiting them on the social Calls but actually working on the Manuscript in their homes Alright so Now I want to show you some things I haven’t done this before But we’ll see how it goes I’m going to show you something that happened recently Some of you may be aware of this and some of you Not so This is a video About there was a There was a town meeting that a number of people Spoke at Including one Shopkeeper from New York And After the meeting He was interviewed by The press, the TV And one of the attendees at The meeting was upset About the fact that the press Was concentrating on him Instead of concentrating on what she regarded As the issues at hand So I’m going to play this for you to begin with Now what I’m trying to show you, I want to show you What it means for someone to be Ideologically possessed And so you can tell When you’re talking to someone like that because This is something I learned from reading Solzhenitsyn Is because you can predict absolutely Everything they’re going to say Once you know the algorithmic substructure Of their political ideology Which is usually predicated on about five or six axioms You can use the axioms To automatically generate speech content You don’t even have to hear the person You can just predict what they’re going to say And so that alleviates Any responsibility whatsoever they have For thinking, and it also allows them To believe that they have full control And full knowledge over the The whole world But also the capacity to distinguish Without a moment’s thought between those Who are on the side of the good And those who are not And that’s where the danger really comes So anyways, we’ll take a look at this So right now The news is Interviewing A person Whose daughter Was a heroin addict I think Was a heroin addict I think Is what he said in his public comment And he’s pro-bunker He’s pro-cop And so he’s the one getting interviewed And there are like a million people who Have spoken about how they’ve been Abused by the cops that they’re not being Spoken to Only the person who’s pro-bunker Who’s also a person of color So they got their token And that’s the one that they use And no idea, we’ll find out I have a question I’m actually happy You’re taking my picture You want my name? It’s Humongous Okay Humongous what? Humongous what? Humongous Humongous what? Humongous Humongous Humongous what? Humongous Humongous what? Humongous Humongous what? Is that sexual harassment? No, it’s humongous That’s my name Humongous what? Is that sexual harassment? Is that what you just did when you said that to me? Why would you say that to me? Why would you say that to me? Why would you ask me my name? Humongous what? Humongous what? Humongous what? This person Just spoke to me in a sexually Harassing way He did He said, do you know what my name is? And he said humongous Yeah This person just sexually harassed me I said I’m humongous Humongous what? Oh, so now you’re So now you’re actually pointing to yourself You’re actually pointing to your body Parts and you’re actually pointing to your body Parts and saying that you’re humongous You’re actually doing that And this is the person who just got interviewed As a pro bunker person of color As if you As if you represent us They’re using you as a token And then you speak to me in a sexually harassing Manner, how dare you? How dare you? Disgusting Disgusting Disgusting You just abused a woman You just abused a woman And you have the audacity You have the audacity to say that girls matter How dare you? How dare you you disgusting person Disgusting Don’t touch me Don’t touch me Are you going to do anything about how he sexually harassed me? Are you going to do anything about how he sexually harassed me? Are you going to You’re okay He’s asking me to leave After I’ve been sexually harassed You’re asking me to leave After I’ve been sexually harassed Did you ask him to leave? Did you ask him to leave? Are you following him? Did you ask him to start sexually harassing me? What is your name? What is your name? What is your name? You work for the city, we are here in a public place You need to tell me what your name is My name is Tanel And I work for a security firm, I do not work for the city, okay? You work for the city, you don’t work for us That means I don’t have to do what you want You don’t work for us, that means I don’t have to do what you want Stop raising your voice at me What is your name? Right now you are breaking our building rules No, no, sorry What did you do about him? What is your name? What is your name? I’ve already told you my name No, you haven’t What is your full name? And what company do you work for? I work for Universal Protection, my name is Tanel Stefanestri Why are you questioning her? I’m just asking You are questioning the wrong person Ma’am, I’m not questioning anyone All I’m saying is that we’re being disorderly We’re disrupting the meeting So why don’t you have to do what you want? So fuck off Who are you? Who are you? Did you go after the person who sexually harassed me? Did you go after the person who sexually harassed me? This is Universal Protection Security Universal Protection Security Notice how they didn’t get the cops here Notice how they didn’t get the cops here today They just got some more cops this evening So why did you do nothing about the person who sexually harassed me? I made it very clear He just sexually harassed me Why did you not go after him and tell him to stop Why did you not do that? Why did you not do that? You deal with a gentleman The gentleman’s gone already. He wants me gentlemen. He wants- oh, why are you here? Why are you still here? Because we’re being really loud and we’re just roughen- I- is being louder crying? It is in our building ma’am. No it’s not! No it’s not! No it’s not! She’s standing up for herself. I understand ma’am. No you don’t! You don’t understand anything! You don’t understand anything! So this got a lot of attention online, just so you know, and so then she responded because she was quite intensely criticized. So here’s her response. Now I want you to listen to how she speaks. My name is Zana. And I’m doing this video because we need to talk. It’s become clear to me that a great deal of us suffer from the illness of patriarchy. And it’s not just the men who suffer. Women can be patriarchal too. Women? Really? But why would they be patriarchal? Towards who? Other women? That’s stupid! So many things in our system today come from patriarchy, including racism, colonialism, capitalism, classism, and of course sexism. Wow! She thinks she knows everything. Guess all these experts with their degrees can just go home. One thing to remember though, it’s hard to see something when we’re really close to it. We have to step back sometimes, look at a system critically to see what others might be seeing. I wonder if she’s done that. I’m a woman of color, so I’m going to talk about my experience. But many other marginalized people, such as indigenous peoples, and queer and transgender people, and gender nonconforming people, will have their own thoughts on this also. Indigenous who? And what the hell is gender nonconforming? What are all these labels? What is she even talking about? Why does this woman think she can speak for everyone? I mean, who the hell is she anyways? What a drama queen. The challenge is that it is very hard for those who are marginalized, such as women of color, to express how they feel without being called the angry brown woman, or the angry black woman, or the nagging woman, or crazy. My god, she just won’t stop talking. But sometimes I do wonder what women of color are thinking when I make a crass racial or sexual joke in front of them, and then I say, just kidding, and then afterwards, why do they always turn me down when I ask them to dinner? It’s because of a phenomenon called white fragility and male fragility. White liberals and men in general have been told over and over again that if they just never use the N-word, and they never talk about race, and they never physically molest anyone, then they’re not racist or sexist. So when I point out that actually, the system of power we live in ensures that all white people are racist, and all men are sexist, because they profit from a system that marginalizes people of color and non-males, they attack me, just as they’ve attacked women of color for centuries to attain their power structure. Whoa! She’s the sexist one. She’s the racist one. Why does she hate me? Yeah, so I make more money because I’m a man, and I have a lot of privilege, and my voice matters in every sphere of life, but I didn’t ask for that. That doesn’t make me racist or sexist. She talks as if men don’t have any problems. I haven’t had a raise in three years! I mean, yeah, I haven’t spoken up for women or done anything constructive to help women or people of color, and I take my privileges without question, and I live happily in my own little bubble, but that doesn’t mean that I profit from their suffering. It’s not my fault they’re marginalized. I didn’t marginalize them, so why should I do anything to help them? Just because I make more money and have access to all the education and resources and housing and jobs. Recently, I was sexually harassed by a man in public on camera, and the news stations posted the video without my permission with the question, do you consider this sexual harassment? This led to a lot of people attacking me and going after me all over social media. This is what patriarchy does. It causes everyone to attack the victim, the one who is most vulnerable. This protects the system of power, which is male sexual dominance. How do we even know she’s telling the truth about sexual harassment? I saw that video in the online reactions from all the men, and yeah, they were threatening rape and violence and death, all while accusing her of overreacting, but just because she’s putting her physical safety on the line to talk about this doesn’t mean she’s right. Their main complaint was that I raised my voice. They questioned my sanity because I spoke up. A patriarchal society wants women to shut up. Okay, so now the next thing that happened was she started a funding campaign to help her out and get her to spread her message. So, okay, so that was interesting. And then what happened was this guy here decided that he was going to start a funding campaign for Hugh Mungus. And so he started a funding campaign on a website devoted to funding such projects, and they shut him down. So then he started another funding campaign, and he raised 130,000 and he’s out there blowing some fucking leaves. Y’all can learn something from your boy Hugh Mungus here. God damn. You know, we got a new president, but doesn’t mean that leaves don’t need to be still picked up. Rudy, how are you feeling right now, dude? I feel loved. I am really, truly grateful. I mean, last weekend I was no trucker, broke down, ready for an eviction. I’m looking out at the sky and I’m thinking, I think I’m kind of screwed today. So I took myself down to a church and I went and prayed. I went and did confession, but my confession didn’t meet the criteria at the church. I swear to God. What does that mean? You see the father stepped out of the confession room. What? He said, oh no, he says, he says, excuse me, we’re going to have to maybe do this after mass. And he walked me to the door and I said, is there a certain way to confess my sin? So maybe I can get a little help from somebody. God, I mean, I’m just asking God for help. And the dude’s like, nah, not here. We don’t want your ass here. I never heard of such a thing. It’s actually really funny. It’s one of those things that make you go, hmm. And then he went out the front door and I waited until I got off the church property and I said, what the F was that? So I went up. So, you know, being humongous, I’m thinking I’m hungry. But I see Taco Bell go over and I’ve got seventy five cents. And I’m thinking, I wonder if I could get a little short on that one. And I’m going, I think I’m going to try another church halfway between the Mexican restaurant, Larson’s Bakery and the church I was going to. I get a call from you. Wow. Are you serious? I swear to God, I am not kidding. That’s actually incredible. I go, hello? I remember you said when I called you, you didn’t know it was me. And you’re like, I swear to God, I’m about to, I’m having a midlife crisis. And then you, like, as if you were speaking to yourself. And then you said, hey, who is this? Do you remember that? I remember that, yeah. And I wasn’t, I thought you were somebody else. Okay. And so you said, I’m packed up because that lady is getting funded and I’m going to fund you. Because it’s not fair how she’s degraded you. And I’m going, you know, I’m going to keep going to that church. Apparently, I’m God’s messenger. I was out of my control the whole time. God, God bless, Papa bless. I’ll do that stuff. Okay, you’re actually ascending to heaven right now, it looks like. I think God is trying to tell us something right now because the sun, there’s a stairway to heaven coming out right from the top left side. Oh, there’s the light. There’s the light. God finally answered your prayers. I really sure have. Ethan, you have. And those across America and around the world, I really want to, I can’t really put it into words other than that I realize that what I’ve learned from others, I’m carrying that message of down with dope, up with hope. I feel like if there was a Bible written today, I almost feel like that story would be in there. Humongous left the church in despair, walked to Taco Bell with 75 cents in his pocket. And as he realized he didn’t have enough for a taco, he got a ring up not from Ethan, but from the spirit of Papa John who worked through him in mysterious ways. And you know what I’m going to do? Is I’m going to go drop 20 an hour, which is a radical underestimate, it’s probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages. If you’re wasting 20 hours a week, you’re wasting 50,000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it, because I’m not going to last nearly as long. And so if your life isn’t everything it could be, you could ask yourself, well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you? You’d be, who knows how much more efficient? 10 times more efficient, 20 times more efficient, that’s the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient, efficient people get. It’s completely, it’s off the charts. Well, and if we all got our act together collectively, and stopped making things worse, because that’s another thing people do all the time, not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse, because they’re spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package. If people stopped really, really trying just to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that. So there’s this weird dynamic that’s part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability, social judgment, both of which are major causes of suffering, and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt. And that’s the thing that’s interesting too, is that, like one of the other things I’ve often asked my undergraduate classes is, you know, there’s this idea that people have, that people have a conscience. And you know what the conscience is, it’s this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something that you know is stupid, telling you that probably you shouldn’t do that stupid thing. You don’t have to listen to it, strangely enough, but you go ahead and do it anyways, and then of course exactly what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happens so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident. Because you know, I knew this was going to happen, I got a warning it was going to happen, and I went and did it anyways. And the funny thing too is that that conscience operates within people and we really don’t understand what the hell that is. So you might say, well what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for ten years? What sort of position might you be in? What sort of family might you have? What sort of relationship might you be able to forge? And you can be bloody sure that a relationship that’s forged on the basis of who you actually are is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than one that’s forged on the basis of who you aren’t. Now of course that means that the person you’re with has to deal with the full force of you and all your ability and your catastrophe and that’s a very very difficult thing to negotiate. But if you do negotiate it, well at least you have something, you have somewhere solid to stand and you have somewhere to live, you have a real life. And it’s a great basis upon which to bring children into the world for example because you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death which is what happens in a tremendously large minority of cases. Well it’s more than that too because, and this is what I’ll close with, and this is why I wanted to introduce Solzhenitsyn’s writings to you. You see, because it isn’t merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you’re going to live out your own genuine being. It isn’t only your fate, it’s the fate of everyone that you’re networked with. And so you know you think well there’s nine billion, seven billion people in the world, we’re going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it’ll decline rapidly, but seven billion people in the world and who are you? You’re just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do but that’s simply not the case. It’s the wrong model because you’re at the center of a network, you’re a node in a network. Of course that’s even more true now that we have social media. You’ll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they’ll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion. And so that’s how you’re connected and the things you do, they’re like dropping a stone in a pond. The ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can’t fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don’t do are far more important than you think. And so if you act that way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that’s better than living a meaningless existence. It’s better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice I can live with no responsibility whatsoever. The price I pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility that’s associated with that. It’s not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path. Now when you say well nihilists suffer dreadfully because there’s no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantage is they have no responsibility. So that’s the payoff and I actually think that’s the motivation. Say well I can’t help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed. It’s like yeah maybe, maybe you’ve just allowed them to collapse because it’s a hell of a lot easier than acting them out. And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr. So that’s a pretty good deal all things considered especially when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world. Well what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th century it’s not just him even though he’s the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society. And if enough people do that then it’s hell. Really. Really. And you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the fortitude to do that and you’ll see exactly what hell is like. And then you can decide if that’s a place you’d like to visit or even more importantly if it’s a place you’d like to visit and take all your family and friends. Because that’s what happened in the 20th century. Thank you.