Clarissa had a piece a while ago and a lot of the readers suggested books people read about the Soviet Union and just how truly evil it was.
The first one is "The Gulag Archipelago"
I would appreciate other book recommendations from readers about the Soviet Union and will be putting them up here.
31 comments:
Eugenia Ginzburg's 2-part memoir: Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, based on her own experiences being sent to Siberia during the Stalin era. There's also a decent movie based on this, but it's available in non-US DVD format only.
Ayn Rand's We the Living, set shortly after the Russian Revolution. Better character development than her later novels.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Also, Bitter Waters, by Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov. I reviewed it here:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6966.html
Gulag Archipelago is too damn long and depressing.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
by Simon Sebag Montefiore was pretty good.
Anything by Robert Conquest or Richard Pipes.
If you want to know about the USSR in WW2, anything by David Glantz (and he has written a LOT).
The First Circle and Cancer Ward are also good.
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
12"The Liberators" and "Inside the Aquarium" by Viktor Suvorov.
"We", by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29
The model to "1984", "A Brave New World" (probably), etc.
Freely available here:
https://mises.org/books/we_zamiatin.pdf
Excellent idea, though I wonder if it'll reach those who need to hear it. You can lead an Occupier to water, but you can't make them bath...
Their political demands and their 'logic' are bad enough, but their blindness to history just compounds it. If you've not seen them, search Youtube videos for ex-Soviet citizen confronting people with the truth. Assertions that life is paradise in North Korea, that sort of nonsense.
On the "Gulag Archipelago"-It is important to remember that it is actually a 3-book trilogy. It is has been several years since I read it-but I would describe Book 1 as "Trials and arrests"-Book 2 as set in the camps and Book 3 as hope from the camps and so forth.
I got the least out of Book 1-I thought it was the hardest to understand. I loved Book 2 and 3.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn is about one day in the gulag. You can read it in a few hours. Harrowing how it doesn't matter if the camp is communist or fascist, all authoritarian regimes come down to control.
My favourite line from The Gulag Archipelago was that if Germany had conquered the Soviet Union, the Russian people would have just exchanged the big mustache (Stalin) for the little mustache (Hitler). The philosophy behind the authoritarian regime may have changed, but not the method or the means of enforcement.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn also wrote a novel called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
A People's Tragedy; The Russian Revolution by Orlando Figues.
Excellent background on the Russian People, and how the took power and kept it. Ends where Stalin takes over, so it only gets worse from there...
Echoes of Communism - Collection of essays on life in Communist Romania written by a HS teacher of mine who immigrated from there in the late 70s.
http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Communism-Lessons-American-Choice/dp/1456535080/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352222493&sr=8-1&keywords=echoes+of+communism
It's difficult to beat the Holy Trinity of Solzhenitsyn, Conquest and Pipes, but the books of the Annals Of Communism series from Yale (!) are invaluable as they provide the facts to back up all the important points brought up by the three abovenamed authors. One can look up decrypted Soviet diplomatic cables that PROVE Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, and read transcripts of the meetings of the Supreme Soviet that launched the Great Terror.
My favorite anti-communist book has to be Whittaker Chambers' Witness, however. No anti-communist reading list is complete without it.
Was it Gulag Archipelago which had the scene with all the dignitaries clapping?
I read that once and it was one of the most horrible things I've ever read. I don't think I could stand to read a whole book of that.
A second for Darkness At Noon. Eminently readable and scarier than anything Stevie King ever wrote.
While The Gulag Archipelago is important, it is monstrously long and, if you stick with it, it'll have you wanting to wash a bottle of barbiturates down with a fifth of Rumpie and end it all by the time you're two-thirds of the way in.
On the other hand, if you're ever stuck in some kind of relentlessly happy and cheerful mood and need a buzzkill, Solzhenitsyn is your go-to guy...
One more---I just finished Anna Funder's "Stasiland," which describes her conversations with East Germans--both victims of the regime and agents of the regime--after the Wall came down.
The Black Book of Communism covers Soviet communism along with China and others.
Darkness at Noon has the advantage of a more European view than a Russian one. The Left positive hate it.
Also, here's a clickable map of executions in Stalin's Moscow.
Documentary "Soviet Story".
See http://www.sovietstory.com/
Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick is a great book covering the time of the end of the Soviet Union. Great stories of life under communism.
Nathan Sharansky wrote The Case for Democracy that is not just about Russia but is built from his time there. Pretty good.
The Gulag Archipelago is one of my all time favorites, though I want to hurt some socialists as I read it.
Robert Conquest of course for detailed history which is still readable and not without passion.; Simon Sebag Montefiore's "In the court of the Red Czar" and "Young Stalin" are good - all the more so in that Montefiore is straightforward about the achievements of Stalin and company during WWII without in any way pulling his punches (and he had access not only to archival material but also to children and grandchildren of high Soviet officials). "Young Stalin" shows the monster in the making, together with lesser monsters in the making.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder
"Stasiland"
--Ed
Nadezhda Mandelshtam's "Hope Against Hope." Her husband wrote a poem about Stalin that said his mustache looked like a cockroach. He was promptly shipped off to Siberia to die in the Gulag. Evgenia Ginzberg's memoirs are excellent. Also Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" and "Everything Flows".
+1 for Viktor Suvorov, beginning with The Liberators. Then The Aquarium. Very interesting stuff about life in the Soviet military intelligence, the GRU.
Varlam Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales". Varlam spent about 14 years in the Siberian forced labor camps.
Gulag archipelago is filled with black humor. Its really amazing how the author manages to um... overpower that evil regime with humor. Read that book guys, its not so depressing and gloomy.
Just a little anecdote. In the 1970s I was working at a university in Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Now the students then were really really leftist - they regarded communists as conservatives. Anyway, a delegation went to Russia, Leningrad I do believe, which was still communist, though thawing. Being students they looked around and met up with a Russian student; and all went back to their hotel room. The Russian in doing so was acting illegally, as I say things were thawing. After a while the Russian needed to use the washroom (one per floor) and off he went. And didn't come back. After about 20 minutes one of the Dutch students went down the hall to see if their Russian friend was OK. They didn't find him, but standing in the washroom door was a large KGB officer. They never did see the Russian friend again.
And this was about 1975.
Another anecdote from the Communist days (this is probably made-up): in an East German university, at the end of a class in the compulsory Communism course, the instructress asked if there were any questions. Comrade Moebius got up and asked why after thirty years of scientific socialism (communism) the US was still ahead of East Germany economically. "That's a very good question, Comrade Boebius", the instructress said, "but the answer is rather long so I will defer it to the next class."
At the next class she said nothing about the question. When she asked if there were any questions, another student got up and said, "Yes, Comrade Instructor, my question is, where is Comrade Moebius?"
I am convinced that the compulsory Communism courses, taught by the worst and most obnoxious, usually female, instructors, did more to turn the educated people in Eastern Europe and Russia away from Communism than anything else.
Hey Cap, if you nixed my recommendation for 'Smersh' by Nicola Sinevirsky (real name Mikhail Mondich) because you thought it was a crank post because of the James Bond Smersh, you should know that Ian Fleming based his super-villan outfit on a real organization. Wikipedia has entries for the James Bond Smersh and the real one. If it was for another reason though, no worries.
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