New at Reason

May 13, 2004

Cathy Young reconsiders Solzhenitsyn.

Comments

|5.13.04 @ 5:40AM|#

"It was a defense of a different kind of collectivism: ethnic, religious, and traditionalist."

Well for many conservatives that is "freedom"; for an example, simply visit the blog of the Brothers Judd sometime.

|5.13.04 @ 7:47AM|#

Um, I thought that's an old news. Vladimir Voinovich articulated all those charges in his "Портрет на фоне мифа" a couple of years back - something Cathy, being a Russian speaker, shoulda known.

|5.13.04 @ 8:52AM|#

Solz's son worked with my wife. He was a total fascist. After the Vermont civil unions ruling, he moved up there to help fight against gay civil rights.

You have to be carefully taught, knowwhatImean.

|5.14.04 @ 12:21PM|#

It's a small step from communist to fascist. He was the former first, and was arrested for saying bad things (in a private code) about Stalin in correspondence with his brother when he was an officier in the Red Army artillery. That was near the end of WW2.

The Red Army was a very brutal institution. Their German counterparts (even in the SS) had a comparitive free speach existance, with lots of crude, caustic, cynical sayings, including caractures of Nazi big-wigs. You couldn't get away with that sort of stuff in the Red Army, where even a hint of cynical behavior would land you in the Gulag.

|5.15.04 @ 7:50AM|#

A Jew-loathing, authoritarian-minded Russian. Stop the presses!

The one time I was foolish enough to discuss politics with a Russian, I let on that I thought the oligarchs had been on the whole good for the country. The conversation ended shortly afterwards with the Russian saying that all of the oligarchs should be arrested, expropriated, tortured, and shot.

He wasn't just some ignorant jerk. He was a graduate engineering student at a high-rank US college (ironically, one established by a 19th century industrialist).

The doctrines have changed, but the political culture has not. It's like Weimar all over again.

Billy Beck|5.15.04 @ 10:10AM|#

On my shelves, Sovietology is the largest single category of organization, stretching six feet through more than sixty titles. In my experience, the matter in question here naturally arises as a point of curiosity when studying this history. To my mind, it's a question of (of course) individual response to culture. What was the difference in a man like Radek?

It's very difficult to say. However, if we are to consider Jews as a distinct culture -- a valid consideration, to my mind, as well as being the general practice of history -- then there can be no two ways about it: the matter of Jewish response to and/or complicity in the Bolshevik Revolution must be considered as specially as Jewish culture in general. This is a legitimate study.

In her Reason article, Smith wonders about American writers and and absolution from "the taint of racism". In a time when schools are locking Mark Twain away in the dark, I know better than to hope for genuinely reasonable response to Solzhenitsyn in this matter.

|5.16.04 @ 2:03AM|#

joe,

I have no tolerance for anti-Gay bigotry but, do you think that this enough to make Solzhenitsyn's son a "total fascist"? Or, perhaps are there other items as well.

|5.16.04 @ 2:16AM|#

Billy Beck,

What is your point (or question) concerning Karl Radek?

|5.16.04 @ 10:29AM|#

Rick,

Plenty of other stories, but I probably shouldn't have smeared the man in this space to begin with, and don't intend to compound my mistake.

Will|5.19.04 @ 7:44AM|#

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Solzhenitsyn was a useful tool for a time, but that time is over.

Let him take his rightful place in the dust-bin of history.