Solzhenitsyn’s book is maybe one of the most important documents in political history.
People tend to write about the unusual, and ignore the normal, no matter how recently the bizarre became normalized.
As a result, we don’t have as many records of things from the past that reflect the day to day reality.
Just for an example, as a bird photographer among a group of bird photographers, we really don’t have many, if any, pictures of pigeons, starlings, crows or the myriad of little brown birds all over the place, but tend to focus on the rare, bizarre, magnificent or beautiful ones that take effort to find and get a decent photo of.
The Gulag Archipelago is the day to day machinations of a communist society. It is an amazingly powerful read if you are looking for the signs of growing totalitarianism in order to properly estimate your personal, or collective cost-benefit to fighting back against a state, increasingly divorcing itself from the interests of the people in general. More accurately, a power structure that increasingly oppresses the public, rather than solves problems or is an administrator of basis systems for them.
Like reading 1984 today, these books suddenly make sense as our personal experience begins to overlap with the frame of reference of the authors of the books. And no, this isn’t a good thing in terms of what is happening to us. Not having to read a map is good. But having one when you are lost is also good. And that is what these books are.
In this segment, there is a string of descriptions of arbitrary arrests and the reasons given for them. It is a very small sample of the ones in Alexander’s book, which is a very very small sample of the ones that actually took place. But I chose to truncate this file because the last one seems eerily like a string of recent arrests in the UK.
I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide what relationship, if any, these two cases have with each other. Not to mention the other 30 odd arrests every day in the UK for thought crimes. Many of which are posted here, and many more are on X.
President Trump needs to continue to punish those who suppress free speech. No one should visit the UK like you should not visit NYC or Russia with current rulers.