Quotes About Gulag

If Marx was alive during the Stalinist period, he'd be first to be in the gulag.

Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is.

Exploitation is capitalism's most effective naturalized violence, a systemic violence experienced by most of the world, and yet rarely recognized as a form of violence, or a form of violence that you can do something about: We know that capitalism is bad, ruthless even, but we don't believe anything else is better. Capitalism or the Gulag? We choose the former each time.

Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger's case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.

Solzhenitsyn emerged from the grinding misery of the gulag as a fearless man of God whose prophetic witness to the world helped bring down an evil empire.

By the late Stalin period, the right of complaint was so thoroughly a part of this political culture, in which civil law and litigation were frequently meaningless, that there were special mailboxes in the concentration camps of the Gulag labeled, To the Supreme Soviet, To the Council of Ministers, To the Minister of Internal Affairs, and To the Prosecutor General.

Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. "I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage," says the first. "I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying," says the second. "I am here because I got to work on time every day," says the third, "and they charged me with owning a western watch.

Ambiciones irritantemente desproporcionadas, proyectos nobles, ideales resplandecientes se convierten en catástrofe: el socialismo mesiánico engendra el gulag.

One of the major contributions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, was his analysis of the direct causal relationship between the pathology of the Soviet prison-work-camp dependent state (where millions suffered and died) and the almost universal proclivity of the Soviet citizen to falsify his own day-to-day personal experience, deny his own state-induced suffering, and thereby prop up the dictates of the rational, ideology-possessed communist system.

Don't be disgusting. Don't dare me. I majored in disgusting at Gulag Community College. Lucrezia Borgia taught cooking, and Madame Defarge taught knitting. Emperor Nero taught violin and also led the cheerleading squad. I skipped all my classes and failed with distinction.

his [Mayakovsky] genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.

In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare's evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology.

In the Gulag Archipelago there are no heroes or villains. No prince or pauper. It is the most democratic of all societies. Everyone is an inmate.

The reign of terror abated, though not the institutions and practices to which it had given rise: the Gulag was still in place, and tens of thousands of political prisoners still languished in camps and in exile—half of them Ukrainians.

one were seeking a symbolic moment when this transformation was accomplished, a hinge on which post-war Europe's self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Reviewing the English translation in the Guardian, W. L. Webb wrote 'To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.

Kolyma is Auschwitz without the ovens.

Há muito que os comissários do gulag se tinham aposentado, com medalhas e pensões. Nem um único comparecera perante a justiça. A Rússia voltara as costas ao passado. Como podia eu entender? Desde o Holocausto, o meu mundo fizera da memória um dever. A Rússia, tal como a China, optara pelo esquecimento. Era assim que as pessoas sobreviviam, dizia o escritor Shamalov. Uma nação não se construía sobre a verdade.

One might say that romance with revolution died with Solzhenitsyn. The line from Bastille to the gulag is not straight, but the connection is unmistakable. Modern totalitarianism has its roots in 1789. 'The spirit of the French Revolution has always been present in the social life of our country,' said Gorbachev during his visit to France last week. Few attempts at ingratiation have been more true or more damning.

In the end, the number of people killed in the kulak operation was about the same as the number sent to the Gulag (378,326 and 389,070, respectively).

Over a million lives were shortened by exhaustion and disease in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945—as distinct from the Soviet killing fields and the Soviet hunger regions, where some six million people died, about four million of them in the bloodlands. Ninety percent of those who entered the Gulag left it alive. Most of the people who entered German concentration camps (as opposed to the German gas chambers, death pits, and prisoner-of-war camps) also survived.

Thus a Western order that retrospectively mythologized its opposition to Nazism as opposition to the camp universe, and which denounced this too as the ultimate offence of Stalinism, patronised a regime in Spain that was, like the Soviet Union's, based on mass murder and its own gulag.

It was officially known as Kwan-li-so Number 18. That meant Penal Labor Colony in Korean. It was a concentration camp. It was a gulag. It actually was hell, near the Taedong River in North Korea's P'yongan-namdo province.

let me let you in on a little secret as to why the new American gulag is going to be so popular. MSNBC has already done the math on this one: Prison = Entertainment! Now and forever! You

Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.