Name: 2017 Personality 13: Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T06:17:55.000Z
Duration: 1 h 41 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago."

(to the students) The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago," and it's by a

a Russian author... a Soviet author named

concentration camp system for a very long time. He had a very hard life.

invaded the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II. 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,

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 the conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful,

and Solzhenitsyn was soldier on Russian front.

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

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,

book about that called "Cancer Ward," which

concentration camp, and then to have cancer,

He wrote a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" first,

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,

a 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 in every possible way you could imagine,

And he was certainly capable of doing such things, because he had already

imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people.

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 of isolated camps distributed across the entire state...

He likened that to a series of islands, and 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.

After that, he spent— he wrote a number of other books which were also—

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 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

Well, Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at

something approximating sixty 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

twenty million, and the high-end bounds are near 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 fifty and a hundred million people. And one of the things that's really surprising to me

and that I think is absolutely reprehensible — absolutely reprehensible — is the fact that

this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West.any of these

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 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 Czarist/Capitalist system. And that the only reason that these criminals existed

was because they had been oppressed -- they were oppressed victims of that system