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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago (book) Videos

Solzhenitsyn

Video below by Gonzalo Lira!

Solzhenitsyn was given eight years in prison: the same years that the English System recently gave to Chris Gibbons, whom I mentioned in my other posts this week, also for thoughtcrime.

This is the best presentation of Solzhenitsyn I have ever heard. Unfortunately, Gonzalo himself died in a sort of Gulag, but this time, not a Russian but a Ukrainian Gulag.

The moralistic passion with which Gonzalo speaks is the same with which I speak! It is amazing how the character is similar among the few Spanish speakers who still believe in patriarchy. I haven’t seen anyone like that for years, at least not speaking my mother tongue, as Gonzalo used to speak it, although in the video above he speaks in English.

‘To live now and not to know this work [The Gulag Archipelago] is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age’. —W.L. Webb.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Daybreak Publishing Gulag Archipelago (book)

Two Hundred Years Together

Many people are discussing Spencer J. Quinn’s review of Solzhenitsyn’s second non-fiction book, Two Hundred Years Together that I was talking about yesterday: a review originally published on Counter-Currents in various instalments.

The truth is that both Solzhenitsyn and Quinn make so many concessions to Christian morality that neither was able to see the truth: only Hitler would have destroyed Stalin’s willing executioners—and I’m tempted to add triple parentheses on those words—if the US and the UK hadn’t intervened.

From the point of view of this site, the two non-fiction books by the Russian author, The Gulag Archipelago and Two Hundred Years Together can serve as the first baby steps to cross the psychological Rubicon. But neither Solzhenitsyn nor Quinn nor the commenters of The Unz Review or Counter-Currents have crossed it. Only those who have already transvalued their values have crossed it.

What helps to finish crossing it are the texts that I collected in the Daybreak Press books. If I finish my series on Game of Thrones perhaps I will include it in my next anti-feminist book, which will supplement what was said in those books.

In short, if you have dealings with normies, do mention those two books by the famous Russian author. But if you already have dealings with white nationalists, it is best to point out the books that I have edited, so that they can go straight ahead to the other side of the river.

Categories
3-eyed crow Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago (book) Neanderthalism Racial right

Explaining my midnight post

Today I woke up shortly after five in the morning because the topic addressed by an Unz Review columnist made me anxious and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I mean ‘Pro-BLM Demonstrations Sweep Across Europe: We’re all living in Amerikwa’ by Guillaume Durocher.

Such collective hysteria (the crucified nigger by evil whites is the New Jesus!), though secular in Europe, is clearly a spawn of Christian ethics that the spiritual children of the French Revolution inherited. Contrary to what conventional historians say, the gospel message has reached its peak in our time, not in the 13th century, even though this climax has occurred in the form of secular values.

No one has grasped the reason for my obsession with the figure of the fisher king looming in the Game of Thrones finale, about which I added something else at midnight. As I have tried to explain in The Fair Race, if the white man reclaims his story he would be cured of the neo-Christianity that is killing him axiologically. I am referring as much to the distant past that almost nobody knows (the real history of Christianity from Caligula to Charlemagne) to the Holocaust of 20th century’s gentiles that nobody talks about because the media hides it from us.

In other words: only a Bran capable of seeing real history has developed the necessary empathy to save the kingdoms of Westeros, and I don’t think that many of the racialists know their true story. From what they say in their forums, it is more than clear that the history books they have read were written by people who sleep in the matrix that controls them.

So I recommend Solzhenitsyn’s book to normies who have never read stories of the victims of the Russian Holocaust, perpetrated by Lenin and Stalin’s willing executioners. A banned commenter who describes himself as ‘a little Russian’ and a Stalin admirer, for example, wanted to post a comment today. He will continue to be banned as long as he continues to admire Stalin or maintain that it was good to ritually sacrifice children, as was done in the historical past (the psychoclass of this banned commenter is exactly the opposite of the psychoclass of Bran).

People who want to comment on this blog must develop the empathy of the fisher king. And that can only be done through actual suffering in the coming decades, and from that suffering finally seeing the tragic past of mankind. Only by looking at our tragic pasts—the actual stories I insist: not what can be read in the history books authored by normies—do we develop proper empathy to save Westeros.

But I’m going to be frank: I don’t think most of the visitors to this site will read the literature to see the past that I recommend up in the sidebar. So sometimes it makes me want to close the comments section and only have contact with the tree of the past with which I am fused.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Eugenics Evil Franklin D. Roosevelt Gulag Archipelago (book) Holocaust Holodomor Joseph Stalin Red terror Third Reich Winston Churchill

Love Germania. Hate the US. – II

1918

With Lenin, in 1918 the Bolsheviks initiated a true Holocaust, a massive genocide that would continue until three years after Stalin’s death. Those who haven’t read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s book about the genocide of tens of millions of goyim in the archipelago of forced labour and extermination camps of the Gulag (see map below) also ignore that the Jews were involved to the core (see also Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together). It isn’t enough to know the figures: it is imperative to read the testimonies of the 250 survivors that Solzhenitsyn collects in order to feel the pathos of this Russian Holocaust (I recommend the abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago to English speakers).

The honest Jew Ron Unz recently said: ‘In per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe’.
 
1932

The Ukrainian Holocaust or Holodomor, which would continue until the following year, killed more Ukrainians than the propaganda figure of 6 million holocausted Jews with which the MSM media has deceived the white man. After this true Holocaust of goyim, among the feminised Europeans only the Germans reacted:
 
1933

January 30: President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. Hitler was given the Chancellorship right after the Jewish Bolsheviks deliberately starved at least six million Ukrainians to death. (Compare this figure to the figure in the paragraph above. What chutzpah! And the stupid goyim, loyal cattle of the Jews, still swallow it!) Can there be any real doubt that the threat of the Bolshevik terror influenced both the German voters and the decision to give Hitler the Chancellorship? (The Holocaust exposed by Solzhenitsyn has never been consistently dramatised in films or TV documentaries, not even after a century! It would break their little narrative.)

March 5: The National Socialist Party gets 44 percent of the votes in the elections to the German Parliament.

August 12: A spiritual heir to the philo-Semite Cromwell, Winston Churchill, before becoming prime minister begins to sow discord against the German state in a public speech.

December 20: Eugenics begins to be put into practice. The German government announces the sterilisation of 400,000 residents for hereditary defects. (For an introduction to eugenics, and the SS doctrine about Nordicism see: here.)
 
1934

February 6: In Paris, right-wing groups gather in front of the National Assembly in a frustrated coup attempt against the French Third Republic. (Much of the egalitarian ideology that is destroying the white race and the West had come out of the nefarious French Revolution.)
 
1935

February 26: Hitler orders to create the Luftwaffe, ignoring the unfair Treaty of Versailles.

December 12: SS leader Heinrich Himmler creates the Lebensborn Program, aimed at increasing the births of Aryan children: the diametrically opposite of what is happening across the West today (in the London of this century, for example, mass street propaganda encourages white women to have black husbands).
 
1936

November 3: Roosevelt achieves a landslide victory in his re-election in the US, which cannot but reflect that the American people deserve the type of leaders they choose, and deserve to get them good and hard!
 
1937

April 28: The Luftwaffe bombs Guernica in Spain. Pablo Picasso lied, claiming that the bombing inspired the painting of the same name. (Picasso was not in Guernica. Alice Miller suggests that the famous painting had as ferment the experience of a three-year-old Pablo in the arms of his father who was running scared; his eyes recorded the tremendous earthquake of 1884 in Malaga. José María Juarranz, a scholar of Picasso agrees with this interpretation. See Miller’s insightful book The Untouched Key.)

November 5: Hitler explains his Lebensraum plan for Eastern Europe at a secret meeting at the Reich Chancellery. Unlike today’s cucked racialists, those who dreamed of a new Germania knew that the race needed an entire continent to flourish.
 
1938

October 30: The radio broadcast of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds unleashes panic in the Americans, who believe all the bullshit they hear on MSM as fantastic as it is including propaganda against National Socialist Germany, the noblest nation the West has produced.

November 9: On the Night of Broken Glass, Jewish shops and synagogues are looted—which whites on the other side of the Atlantic should have imitated but, so addicted to their (((Bible))), regarded the Jews as the chosen people.
 
1939

February 27: France and England recognise the Spanish government of Francisco Franco.

March 15: Czechoslovakia ceases to exist as a state after the occupation of the rest of Bohemia and Moravia by German troops.

May 17: Sweden, Norway and Finland rejected German offers of non-aggression pacts. (Apparently, it is not enough to be pure Aryan: You must be noble in spirit like those Germans who dreamed of Germania.)

September 1: Hitler invades Poland and extremely cucked England declares war on Germany. The Second World War begins.

December 15: The romantic film Gone with the Wind is released in the United States. Who would have guessed that the anti-German wind that was already blowing those years would produce a suicidal zeitgeist that would blow away not only the Old South, but the entire American nation in the following decades?
 
1940

January 4: Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, takes control of the German war industry.

May 10: British Prime Minister resigns, Neville Chamberlain, and is replaced by Winston Churchill, who would intensify the anti-German winds. (After the war, such anti-white winds would also blow away across the UK, including Scotland and Ireland. Remember what I said above about ubiquitous propaganda in Britain to promote mixed couples between monkeys and English roses. Nowadays, the ethnic death-wish of brainwashed Anglo-Saxons seems almost absolute.)

May 14: The Dutch army surrenders after an intense bombardment of Rotterdam.

June 14: German troops occupy Paris (a symbolic place for the West is the city where, by emancipating the Jews, the incredibly imbecile Napoleon Bonaparte opened Pandora’s box).

August 3-6: Stalin annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the USSR (compared to the handsome Aryan Tsar and his beautiful family that the kike revolution had assassinated, Stalin looks like a fucking mudblood).

October 16: The most treacherous and vile nation in the entire world, the United States of America, recruits 16 million sucker soldiers to prevent Germania from being born if they conquer the lands of Lenin and Stalin’s (((willing executioners))).
 
1941

June 22: Germany invades the Soviet Union.

December 7: The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
 
1942

January 20: The Berlin government and the SS launch a plan to expel Jews from Europe. The gringos, who have practiced fellatio on the god of the Jews since 1776—and even before, since the times of John Winthrop—were horrified and continue to be horrified until 2020!

October 3: Pius XII criticises the racial restrictions on marriages dictated by the National Socialists. (Unlike the eugenics that healthy Judaism practices, dysgenics reigns in sick Christianity. In Greco-Roman times Whites had a higher IQ than that of the Jews. It had been precisely Christian dysgenics throughout the centuries that not only matched the IQs after the Middle Ages, but nowadays the Jew surpasses the Aryan in IQ!)
 
1943

April 26: Thousands of Swedish anti-fascists protest against a National Socialist congress in the royal burial mounds at Uppsala. (Apparently, many Swedes had already cucked since then, even before Jewry’s influence over their media became overwhelming.)

April 29: As Christianity and the JQ are two sides of the same coin, Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, leader of the church resistance to National Socialism, is arrested and then hanged in the Flossenburg concentration camp.
 
1944

January 21: The Soviet Union (remember that the USSR had penalized anti-Semites with capital punishment), aided indirectly by the Judaised US, breaks the siege of Leningrad.
 
1945

______ 卐 ______

September 2024 Note:

I removed the following quote because I will be incorporating it into the Summer 1945 series.

Categories
Film Gulag Archipelago (book) Red terror

Zero-budget movies about the Gulag

From minute 40 to 43 Michael Kingsbury explains exactly what we have been saying this month: Whites need a very specific story, and Kingsbury wisely states which story should it be: a tragic story, like the Gulag that killed dozens of millions of whites.

https://youtu.be/aHSsKXFNbhg

Decades ago I was very naïve. I could not figure out why, in the middle of the Cold War, Kissinger and Nixon did not ask Hollywood to make films about the Gulag in order to win the cultural war that was already taking place in the West. I knew nothing about the Jewish question, let alone that whites were behaving like accomplices of the Jews. (Recall the phone call between Nixon and Billy Graham in which they worried that the media was controlled by Jewry but, from the presidential chair and the pulpit, they did nothing to solve the problem.)

Now I know that both Christians and secular whites are involved not only in the empowerment of Jewry, but in the internalisation of a foundation myth that diabolises the white race. What I did not understand in the past, times when I told people that the media feeds us with ‘a hundred films and documentaries about the Holocaust and zero about the Gulag’, I understand now.

Kingsbury is right in what he says, as I pointed out above, from the 40th to the 43rd minutes. That is why I place so much emphasis on Hellstorm, a true holocaust of Germans that even the so-called white nationalists in North America don’t want to see, apparently because those facts put their dear nation at the level of the USSR of Stalin.

The white man, compassionate by nature, must radically change the story he tells himself. And what better way that, instead of Game of Thrones fantasies, tell stories about real events of the 20th century: events that the System has been hiding for a century (according to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag system started in 1918 and ended a couple of years before the year I was born).

No one wanted to sponsor Kingsbury for his Gulag films. The three films he made were practically zero-budget movies. It reminds me the conditions in which I am also forced to work.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Evil Gulag Archipelago (book) Psychiatry

The nature of evil:

The self-righteousness of (((Viktor Frankl)))

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of my books:
 
It would seem that in this series on psychiatry I portray psychiatrists as the nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: one of the coldest villains, yet of softest voice, that has seen the film industry. But that is Hollywood; reality is not like a movie where the villain possess a perfect consciousness of the evil she does, so much so that the spectator becomes excited when Jack Nicholson throws himself to the nurse’s neck to strangulate her. Alienists are not Ratched, nor my objective to film them as such.

Evil is not to do evil for the sake of evil. Evil is to believe that the good is being done, it is the faith with a smile, the educated dogma untouched by doubt, the ideology with charisma. It was an educated and preoccupied theology with saving souls what moved the inquisitors to burn countless women labelled ‘witches’. It was an ideology with an enlightened smile what moved the Jacobins to decapitate not only blond aristocrats, but also thousands of simple citizens. It was the dogma of a philosopher that half humanity took as its second Messiah what moved the artificers of the Gulag Holocaust. How many more souls have not been destroyed or driven mad by other men so well-intentioned as the psychiatrists? Because it is the belief that the identified child by the parents has to be ‘treated’ what moves them to re-victimize children and teenagers condemning them to the hells of panic.

To be convinced of one’s own rectitude is a notion of evil not yet accepted by common sense, a notion about which we human beings have to ponder about. Not even the immortals seem to know it, not a Homer nor a Dante nor a Shakespeare. Solzhenitsyn wrote:

Just how are we to understand [evil]? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behaviour is this? Do such people really exist?

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: ‘I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I will drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!’ Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.

Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology…

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then, do we dare to insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago…

That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear. [1]

Sixty million were killed by Stalin’s (((willing executioners))).[2] But Solzhenitsyn’s vision of evil can be also illustrated through psychiatric practice.

Electroshock, that some psychiatrists use in their private offices, artificially produces an epileptic seizure so severe that some decades ago, when the body was not tied up and paralyzed with drugs, the violent muscular spasm occasionally broke the patient’s vertebrae. At present, in the subsequent instants of electroshock the EEG waves become temporarily flat, exactly what happens in brain death. And what about its therapeutic effects? It has been demonstrated that electroshock produces memory loss, in other words: brain damage. I obtained the information of this paragraph from a book by a psychiatrist who denounces the crimes of his profession.[3] But despite this denunciation and numerous protests from those who have been injured in their memories, in the United States thousands of persons are exposed to electroshock each year.

For the psychiatrist to openly say he injures a healthy brain it is evident that, as Solzhenitsyn says, he has an ideology: he is convinced that what he does is good and necessary. Just remember Dr. Massini’s letter about Julie. He re-victimized the mentally sane Julie by committing her to the psychiatric ward with the cleanest conscience. To mercenary bring oneself on the side of an abusive father, which is a reprobate act for us, for this physician’s eyes was so perfectly natural that he left it on the paper so that future generations may judge him.

That psychiatrists behave towards the children that their parents bring to them as third-class citizens is attested when pointing out the fact that they don’t warn them about the risk that the ingestion of psychiatric drugs carries within. Only psychiatric critics know that neuroleptics are potent neurotoxins that affect brain cells, and that those under this drug suffer from tardive dyskinesia, a permanent and irreversible neurological disorder.

But the ultimate truth is that neuroleptics don’t mend diseases: they cause diseases. This is so true that even a textbook of psychiatry confesses that ‘antipsychotic drugs have been termed “neuroleptics”, in that these drugs’ actions imitate a neurological disease’.[4] The supposed ‘antipsychotic’ effect of the neuroleptic is actually a state of emotional indifference. The individuals under this drug become lethargic, they become more docile and manageable for the family and the psychiatrist hired by them. In fact, this stupor effect has been called chemical straightjacket and even chemical lobotomy. Peter Sterling, neuroanatomist of the University of Pennsylvania wrote:

At any rate, a psychiatrist would be hard-put to distinguish a lobotomized patient from one treated with chlorpromazine [a neuroleptic]. [5]

Surgical lobotomy cuts off the fibbers that come and go from the frontal lobes; chemical lobotomy produced by neuroleptics disables the fibbers that go to these lobules. This iatrogenic zeal is found even in the most beloved psychiatrists and considered the most humane. How pertinent it is to quote Viktor Frankl whom twenty-nine universities conferred titles of doctor honoris causa:

In my department at the Vienna Polyclinic, we use drugs, and we use electro-convulsive treatment [electroshock]. I have signed the authorization for lobotomies without having cause to regret it. In a few cases, I have even carried out transorbital lobotomy. However, I promise you that the human dignity of our patients is not violated in this way… What matters is not a technique or therapeutic approach as such, be it drug treatment or shock treatment, but the spirit in which it is being carried out [my italics]. [6]

The city of Austin awarded Viktor Frankl as ‘Honorary Citizen of the Capital of Texas’ in 1976. Frankl’s words are a perfect paradigm of the Solzhenitsyn vision of evil: if a dude’s spirit or intentions are good, his actions have to be good.

Frankl, a so-called victim of the Nazis in Auschwitz (if he was a true victim the Nazis would have killed him), once in power committed terrible atrocities, always convinced of his own rectitude. It goes without saying that, from the patient’s view, it is irrelevant that Frankl claimed to be well-meaning; what he did to him was mutilation. (Psychosurgery such as lobotomy means to operate perfectly healthy brains of those unfortunate to fall into the hands of psychiatrists like Frankl. On the other hand, neurosurgery means to operate genuinely sick brains like one with a cancerous tumour. Again, the pseudo-science of psychiatry should not be confused with neurological science.)

It is very telling that Frankl promises that his patients’ dignity, whose healthy brains were mutilated, was not violated. This is a classic rhetorical device in the psychiatric profession. Obviously the only one who can pronounce this judgement is the so-called patient, but our society has allowed that his inquisitor to be the one who talks in his name. Not to let talk someone who shouts ‘Don’t mutilate my brain!’ and to say the opposite to public opinion, ‘The human dignity of my patient is not violated’ is what George Orwell called a black-white use of language. [7]

Of course, Frankl wouldn’t have performed his dignified surgical lobotomies if the broader gentile society wouldn’t have granted him tremendous inquisitorial power.
 
___________

[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag archipelago (Harvill Press, 1999), pp. 77f.

[2] See ‘The Sixty Million: Jews & Bolshevism’ by Dara Halley-James (Counter-Currents, August 4, 2016).

[3] Toxic psychiatry (op. cit.), p. 195.

[4] Quoted in ibid., p. 68.

[5] Quoted in ibid., p. 57. Dr. Breggin talks about the functional equivalence between psychical lobotomy and chemical lobotomy in chapter 3.

[6] Quoted in Thomas Szasz, The myth of psychotherapy: mental healing as religion, rhetoric and repression (Syracuse University Press, 1988), p. 205. Frankl’s words originally appeared in Encounter (November 1969), p. 56.

[7] In George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen eighty-four the blackwhite slogans of the party were: ‘War is peace’, ‘Freedom is slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is strength’.

Categories
Axiology Gulag Archipelago (book) Real men William Pierce

Axiological revisionism

‘Whenever referring to modern history the line is drawn: we live in the post-war period. For the most part the lines on the maps, the institutions and more importantly how we define our era as a society—all find their origins in World War II’ said a vlogger in a video I embedded here last Thursday.
I hope I’ll have the textual transcript of the whole audio by the weekend. It is pivotal to understand the current evil paradigm that has been destroying the white race since I was a child.
It is so important actually that I must reiterate what I have said elsewhere: Getting the record straight about what really happened in that war should be #1 priority in racialist circles. And getting the record straight about what really was National Socialism should be equally prioritised.
As far as I know Carolyn Yeager is the only one that theoretically has this approach. But she’s a woman, and as she has made it perfectly clear, she doesn’t want to be associated with my ‘extremism, i.e., murder and mayhem, Viking style’. I cannot blame Carolyn as white nationalist males are as distant from Himmler’s SS as is this woman.
These tweets by Young White Family hit the nail:

• ‘The WN meme that the Nazis dindu nuffin and dindu mass grave killings is ridiculous and goes against the violent attitude we need to have.’
• ‘100 Dylan Roofs and the JewSA would crumble. 100,000 peaceful whiners and enemies are still laughing at us.’
• ‘Nearly every White Nationalist info source is cleverly scripted towards re-pacifying Whites into the Christian, pro “justice system” fold.’
• ‘So sick of the whining and aggrandizement of Jews like they’re supermen. It’s White traitors and our own weakness that’s the main problem.’
• ‘There’s enough WNs right now to take down the system if they had balls, not blogs.’
• ‘White people won’t be saved by YouTube videos. It’s going to take White men who kill enemies and cause more ppl to fear them than the gov’t.’
• ‘If WNs operated more like ISIS instead of complaining about them, we’d be noteworthy, and not a pathetic bunch of politicking wannabes.’
• ‘Wahhh, you support genocide, you’re anti-White and bad’ – said the WN fag pussy. Whites won’t survive if they don’t genocide non-Whites.

An axiological soulmate! Conversely, in ‘Against Vantardism’ Hunter Wallace published a pic of Dylan Roof as an example of a ‘vanatrdist’. But the only retarded here are those nationalists who simply cannot grasp the truth in the sentence ‘A hundred Dylan Roofs and the JewSA would crumble. 100,000 peaceful whiners and our enemies are still laughing at us.’
Don’t take me wrong. I am not advocating violence right now because I am certain that the dollar will crash and, when it does, the System will start to crumble. Even William Pierce did not recommend violence to his listeners, though he never condemned it either (see for example what Pierce wrote about Bob Mathews).
Wallace’s stance is refuted in this video, where he was constantly interrupted by the crying of a child. But of course: these guys admit women with small children in their conferences! Compare them not only with the real Nazis but with the white warriors of yore.
Today’s nationalists are still thinking like civilians, not as freedom fighters. But going back to the point I was making at the beginning of this entry, last October a Counter-Currents article advised ‘Not Starting with Revisionism’.
gulagThe exact opposite is the truth. As I have said many times, if Anglo-Saxons don’t atone for the Holocaust they committed on the Germans, their little race will go extinct. A good starting point for anti-Nazi normies who still gravitate around the current narrative about the Second World War is this abridged book.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn David Irving Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Gulag Archipelago (book) Holocaust Red terror

Holohoax “hoax”?

In the previous post I linked to an article where Andrew Anglin steamrolled a spineless coward in the white nationalist movement, Colin Liddell. Today Greg Johnson has, again, criticized Anglin. I am tired of this debate but must clarify something about what Johnson said on the so-called Jewish holocaust. Making mock of Anglin’s term he wrote:

The “Holohoax” hoax

Both Anglin and [Alex] Linder stridently assert that (1) the Holocaust is a hoax, and (2) this hoax is the foundation of Jewish power today, such that undermining the orthodox Holocaust story will undermine Jewish power.

I think that both claims are false.

First, even if one deducts all the falsehoods and exaggerations so ably debunked by revisionists, there is still Holocaust enough for Jewish purposes.

While I thoroughly agree with Anglin and Linder that the message for the masses must be boiled down to a mere bone, we bookworms may have the luxury to split hairs on historical matters. As I have tried to convey by the end of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour we still have to rely on a yet-to-be published study by David Irving on Himmler (for the moment see here) to guess what exactly happened to the Jews in the Second World War. But my central point in The Fair Race was clear: whatever happened to them—although one thing is clear: the six million figure is completely bogus—the Jewish holocaust story is still a hoax.

A hoax: because the current narrative is that only the Germans committed crimes during the war. It’s a lie by omission because, as Irmin Vinson says, in almost any war one side can be dishonestly demonized even by a truthful enumeration of its crimes if the crimes of its adversaries are suppressed. I have said it many times and I must iterate again: The most relevant information I have found in my adult life is the discovery that the System lied to me about what really happened before, during and after the Second World War. I’ll never tire to repeat that what the Allies did in times of peace was incomparably more monstrous than the crimes attributed to the Germans in times of war—precisely because it was done in times of peace.

The trouble not only with Liddell and Johnson but with the rest of the effete, non-NS approaches of white nationalism is that they avoid the subject that morally the Germans had the higher ground compared to the Allied forces. Every time anybody mentions the fate of the Jews during the war a highly red-pilled man should immediately jump with reliable sources demonstrating that the Allies committed tenfold atrocities in times of peace compared to the (bogus) six-million figure in times of war. On page 178 of the abridged edition of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn cites the estimates of a professor of statistics calculating in more than sixty million the number of lives lost as a result of internal repression from the October Revolution to 1959.

gulagWhen Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago was published W.L. Webb said, “To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool.” Are the non-NS wing of white nationalists historical fools? If they follow the System narrative of Jewish victimology they certainly are. The tougher type, the national socialists, should read not only the abridged version of the Archipelago but use such data every time the enemy shouts “Jewish holocaust!” to undermine white preservation. In his 1998 biography of Solzhenitsyn, D.H. Thomas says that the figures that Solzhenitsyn cites have not been refuted, and on pages 442-443 he adds a table about the causes of death of the Holocaust perpetrated on Russians that dwarfs the so-called Jewish holocaust:

  • 1917-1921 – Shooting, tortures – 6 to 12 millions

Note that Lenin was under charge then, and that even those four years comprise a figure larger than the “holocaust” attributed to the Germans.

  • 1922-1923 – Famine in the Volga region and other areas – 7.5 to 13 millions
  • 1922-1928 – Destruction of the old social classes, the clergy and believers – 2.3 millions
  • 1929-1933 – Liquidation of the kulaks, organized famine – 16 millions
  • 1934-1941 – Mass executions in prisons and camps, starvation in camps – 7 millions
  • 1941-1942 – Destruction of zeks through hunger and overwork – 7.5 millions
  • 1943-1945 – Death in Stalin’s wartime camps – 5 millions
  • 1946-1953 – Death in Stalin’s camps after the war – 6 million

The real six million! But if you add the other years the figure is about a tenfold of the crimes attributed to the Germans (keyword: attributed).

Furthermore, we still have to add the figures of still another Holocaust, this one perpetrated on Germans by Eisenhower and other Allied forces in 1945-1947, the subject of Tom Goodrich’s book Hellstorm.

banned sculpture

Incidentally, a documentary on the Hellstorm Holocaust perpetrated even against civilian Germans is coming soon (YouTube clip here).

Right: A statue of a Soviet soldier raping a pregnant German as he holds a gun to her head.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Alice Miller Arthur C. Clarke Gulag Archipelago (book) Lloyd deMause Maxfield Parrish Red terror

Ten books that changed my mind


1. Maxfield Parrish Poster Book

2. The Sickle

3. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry

4. Childhood’s End

5. A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology

6. The Relentless Question

7. Final Analysis

8. The Gulag Archipelago

9. For Your Own Good

10. The Emotional Life of Nations

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Communism Evil Gulag Archipelago (book) Joseph Stalin Moscow Red terror Socrates Vladimir Lenin

The Gulag Archipelago

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
8.- The Gulag Archipelago
(read in 1999)


The Gulag Archipelago, The Harvill Press, 1999. Abridged by Edward Ericson. No ellipsis added between excerpts:



Foreword to the Abridgement

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accepted Professor Ericson’s suggestion to create a one-volume abridgement of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn


Introduction

For a few decades the word Holocaust has served us well as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. In recent years a second such shorthand term has entered our working vocabulary: Gulag. This term comes to us not from a host of witness but from one lone man: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose very name has become a household word around the world.

Were The Gulag Archipelago to be even more widely read than it has been, it would, I believe, make an indelible impression on the modern mind and have a salutary effect on the whole world. Here we have the greatest horror story of human history—in quantitative terms, at least (the comparable toll in China having not yet been calculated)—and, although it happened during our lifetime, most of us do not even know about it.

This work was written especially for future generations of Russians. It is these readers in particular who need to know, in as much detail as possible, the truth of their history. This abridged text is designed for the general reader, not for the scholar.

At Solzhenitsyn’s own suggestion, I have eliminated much of his personal story, though parts of it I treasure too much to drop.

Needless to say, I take responsibility for any errors of omission or commission. I hope only that any mistakes which I have made do not interfere with the transmission of Solzhenitsyn’s words to an audience which I believe desperately needs to hear them.

Edward Ericson


Author’s Note

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described.

This book could never have been created by one person alone. In addition to what I myself was able to take away from the Archipelago—on the skin of my back, and with my eyes and ears—material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and letters by 227 witness, whose names were to have been listed here.

What I here express to them is not personal gratitude, because this is our common, collective monument to all those who were tortured and murdered.


Chapter 1: “Arrest”

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? At ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they’ve never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.” The gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours. And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of the locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child. The “jurists” dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.

For those left behind after the arrest there is the long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life. And the attempts to go and deliver food parcels. And this means once and for all: “No right to correspondence”—and that almost certain means: “Has been shot.”

They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest—just let him try! They’ll take you right off the operating table—as they took N.M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer—and drag you off to a cell, as they did him, half-alive and all bloody.

And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they’ll put me in too.” (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.) The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake. They’ll set things straight and let me out!” Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe he was guilty…?” But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

Once a person was arrested he was never released. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. (For, after all, we get no news from that other world, and we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse.)

I myself lugged a fifth suitcase with no great joy since it contained my diaries and literary works, which were being used as evidence against me. My cellmates—tankmen in soft black helmets—hid nothing. They were three honest, openhearted soldiers—people of a kind I had become attached to during the war years because I myself was more complex and worse. All three had been officers.

“Out for toilet call! Hands behind your backs!”

I was bursting with indignation that some ignoramus of a master sergeant dared to give orders to us officers: “Hands behind your backs!” But the tank officers put their hands behind them and I followed suit.

Back of the barn was a small square area in which the snow had been all trampled down but had not yet melted. It was soiled all over with human feces, so densely scattered over the whole square that it was difficult to find a spot to place one’s two feet and squat. However, we spread ourselves about and the five of us did squat down. Two machine gunners grimly pointed their machine pistols at us as we squatted, and before a minute had passed the master sergeant brusquely urged us on:

“Come on, hurry it up! With us they do it quickly!”


Chapter 2: “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System”

Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one not even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good River Ob, which drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and me as well) committed no crime more heinous than this. And after it there was the wave of 1944 to 1946. But in this wave, too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote no memoirs.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated people, around whom were many who had been wounded and remained in the cities… and what a lot of them had pen in hand!

It is well known that any organ withers away if it is not used. Therefore, if we know that the Soviet security organs, or Organs (and they christened themselves with this vile word), praised and exalted above all living things, have not died off even to the extent of one single tentacle, but, instead have grown new ones and strengthened their muscles—it is easy to deduce that they have had constant exercise. This action was, in fact, explained openly (Latsis, in the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918):

“We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeois class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of Red Terror.”

A decree of the defense Council on February 15, 1919 (the meeting was evidently presided over by Lenin), suggest that the Cheka and the NKVD take hostages among the peasants of those regions where “the cleaning of snow from the railroads does not proceed quite satisfactorily” and noted that “these hostages be executed if the cleaning is not completed.” In other words, free people were simply arrested and executed immediately…

The practice of arresting students began in 1921. In the spring of 1922 the Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were held, following by the execution of those who had publicized the Patriarch’s appeal. Metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children. In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code.

In 1929, also, those historians who had not been sent abroad in time were arrested… It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other’s presence—who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water. One gold piece for a cup of water!

In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave (it was an ocean) swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system or even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with in all Russian history. It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe.

This wave was also distinct from all those which preceded it because no one fused about with taking the head of the family first and then working out what to do with the rest of the family. On the contrary, in this wave they burned out whole nests, whole families, from the start; and they watched jealously to be sure that none of the children—fourteen, ten, even six year old— got away: to the last scrapings, all had to go the same road, to the same common destruction. (This was the first such experiment—at least in modern history. It was subsequently repeated by Hitler with the Jews.)

In 1941 the Germans went round Tagnrog, cutting it off so swiftly that prisoners were left in freight wagons at the railway station where they had been brought to be evacuated. What should one do with them? Certainly not set them free nor leave them to the Germans. Oil tank trucks were rushed to the station, and the wagons were drenched with oil and set on fire. All the prisoners were burned alive.


Chapter 3: “The Interrogation”

What had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catharine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles—not by one scoundrel alone, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

In 1952 Anna Skripnikova was undergoing her fifth imprisonment, and Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her:

“The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That’s too low you bitch! We’re going to drive it up to 340 so you’ll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We’ll just not let you sleep.”

She was in her fifties at the time. And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: “Open your eyes or I’ll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up.”

As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night. And there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners. A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood begin to ooze through your pores.

Then in the years 1937-1938, in view of the extraordinary situation prevailing (the specified millions of admissions to the Archipelago had to be ground through the apparatus of individual interrogation in specified, limited periods, something which had simply not happened in the mass waves of kulaks and nationalities), interrogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis, at their own discretion. For the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken.

In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutimskaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from. Six days! Just try to sit that way for six hours! People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator’s office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four hours. (The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself in one way or another—this was an organized system; watch was kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in shifts.) What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such treatment? It was a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened? Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. Watch shows that the method also worked well on proud people.

Then there is the method of simply compelling the prisoner to stand there, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.

Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in medieval times: They did not understand how narrow are the limits within which a human being can preserve his personality intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright, light terror, and the unknown—what other tortures are needed?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own “I.” (As in Chekov’s “I Want to Sleep,” but there it was much easier, for there the girl could lie down and slip into lapses of consciousness, which even in just a minute could revive and refresh the brain.) A person deprived of sleep acts half-consciously or altogether unconsciously, so that his testimony cannot be held against him.

Sometimes, as a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.) Sleeplessness became the universal method of the Organs. The prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute. Whoever was undergoing interrogation got no sleep for at least five days and nights. The above method was further implemented by an assembly line of interrogators. Not only were you not allowed to sleep, but for three or four days shifts of interrogators kept up a continuous interrogation.

As long ago as 1933 this was one of the ways they tortured S.A. Chebotaryev in the Khabarovsk GPU. They locked him in a concrete alcove in such a way that he could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, not turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water into his scalp—a classic torture—which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours. It was awful enough at any rate for him to lose consciousness, and he was discovered the next day apparently dead. He came to on a hospital cot. They had brought him out of his faint with spirits of ammonia, caffeine, and body massage. At first he had no recollection of where he had been, or what happened. For a whole month he was useless for interrogation.

[The] bridling, also known as “the swan dive”: This was a Sukhanovka method—also used in Archangel, where the interrogator Ivkov applied it in 1940. A lone piece of rough toweling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking—and without water and food for two days!

Is it necessary to go on with the list?


Chapter 4. “The bluecaps”

“Just give us a person and we will create a case!” That was what many of them say jokingly, and it was their slogan. What we think of torture they think of as a good work. The wife of the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Project) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he confessed.”

You have a power over all the people in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater than that of the military commander, or factory director, or secretary of the district Communist Party. These men control people’s military or official duties, wages, reputations, but you control people’s freedom. From the moment you don that heavenly blue service cap, you stand higher than the publicly acknowledged power.

The girl is blushing all over and in tears. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the case,” she protests. “Yes, it does, speak up!” If you want, she’ll demonstrate with her body. She has no way out. In your hands you hold the punishment cell and her prison term.

To know what it meant to be a bluecap one had to experience it! Anything you saw was yours! [But] let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” Twenty-year-olds, we marched in the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of futures lay ahead.

It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It certainly didn’t derive from the lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task.

Still, some of us were recruited at that time, and I think that if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken everybody’s resistance. So I would like to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD’s officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself! Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behavior is this?

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I will drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then, do we dare to insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear…

In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke with anger here. The fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t touch us. That would be “digging the past.”

Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would become one-quarter of a million. Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.


Chapter 5: “First Cell, First Love”

How is one to take the title of this chapter? Out of all the cells you have been in, your first cell is a very special one. All your life you will remember it… those days when you rethought your entire life. But it was not the dirty floor, nor the murky walls, nor the odor of the latrine bucket that you loved. For a week or a month you had been an abandoned waif, alone among enemies, and you had already said good-bye to reason and to life; and you had already tried to kill yourself by “falling” from the radiator in such a way as to smash your brains against the iron cone of the valve. Then all of a sudden you are alive again. And reason returned to you.

And that was the purpose of silent Sukhanovka: to leave the prisoner not a single moment for sleep, not a single stolen moment for privacy. You were always being watched and always in their power. But if you endured the whole duel with insanity and all the trials and loneliness, and had stood firm, you deserved your first cell! And now when you got into it, your soul would heal.

I had been dueling for four days with the interrogator, when the jailer, having waited until I lay down to sleep in my blindingly lit box, began to unlock my door. I heard him all right, but before he could say: “Get up! Interrogation!” I wanted to lie for another three-hundredths of a second. One night of undisturbed sleep was more important than all the fates on earth! And I lay there. Interrogation still pending over me, but how far it had retreated!

And there was no reason to be bored with my companions. They were people to listen and people with whom to compare notes. The old fellow with lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilych Fastenko. There was much in Fastenko I could not understand. In my eyes, perhaps the main thing about him, and the most surprising, was that he had known Lenin personally. Yet he was quite cool in recalling this. (Such was my attitude at the time that when someone in the cell called Fastenko by his patronymic alone, without using his given name—in other words simply “Ilych,” asking: “Ilych, is it your turn to take out the latrine bucket?” —I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin’s patronymic in the same sentence as “latrine bucket,” but even to call anyone on earth “Ilych” except that one man, Lenin.) Observing my enthusiasm, more than once Fastenko said to me insistently: “You are a mathematician; it’s a mistake for you to forget that maxim of Descartes: ‘Question everything!’ Question everything!” What did this mean—“everything”? Certainly not everything!

When, in the spring of 1943, recruiters from the first Byelorussian “legions” put in an appearance, some POWs signed up with them to escape starvation. Yuri went with them out of conviction, with a clear mind. Yuri became lieutenant in the German Army. In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him all these weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips.

On May 2 a thirty-gun salute roared out. That meant a European capital. Only two had not yet been captured—Prague and Berlin. We tried to guess which it was.

That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.


Chapter 6: “That Spring” [The concealed history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union]

Along with them [a big wave of civilians that flowed into the Archipelago] were seized no less than one million fugitives from the Soviet government —civilians of all ages and both sexes who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by Allied authorities into Soviet hands […]. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the spring of the Russian prisoners of war. Not only war prisoners passed through those cells. A wave of those who had spent any time in Europe was rolling too: émigrés from the Civil War; the “ostovtsy”—workers recruited as laborers by the Germans during World War II. It was the war prisoners who constituted the bulk of the wave.

“The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland has forgiven you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers. It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors? Then, under the most just social system in the world, came the most just war of all—and all of nowhere millions of traitors appeared, from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population. How is this to be understood and explained? Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in the same England. Why was it that in this war only one traitor could be found among them—but in our country millions?

The Vlasov men.

In addition, there were a few volunteer anti-Soviet units, made up of former Soviet citizens but under the command of German officers. The Lithuanians were the first to start supporting the Germans (understandably so: we had really hurt them beyond endurance in just one year!). Then the Ukrainians formed a voluntary SS division, and the Estonians joined a few SS units. In Byelorussia there was a people’s militia fighting against the partisans: 100,000 men. When the Germans conquered our southern regions, the number of volunteer battalions increased: there was a Georgian one, an Armenian one, a battalion of the Northern Caucasus peoples, and sixteen Kalmyk battalions. During the German retreat from the Don region, about fifteen thousand Cossacks followed the German army. The Briansk region had twenty thousand armed men. They called themselves “The Russian National Liberation Army.”

Vlasov made public appearances in the theaters of Smolensk and Pskov, both filled to capacity; he spoke about the goals of the liberation movement and then proceeded to declare openly that national socialism was unacceptable for Russia but that, on the other hand, it was impossible to overthrow the Bolsheviks without the Germans. Those were the last months during which millions of Soviet people were still out of Stalin’s reach and could fight against the Bolshevik slavery and organize their own independent existence.

But there was a gap between the Russian and the Western conscience which exist to this day. The West was fighting only against Hitler, and for this purpose all means and all allies were good, the Soviets above all. Not only could the West not concede that the Soviet people might have their own purposes which did not coincide with the goals of the Communist government; it did not want to admit any such thought, because it would have been embarrassing and difficult to live with. It is a tragicomic fact that on the leaflets which the Western allies were distributing among the anti-Bolshevik volunteer battalions on the Western front, they wrote: “We promise all defectors that they will be immediately sent back to the Soviet Union.” We soon discovered that they really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men.

The West simply has to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind. But the West did not understand at all. In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery. But nobody heard that squeaking. Most of the America military commanders were amazed to learn about the existence of Russians who were not Soviets; they thought it quite natural to hand them all over to the Soviet state. The ROA [Russian Liberation Army] not only surrendered to the Americans; it implored them to accept its capitulation and begged for one thing only: the promise that Americans would not extradite them to the Soviets.

In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced: How could any people on earth not be willing to return to their homes? The nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.

The English turned over the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition. The Cossacks did not grow suspicious when they were asked to turn in their weapons, on the grounds that this was necessary in order to standardize their equipment. On May 28… [Chechar’s note: Solzhenitsyn describes in this paragraph how the Allied forces extradited these Russian people, against their will, to Stalin.]

They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death, since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones. The hearts of the British were not troubled, nor were their democratic minds. British tanks and soldiers arrived. The British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them into the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages. Entire families sought death by throwing themselves into the river. Meanwhile, the British units in the neighborhood pursued and shot at the fugitives. (The cemetery where the people who were shot or trampled to death and buried still exists in Lienz.)

But even that was only the beginning. During all of 1946 and 1947 the Western allies, faithful to Stalin, continued to turn over to him Soviet citizens, former soldiers as well as civilians. It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of this human confusion as quickly as possible. People were extradited from Austria, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the American occupation zones, and from the territory of the United States as well.

Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of the Vlasov men have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy.

For the other nine books see here.