This week I finished:

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, volume 1, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: If I weren’t reading these books I wouldn’t believe they could exist. I understand why people consider them among the greatest and most important books of the twentieth century.

First, about the book itself: Solzhenitsyn’s writing is simple, clear, and often funny from being sardonic and mocking. He survived the gulag’s so he knows what he’s writing about. I’m listening to the recording online here and the narrator has prepared himself well. The technical quality of the audio isn’t great, but I find the reading very listenable.

About the content: I knew something of Stalin’s gulag prison system. I knew something about slavery in the US and the Holocaust in WWII. I knew people valued these books. I recently read A Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich, which prompted reading these books, so I knew something of what happened in one camp.

I didn’t know the extent in time, space, number of people, or harshness of the network of prison camps, concentration camps, show trials, and other elements of one of the largest and most severe forms of dominance hierarchy, maybe the most.

I’m interspersing listening with watching a few documentaries and looking up some history and statistics. If you don’t know much detail about the system, as I didn’t, I recommend learning about this extreme of the human cultural condition.

It shows what can happen if we don’t protect freedom and democracy. Lenin and Stalin were just single individuals. What makes something like this situation happen for decades across multiple nations doesn’t start with a cult of personality. I see it as the result of what causes all dominance hierarchy and empire combined with modern technology enabling tighter control.

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