Ford motor sent 400 Americans to Russia in 1932 to work at an auto plant Ford built. They were to stay 1 year. One of the less interesting gulag books.
Ford motor sent 400 Americans to Russia in 1932 to work at an auto plant Ford built. They were to stay 1 year.
The authors grandfather and family and 2 other people stayed on beyond that 1 year.
Why?
The author never explains that, and tells little about how the Ford plant worked out.
My guess is that the grandfather being a good jewish communist, stayed on because he wanted to help build up uncle Joe's industry.
But we're never told anything about how/why they stayed when almost everyone else returned to the US.
Did they give up their passports?
Who knows? The author doesn't tell us what happened.
About the worst gulag book I've seen, 200 pages and on almost every page: the people are hungry, sick, badly treated...
A bunch of statistics that don't About the worst gulag book I've seen, 200 pages and on almost every page: the people are hungry, sick, badly treated...
A bunch of statistics that don't mean much, and the author likes to spell names differently than other authors.
Yagoda is Iagoda his replacement is likewise otherwise spelled.
Given that Russian doesn't use the Latin alphabet, I have no doubt that translations are flexible, but please, lets not be a dilettante to make up for a weak story.
I've read 4 other books written by people who were in the gulag, this is by far the worst, in fact the only bad one.
There are no notes or other sources,I've read 4 other books written by people who were in the gulag, this is by far the worst, in fact the only bad one.
There are no notes or other sources, the author is the only source. And he is recounting events that happened 50-60 years earlier.
He is the biggest liar I've ever seen.
I don't believe the story about his tank tipping over, inexperienced, he was sent to find a route across a stream by himself? And in the tank without other crew members?
Gimme a break, I think he planned to desert and that was what got him the court martial.
And the story about escaping and being tracked by dogs??? LIES and the gulag story of 2 guys escaping and being also tracked by dogs? Lies
I think at least 80% of the book is one lie after another and perhaps as much as 98%
He said in the book when he was young he fantasied about becoming a famous person. We have a name for that kind of person: Walter Mitty.
It's amazing that he found such a gullible person to help him write this book.
The 2 books by Ginzburg and Seven Thousand Days in Siberia by Karlo Štajner, Joel Agee (Translator) are real stories about the gulag, and there are others, I don't at the moment remember the authors of.
This book has so many lies I'm tempted to put it on my literary fraud bookshelf.
This was a curious book, I've read several others by Gulag survivors. But there was an ambiguity in this book that puzzled me to the end.
Starting out,This was a curious book, I've read several others by Gulag survivors. But there was an ambiguity in this book that puzzled me to the end.
Starting out, I thought, she thought, that the entire insanity of the purges was the fault of Stalin. And that she still believed in communism,
But as I continued through the book, more and more I began to wonder if she was hiding her real feelings, perhaps because, while it was possible to denounce Stalin in the 1960's, it still wasn't possible to denounce communism.
She died in 1977 while the Soviet Union was still riding high. She never saw the disintegration and repudiation of Marxism. If she had written the book after 1990, how would it have been different?
In other words, was she to some extent an unreliable narrator? I have no doubt that the horrors she describes happened, if not to her, then to someone she met along the way.
But what was going on in her mind? Was she a communist of pure heart? or merely another opportunist who joined the party to get a better education, job, housing, and the right to buy in the special stores for party members?
And when the benefits were taken away, what use was the communist party to her?
Another reason I wonder if she was an unreliable narrator is because she always makes herself out to be such a perfect human being.
People who make up psychology tests often use several techniques for determining if a person is lying. Perhaps the most common is to include absolute questions that make a person seem too good to be true. Like: I have never told a lie. Or, I have never stolen anything.
In never showing a dark side, she seems unrealistic.
One comment of her's I really liked was: "how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance, and also how relative are all human systems and ideologies and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another."
Is there much difference between the US political parties and the communist party in their determination to impose their will on others?
When she found out she was only going to get 10 years in prison and loss of all personal property, she was ecstatic!
She had thought she was going to be shot. How unstable our feelings can be depending on circumstances!
A few lines from the book I liked include:
"Thus, in full accordance with Marxist theory, the business of replacing the rules began as a tragedy and was then twice repeated as a farce."
"It was long ago and it never happened anyway"
This book only covers the first few years, she wrote a second book "Within the Whirlwind", about the later years.
She likes to use the word "whirlwind" in her book titles, is she referring to: "The wicked sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."
This is a curious book, a victim of Stalin's purge, the author spent 18 years in Siberian labor camps and prisons. He was starved, beaten, and grossly This is a curious book, a victim of Stalin's purge, the author spent 18 years in Siberian labor camps and prisons. He was starved, beaten, and grossly overworked.
He states at the beginning that he wrote the book "without analysis", but doesn't say why he made this choice.
He cursed Stalin, the KGB, the prison guards, and many others who tormented him. BUT, he joined the communist party in 1917, and to the end considered himself to be a "good communist".
He never blamed communism for his ordeal, just individual people who were, after all, just doing their jobs. Except for Stalin of course.
I came to the conclusion that this book is one of the greatest examples of cognitive dissonance I've ever encountered.
For 18 years in Siberia, and then for the rest of his life after that, he had to bend his thinking so that communism could still be good, and that his early life choice to work for the political system that nearly killed him was not a bad choice. That he was not a fool for making the choices he made.
What irony. But I never got the impression that he saw the irony.
The author was somewhat more intelligent than average, and very much more stubborn. (Something he was proud of.)
Wiki has a good writeup about cognitive dissonance, with a number of examples/variations.
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