Comment on YSK that Joseph Stalin created the Great Terror. He started killing people randomly including artists, generals, doctors, scientists, government officials. Everyone was terrified.

• VinegarChunks@lemmus.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  
  The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume nonfiction series . . .<

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago?wprov…

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  • Riverside@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You could go ahead quoting Wikipedia:

    UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn’s methodology that “such documentation is methodologically unacceptable in other fields of history” and that "the work is of limited value to the serious student of the 1930s for it provides no important new information or original analytical framework. Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty’s criticism, saying that “he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay … [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias”, adding that “one might dwell at length on the inaccuracies discernible in Solzhenitsyn’s work”. Vadim Rogovin writes of the eyewitness accounts that Solzhenitsyn had read, saying he “took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them”. Both Rogovin and Walter Laquer argue that the book belongs to the genre of ‘oral history’.

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    • VinegarChunks@lemmus.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Assuming for the moment that all these criticisms are completely correct and valid, “Provides no new information” or “documentation is methodologically unacceptable” or “selective bias” or “took license” do not mean that a book should therefore be characterized as fictional.

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      • Riverside@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Go ahead reading tour Tsarist fascist as much as you want, you’ll just get called out when you try to cry crocodile tears while doing it.

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