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Shan Whaley
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History and Anthropology
October 10, 2019.
Writing Assessment 1
Essay 1
There is always a reason for revolution. People stand up against the regimes when they feel their rulers are not competent and have failed to protect their interests. Solzhenitsyn is one of those writers who arouse to fame during the Bolshevik revolution. His writing about his own imprisonment and time as an expatriate, along with the evidence from around two hindered companion prisoners and Soviet records, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn talks about the complete apparatus of Soviet suppression. According to him, the state within the state was ruling strongly. The writer talks about the innocent people who were forced to live a life; they would never have imagined in their wildest dreams. Solzhenitsyn, who had been a strong critique of communism, believed that the Soviet totalitarian regime was more oppressive compared to the Russian Empire. In his book ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, he discusses the situation of Gulag camps, which he referred to as inhumane. In his writings, the depiction of Gulag camps revealed how prisoners were forced to live under such intolerable conditions. While referring to these camps he wrote, “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
This quote suggests that how flawed narratives were built to arrest innocent people. The Gulage prisons depict the inhumane conditions, Lenin regimes offered to the people there. For them, the industrial revolution and increased economic opportunities were more important, which they achieved by forcing the prisoners to forced labor. They illegally arrested the citizens which Solzhenitsyn refers in these words “Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people did not simply sit in their homes, pale with terror at every bang of the door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...”. About Stalin’s reign and how he used to deal with the secret services, whom Solzhenitsyn mentions as organs writes that the “Organs” (the secret police) would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
Essay 2
Solzhenitsyn’s work has not remained limited to writing about the oppressive regimes. He has worked on literature and has written extensively over human instincts, as well. The reason he was forced to leave Russia was his harsh views about the Communist regime. Solzhenitsyn was a man of kindness and looked toward things in a more sympathetic manner. He witnessed people struggling with the bad societal aspects they were facing, which could not keep Solzhenitsyn away from writing about oppressed people. About the evil intentions people, he writes, “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. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart”. It shows how close Solzhenitsyn felt himself to the people.
As Solzhenitsyn has faced the repercussions of the revolution, he believed that revolution took away the respect of humanity from the people. For him, the basic values of humanity were eliminated, and there was no other option left with the regime to take innocent people in imprisonment. For Solzhenitsyn, this was the time of immense obliteration and destruction. Considering the consequences, the ordinary Russians were facing, Solzhenitsyn could not keep himself away from evaluating their internal desires. Lastly, he discovered that the regime and Russians were living distantly when it comes to respecting human life and values.
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