Literary Heroes, Persecuted Historians and CIA History

Literary Heroes and Persecuted Historians &
CIA History.
In a recent video, I featured Andrei Martynov, a former Soviet Military officer and presently a Russia Expert in America. He accurately framed the Ukraine War situation and Russian Military progress. I edited out some gratuitous comments he made. He attacked the Orthodox Christian Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, saying, "This is all Americans know about Russia and its history, and it wasn't history at all. It says right in the book that it is fiction." This was a gross misrepresentation. Yes, Solzhenitsyn said that his work was historical, but not a scholarly history, that it was instead "An experiment in literary investigation." And, of course, Martynov seized upon this admission saying, "Literary investigation? What is that? Is Fiction." On the Duran, Alex and Alexander rightly ignored his slight, knowing that he was there to talk about the Russian Military situation and progress in Ukraine. To confront the blatant misrepresentation would have merely destroyed the interview.

Why was The Gulag Archipelago not a scholarly history? And why do people reading it assume it is? It is not a "scholarly history" because all official records were closed to him. No one at that time, during the Soviet Era, could have written an official history of the Soviet Psycho-political prison system. The Soviet citizen writing the actual story would have been imprisoned and/or exiled. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned as a low-ranking military officer at the end of World War Two. He spent seven years in the Gulag system and then in exile in Siberia for many years. Since the official records were close to him, he depended on his own experience and first and secondhand stories of others, which he collected and turned into the book we know as "The Gulag Archipelago." Solzhenitsyn clearly said this in the introduction of his book, saying, "For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately."
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