Stephen Kotkin on Solzhenitsyn 01/14/2019 

You mean J Peterson?

You are a far right wing sponge. There’s a lot of info (centrist and left) your sponge doesn’t reach

@@alexanderkuptsov6117 Oops, yes!

@@davidtrindle6473 Everyone listening to everything is a liberal fantasy. We only have so much time and interest; as long as the people we learn from are honest and scrupulous it should not matter where they stand politically.

Maddow, Lemon, Gladwell, Barrie Weis ,are the really intellectuals of our times.

Suffering will take you too loo-ow places and the body keeps the record

Продолжайте и дальше читать этого вруна Солженицына. Этот дурак Солженицын в своей писании утверждал, что во времена Сталинских репрессий было уничтожено 120-ть.миллионов человек. Однако, по переписи 1940-го.года в Советском Союзе прозивало 191,7 млн.человек. Это что же получается - за какие-то два года репрессий страна потеряла почти 60℅ своего населения. А кто же тогда во Вторую мировую войну воевал? Кто в тылу на заводах и фабриках работал? Кто землю пахал и выращивал продовольственные культуры? А после окончания войны восстанавливал города и сёла, фабрики и заводы, разрушенные электростанции и мосты? Вобщем ,Милейший, включите логику в своей голове и не читайте всякий бред!

*Exactly. He sounds like an educated and eloquent Brooklyn mafioso.*

1. Joe Biden isn’t winning. 2. People do not know how to do research. 3. Donald Trump is an asshole(so what!) He is wise & gets things done & is helping people & companies Win 4. Bubba Wallace wasn’t a victim. 5. Black lives do matter. 6. What happened to Floyd should never happen again. 7. All cops aren’t bad, nor are they all racist. 8. Brown lives matter. 9. Rioters and looters have nothing to do with George Floyd. (And should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law). 10. Unborn black lives matter. 11. Unborn ALL lives matter. 12. Colin Kaepernick isn’t a hero. 13. CNN isn’t news (nor is MSNBC). 14. Elizabeth Warren isn’t Indian. 15. Facebook only censors conservatives. 16. ALL lives do matter (red, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in HIS sight). 17. COVID-19 is being used to gauge just how much of our freedom they can take away. 18. ALL FEAR IS FUELED BY THE MEDIA. 19. God is STILL in control. 20. Epstein did not kill himself. 12. Nascar did though. 22. There is NO White Privilege.(No one is in control of what color they are born!) 23. LIFE IS what YOU make of it! No one OWES You! Copy, paste, & SHARE

he even looks like him!

@@noname123412 Don't push it...

That's a virtue! I wish more historians sounded like Joe Pesci! haha

I find it fascinating myself. Very Marvellous and bright individual.

@@freckleheckler6311 get

@@freckleheckler6311 BB

I concur, some speakers have interesting things to say, but their delivery is slow, monotone, rambling. But Kotkin has a good pace and an engaging style. Best yet, fascinating material!

Omg, Solzhenitsyn was a liar, his stories weren't supported by facts.

@@julqw2 lolol GTFO - anyone will say anything to be a contranian - that or you're a f'n commie

The last one? Survived?. Whats the title again...🤔

Who? Solzhenitsyn? A stooge of the GULAG administration had a Christian consciousness?!

@@genekalutsky8813 A stooge of the Gulag? What have you done in your life?

@@TheBanderson22 At least I have reviewed the latest scholar research on himq

*conscience con·science /ˈkän(t)SHəns/ noun an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one's behavior. "he had a guilty conscience about his desires"

You mean like Putins Christianity? Or perhaps it's the person's character

Very eloquent

Just stupid enough to make others feel smart. Performing seals get a fish, when they clap.

Как учитель русской школы хочу вас поправит немного. Гений это не тот человек, который только в одном направлении знаний умён, а гений это тот , кто во всех областях человеческого познания отлично соображает. А таких в современном мире не больше десятка. Так что, прежде чем называть кого-либо гением, следует очень хорошо подумать. Иначе это понятие попросту обесценится.

I would love to hear his critique of solzhenitsyns last book. (Maybe he one trick pony).

@@tolyamochin4066 I don't know what is taught about genius in Russian schools, but it is possible to be a genius in one field only in English. It is quite clear, for example, from this Wiki article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius

Can you recommend anyone else as knowledgeable on Stalin/USSR as Kotkin? Preferably someone I can find on RU-vid, as I spend most of my day reading.

@@nicks3350 You may find Sean McMeekin to be a good repository of information and knowledge. A number of his videos are here on RU-vid.

@@DorionNorton I’ve been watching some of his videos later after reading “Stalin’s War” thank you for the recommendation. 👍

@@nicks3350 glad to share!

@nicks3350 Look at Young Stalin by Montefiori.

Why?. Confirmation bias?.

@@duellingscarguevara Probably to some degree, yes. Im sure Putin doesnt like people telling him that his war in ukraine is a failure, eh?

@@lieshtmeiser5542 failing hard atm eh?. Where do you see it ending, just out of interest. (If your ai, don’t bother,..necroposting wasn’t cool of me, 3 years later. See how you navigate this little cesspool).

@@duellingscarguevara What planet are you from exactly? You think youre a god because you know what confirmation bias is? Wake up.

@@lieshtmeiser5542 haha, I know who you work for.

@@duellingscarguevarawhat’s an “agency shill”?

@@-dash OK dash, I want 1500 words, single spaced, on Solzhenitsyn's last book. Can you repeat the title for me please?. I bet you won't. Dashill

@@duellingscarguevara I’m not ready for the assignment! I still have questions!

Liked: "Worth listening to again." Kotkin's insights and context to S. is wonderful - refreshing. Many have forgotten or discounted S. in the 21st C. I think I may have been one of those people. This is a must listen to podcast for anyone who thinks they want to better understand the meanings of the not-so-abstract concepts of morality, social justice, Christian consciousness and more.

Listen more to Kotkin than Peterson. Jordan Peterson's not nearly as historically astute, and is mistaken about quite a few things. It's unfortunate that Jordan Peterson was picked to write the foreward to a recent edition of the The Gulag Archipelago, when there were so many more qualified people to do it.

@@revanofkorriban1505 Yup, Kotkin's Stalin series is interesting, listened to a few interviews with him. I see he hasn't released the third book yet :(

I see a lot of these comments are from 2 years ago, but now, it's vital more understand that, Apps, and AI, are a greater danger as any to the future of humankind.

But there exist good treatments for sciatica.

@@herbertvanlynden6629 Someone could have helped him then.

Yeah, nothing to do with his last book at all?. (You know, the one they pretend he never wrote, and won’t translate to English)?. This joker is an agency hack. I find his lip smacking lies irritating, but that’s just me.

@@duellingscarguevara Even if his later works were judged disappointing only pro-Stalinist hacks will deny that his earlier works were great literature and deserving of high praise, including the Nobel Prize.

@@richardcory5024 Ahem...was there something amiss, with the scholarship of his last work?. What’s a pro-Stalinist btw?. (Wasn’t that, that one guy, and everyone else living in fear?. What has taken that to a national level?..now, let me think...who wants to rule the world by fear?). Let’s just memory hole it, shall we?.

He is terrible. His liberal political views has disabled the real understanding of history. Stephen Cohen is way better.

@@alo1692 I also like Cohen on Russia

Солженицын не является русским человеком. Да писал он свою муть на русском, но по национальности он еврей.

Если ты через бумагомарателей узнаешь об всех этапах Советской истории, которые в угду США писали всякие небылицы того времени, то грош цена твоим познаниям. Любая история познаётся в строгом анализе документов. Если ты это до сих пор не понял, то значит твоя голова забита всяким ненужным мусором.

I read "Ivan Denisovich" in High School, having been turned on to Solzhenitsyn by the National Review mag. I had already been a heavy reader of both sci fi, but also regular novels from a small kid, and his writing let me fall into that story very well. I never had the desire to tackle the massive "Gulag." I'm already sold for most of my thinking life on the horror of it, and Communism, and Socialism as well. But one aspect of the Soviet concept that is now powerful in our culture - PC- has been crushed in Putins' Russia. As a former KGB Major, he was trained in destroying a target country from within, and saw himself how it crippled many "Party" minds. So he has all three volumes of "Gulag" taught in Russian High Schools, while our schools systems are marching us into hating our country.

I see no reason why all of those three books should not be required for school reading. there are not contradictory, and even if they were, the idea of modern education means showing kids different ideas and perspectives and letting them decide.

The Red Badge of Courage and The Great Gatsby are worthwhile books. I'd suggest Cancer Ward or First Circle. In the case of the latter to gently remind the readers that during its time frame the horrors of the Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism were taking place in the United States.

Not even sure why you'd bring this up. Gatsby is an amazing book but is nowhere near the Gulag series in its intent or scope. Any other random issues you'd like to bring up?

Эту глупость дурака Солженицыны, вы читайте в своих западных школах. А в российских школах бред еврея Солженицына не нужен.

Всё очень просто объясняется. При Советском Союзе была стабильность в Европе и в мире. И с Америкой были ровные взаимоотношения. А вот теперь стабильность эта нарушена и в любой момент может начатся ядерная война.

⁠@@tolyamochin4066there was stability? What about the Bay of Pigs, or the missile crisis? John Kennedy was publicly shot in the head…

Evil why? Gulag is just a jail. American prisions today are objetively worse.

@@christophereduardo9903 American prisons are objectively worse? It was just a jail? Holy shit.

Especially since it is re-emerging in the U.S.

EL Dragon Which is even crazier !!!! It’s like ... the Free World wins the Cold War , so the college kids have decided to take lessons and graduate degrees from the losers 💥😡

yeah, loke te stupidity to see one step but ignore the second - what caused the ussr? if that remains you sill stare into a wall mubling for eternity "but human stupidity remains... dreams of utopia... do not dare to think things can be better... cos human stupidity remains..."

@@josefschmeau4682 AAHAHHAH FREE WORLD! Enjoy you slave labour clothes, chocolate and tech, mister freester! Go work at amazon or uber see how freedom works out

Stret173 allow me to make you an offer . I’ll foot the plane ticket bill if you agree to move to Venezuela . One way ticket of course 🤨 What do you think? A free ticket to your utopia , Nirvana Or what ever your current economic dream is 🤣🤣🤣🤣

The horrors of the Soviet Union are overestimated in Solzhenitsyn's works. When they were officially permitted many people started reading them. Some are still in school curriculum, but the attitude changed. Many researches based on archive documents showed there had been too many lies in them, or fiction, if you wish. The attitude of the majority here now is disgust. It's a pity books like those build up foreigners' idea of life in the Soviet Union. We understand that you have no sources of reliable information. As for Stalin, he changed life for millions of people. They became literate, they had guaranteed jobs and salaries, they had free housing, free medicine, free education. They were proud of their country where working people were the elite. They loved their government who made that possible. Millions of Soviet people cried when Stalin died, thousands came to his funeral. Of course, there were different people, there were dishonest and unjustifiably cruel people among executives on different levels. However, there haven't been so many happy people in the country ever before or ever since the years of Stalin's ruling. Maybe the 70-ies were more stable and prosperous, but people became less enthusiastic. They say, "time full of hardships produces strong people, time of well-being produces weak people". These weak and naive people ruined the country in the 90-ies. As for Mr Kotkin, he is a very reasonable man with his idea of the past based on available information and his view of the world and philosophy of life. Whether I share his position or not, I should admit it's much more balanced than the ones politicians lately have...

Allies, esp US, won WWII. Read 3 Vol hist by nicholson

He is one of Putin's heroes and it speaks well of him.

@@murrayaronson3753 Since when? During his KGB years? After?

В России этого лживого дурака Солженицына мало кто читает. В школах его точно не читают - учителям он надоел своим идиотизмом, а школьникам этот врун просто неинтересен, и у них нет ни малейшего желания читать его бредни.

He looks like joes Pesci.

Joe Pesci sounds like him.

Good spot! I've listened to 4-5 talks by Kotkin since jumping in and reading his second volume on Stalin first, and loving it. I just couldn't spot where I had heard that voice before. You nailed it.

None, either been killed or bought.

Really?

@@carylhalfwassen8555 gaslighting again Carly, the default of the Woke.

But we didn't see the USSR as only a "competitor" to our country and government. It was a competitor against the spirit of mankind itself. Its demise was a giant leap for all who are susceptible to being dominated by bad ideas, i.e.everyone, for as long as we exist.

@@Isuzu81 Since then the world has had many opportunities to see what country is the source of 'bad ideas' and it's definitely not the USSR. But my point was a bit different: hypocrisy. The West gives zero fs about how people lived in the USSR because, as I said, for millions of people the living standards after the collapse were abysmal and no country paid attention to it, except for maybe some humanitarian aid, which was utterly humiliating. The West tongue-kissed with Yeltsin and took no notice of how millions desperately tried to make ends meet on a daily basis, because that's the Russia the West has always wanted. Unsurprisingly, things went downhill between the West and Putin, because, without idolizing the latter, one can't but admit that under him things have improved significantly (certainly, with so much more to be done ahead).

@@alexanderkuptsov6117 The aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR was very disappointing to me and many in the west, but we all have our own countries that have to be our primary concern. Was there a culture of dependency on the government that had developed in the USSR during its 70 some odd years? That culture is what everyone has to fight against, inside their own countries. It's very hard to overcome.

@@Isuzu81 >> but we all have our own countries that have to be our primary concern Sure, can't blame you for that and if your countries'd said that in a straightforward fashion, that would have been fair. >>Was there a culture of dependency on the government that had developed in the USSR during its 70 some odd years? I don't think so. It's not dependancy, it's division of labor and redistribution of duties. It's like saying that you depend on the ambulance or the police officers when you call 9-1-1 and that you should drift away from it and be able to solve medical or security issues on your own. The USSR was a very complex and a brand new type of society the West couldn't understand. What's more, Soviets didn't understand it either, Andropov, one of our General Secretaries, said that 'we don't know the society we live in'. It was definitely a social experiment which at some point got out of control, but it was not 100% dark as the Western propaganda has always portrayed it. By the way, it bore a lot of resemblance to the modern USA so again, I wouldn't write the USSR off because the Soviet experience may come in handy one day, with the proper analysis, of course.

Try telling that to the 100s of thousands of dead victims of Stalin. The Russian people were incapable of creating a free productive incorruptible society. The Russian people seem to have a need to be led like sheep by corrupt monsters the psychopath Stalin & now the kleptocratic psychopath Putin. Compare Russia with the Baltic states..it's instructive

Adam Radziwill Kotkin, not a professional literary critic but a cogent thinker, expresses some disappointment with “The First Circle” as a work of art. Whether or not Solzhenitsyn was a great literary stylist is not as significant to his legacy as the fact that he chronicled the horrors of the GULAG. It’s hard to argue for the benefits of the GULAG, but Kotkin makes it clear that some people do. Solzhenitsyn’s role seems to be to have driven the pros and cons of the GULAG from the list of topics that may be the subject of polite conversation. Apparently Solzhenitsyn brought the same earnestness or is thought by some to have brought the same sort of earnestness to his works on nationalism or pan-Slavism. These areas remain on the table as shown by the on-going Brexit dealings. It would be wrong, however, to equate the “nationalist” position with the pro-GULAG position. There’s no secret police carting off anyone to any brutal labor camp over the Brexit issue. I’m not an expert on Holodmor, but I read enough Soviet history to know that Ukrainians served at the highest levels of the Soviet government, including Andrei Grechko, an army commander who became Minister of Defense. For this reason I think that there’s reason to quarrel with the idea that Holodmor was perpetrated by non-Ukrainians. I also know that a similar genocide was perpetrated at the same time in Kazakhstan, where it’s given the name of Goloschekin Genotsid. This famine resulted in the death of almost 40 percent of ethnic Kazakhs. For this reason I would tend to agree with the proposition that the 1932-33 regime-implemented famine wasn’t limited to the Ukraine. The Lower Volga region of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic was also impacted. The targets of these manufactured famines were “kulaks,” who were basically peasants who refused to join state-mandated “worker collectives.” These famines were not designed to wipe out certain ethnic groups. They were designed to wipe out certain classes of people according to the way in which they worked. Noam Chomsky and perhaps others claim that capitalist control of the workplace surpasses anything that Stalin may have dreamed up. On this subject, Chomsky is wrong.

@@arturosuarez-silverio5983 Thank you, 👍👍👍.

I had the same feeling after reading his works, that AS turned towards Russian centrism after denouncing Soviet utopia. I do know if that was xenophobia or not, but it is possible that AS looked at Communism and Marxism as foreign ideas and alien identities forced upon Russian by minorities such as Russian Jews, which were always blamed for everything what was wrong inside Russia or Soviet Union. Stalin himself started playing with deporting Soviet Jews in his later years and he blamed the Jewish commissars for the Ukrainian famine in the 30s. One of the thing I appreciate in Putin, despite his terrible actions, is that he is one of the few Russian leaders in history not contaminated by antisemitism.

Assange should slowly perish in a federal prison, with a patient Celtic guard who painstakingly explains again and again exactly what it is he has done which is offensive, until he just can't fail to understand. I know many prisoners and guards just like this. Sometimes it takes decades, but we have decades.

Because there is no god and all religions are a lie?

@@Sergiuss555 - *All* collectivist ideologies (e.g. Communism, Socialism, Marxism) are religions, too. Their god is the lie of *universal egalitarianism* ---a god of unsurpassed deceit, destructiveness, and inhuman evil.

Russian imperialism preceded 1917. The Russian Empire was brutally repressive toward smaller nations that it dominated. Slavic chauvinism and Russian imperialism went hand in hand.

@@coffeyjjj It's quite a stretch though. A flawed ideology about social processes is much more excusable than a mythological thinking about physical phenomena. Simply because it's much harder to run an experiment and take measurements. Religions distort and make wrong statements about all domains of human knowledge.

@@coffeyjjj my reasoning is simply based on epistemology and not utilitarianism. The number of people murdered under a certain doctrine is more or less irrelevant, unless the doctrine prescribes to do so, aka "kill infidels/apostates". And even in that case, the doctrine may (or may not) embrace the best descriptive statements about natural phenomena and be better in my eyes than other, more peaceful ones. As I understand it, egalitarianism is a concept from ethics, where rational analysis is hardly applicable. I don't see the term god easily mapped semantically onto collectivism. But I would agree that communism maps well to organized religion.

Interesting point. Stalin and the entire soviet socialist system is a topic that leftist controlled institutions in the US do not want the public to see for what it was as the comparisons to current events and anti-freedom mandates make quite clear. One of their primary means of propaganda is to resurrect a bogeyman of white sepremecy, particularly the labeling of people as Nazis. Any truly significant remnants ceased to exist in the US many decades ago as all honest Americans know. Anyone who absorbs the daily left stream news is expected to think otherwise, and what an ugly thing to conjure up, especially when real freedoms are being repressed in the name of collective socialism.