The Gulag Archipelago ABRIDGED
Why you should listen:
Why Abridged?
If you don't have an intimate relationship with Russian history, you'll be lost most of the time.
The full audio version is about an 80 hour adventure of dry listening. This abridged version should be around half that when I'm finished.
This was written for a western audience.
Introduction: https://files.catbox.moe/73kxit.mp3
Chapter 01 - Arrest: https://files.catbox.moe/ep8du7.mp3
Fun quotes which haunt me from this chapter:
"Of course, every machine has a point at which it is overloaded, beyond which it cannot function. In the strained and overloaded years of 1945 and 1946, when trainload after trainload poured in from Europe, to be swallowed up immediately and sent off to Gulag, all that excessive theatricality went out the window, and the whole theory suffered greatly. All the fuss and feathers of ritual went flying in every direction, and the arrest of tens of thousands took on the appearance of a squalid roll call: they stood there with lists, read off the names of those on one train, loaded them onto another, and that was the whole arrest."
"This submissiveness was also due to ignorance of the mechanics of epidemic arrests. By and large, the Organs had no profound reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and whom not to arrest. They merely had over-all assignments, quotas for a specific number of arrests."
"And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you, either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself. You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy?"
"Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."
"Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the garden and slapped on the behind—an amusement, no more. "
**The Gulag Archipelago ABRIDGED**
Why you should listen:
- This is like 1984 before 1984 was written.
- The powers perpetrating mass incarceration and murder throughout this book are still in power today.
Why Abridged?
- If you don't have an intimate relationship with Russian history, you'll be lost most of the time.
- The full audio version is about an 80 hour adventure of dry listening. This abridged version should be around half that when I'm finished.
- This was written for a western audience.
**Introduction: https://files.catbox.moe/73kxit.mp3**
**Chapter 01 - Arrest: https://files.catbox.moe/ep8du7.mp3**
Fun quotes which haunt me from this chapter:
- *"Of course, every machine has a point at which it is overloaded, beyond which it cannot function. In the strained and overloaded years of 1945 and 1946, when trainload after trainload poured in from Europe, to be swallowed up immediately and sent off to Gulag, all that excessive theatricality went out the window, and the whole theory suffered greatly. All the fuss and feathers of ritual went flying in every direction, and the arrest of tens of thousands took on the appearance of a squalid roll call: they stood there with lists, read off the names of those on one train, loaded them onto another, and that was the whole arrest."*
- *"This submissiveness was also due to ignorance of the mechanics of epidemic arrests. By and large, the Organs had no profound reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and whom not to arrest. They merely had over-all assignments, quotas for a specific number of arrests."*
- *"And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you, either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself. You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy?"*
- *"Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."*
- *"Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the garden and slapped on the behind—an amusement, no more. "*
(post is archived)