It has been fifteen years since the former Soviet Union, by virtue of that former one, agreed to publish in full and disseminate (including in school programs) the “Gulag Archipelago” by Nobel Prize winner Solzhenitsyn. This is the most radical and detailed account of the post-revolutionary USSR: in those pages the author demonstrates that the communist regime could govern its oppressed people only with the threat of imprisonment, but also that the country’s economy itself depended from the productivity of forced labor camps.
Now, that milestone runs the risk of facing again a climate from the seventies, times in which it circulated clandestinely and (as the highest form of recognition) was published – in a rigorously reduced edition – by the literary magazine and for years semi-clandestine «Novyj Mir ».
Now, in Putin’s Russia, weakened by an unsustainable war and sanctions that weaken it more every day, we need to act quickly and affect everything possible, starting with school education and culture. And here is the news-symbol of how the country that almost a year ago declared war on Ukraine, is attacking everything in order to save the salvage of an increasingly ailment image by censoring its own story.
The State Duma has proposed removing Nobel Prize winner Solzhenitsyn’s milestone Gulag Archipelago from the school curriculum. Reason? “It contains falsehoods and demagogic ideas that have not stood the ‘test of time’. This was stated to the Tass agency Dmitry Vyatkin, the first deputy head of United Russia in the State Duma. «As he demonstrates – said Vyatkin – many facts were invented out of whole cloth by the author. Historians have verified all the facts. Solzhenitsyn’s mandate, writing his thesis, was only to throw our homeland into the mud».
The announcement of the change of plans
From words to deeds. According to the deputy head of United Russia in the State Duma this year the curriculum of school literature will be changed. On the other hand, this void will be filled by a literature compliant with the regime: among the new entries “The Young Guard” by Alexander Fadeev and “Hot Snow” by Yuri Bondarev. The State Duma Committee on Culture will also study proposals for public scrutiny of works that receive budget funding, such as films in which they “humiliate Russia and pour mud on it.”
«The Gulag Archipelago»
Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece that will soon be removed from the programs tells the bloody repressions that took place in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956. The work is based on the letters, memoirs and stories of 257 prisoners, as well as on the personal experience of Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself who spent eight years of his life in prison.