It's pretty hard to cover whatever the other side is when you're stuck in a prison camp. Not sure in what way it's 'exaggerated', though. The worse stuff, nobody was left to write about.
Parent comment was saying that these are the books to read if you want to know life under communist rule. I wanted to say that it's not true. This kind of literature describe only a small part of a life.
Not everybody was living in a prison camp in USSR, not even a majority of the population. This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.
Person who judges life in USSR by these kind of books will have a very skewed opinion.
> This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.
I mean, I'd agree that the material is a thin slice of the society, but come on. These are real personal narratives of people who lived through these experiences. The implication that "the West" is why these books exist, not just why we're able to read them, is absurd.
There was real injustice, but it is important to also realize the vast usefulness these narratives had to the West (and in more recent times descriptions of the injustice of Saddam Hussein's Iraq were used in part to justify his overthrow). And conversely, the Soviets published many descriptions of the horrors of the Jim Crow US South for similar reasons.
Soviets published many descriptions of the horrors of the Jim Crow US South for similar reasons.
Can you think of some that weren't, I dunno, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or Huck Finn? The notion that a survivor's memoir like Shalamov's is some kind of Western plot was absurd in its time and plainly disgusting now.
I'm talking about contemporary descriptions of US racism during the Soviet period. Things like lynching of black men because they supposedly looked at a white woman and the murder of civil rights leaders like MLK jr. These obviously were terrible things, but why were they reported in Russian? To make Soviet citizens feel that their land was morally superior. And likewise with Gulag literature in the West. It's easier to complain that your neighbors' house is dirty than to clean your own.
No no no no no no. How do you jump from one to the other? That's like saying Anne Frank's diary's credibility is tainted by the injustice of the internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry.
This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.
I think the parent comment is reductive in a the-opposite-of-insightful way but no, that literature was not "funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse."
No, not everybody had passed through camps. Pretty much everybody had a relative who did, though. That's not even counting entire nations summarily sent to balmy Gulag resorts. And even in the 80s (hell, even now) a lot of national culture and character were based on the prison society.
