Customer Reviews (2)

"Turn The Imperialist War Into A Civil War"
This book gives a good view into what sort of man Lenin was really like. Built up by Soviet Communist propaganda as the wisest man in history who devoted his life to bringing a Bolshevik utopia to the world, Solzhenitsyn shows us, during this period when Lenin stuck in Switzerland by the First World War, that he was a man that had little sympathy or empathy for his fellow man, who criticized other emigres for enjoying life in exile from Russia even though he was doing the same thing, a man who never actually worked a day in his life, surviving by living off handouts from relatives and ill-gotten gains by other Marxists, and who had an affair with Inessa Armand while being married to Krupskaya (who went along with the whole thing).This man, who spent the 1905 Revolution on the sidelines, unlike Trotsky and Helphand-Parvus, was actually torn by self-doubts as to whether he could actually do something when the time came for action, also came to despair that the Czarist regime could ever be overthrown, just days before it actually happened.Suddenly, this man, whose biggest ambition was to cause a split in the Swiss Social Democratic Party, suddenly had the option to prove his abilities, and to the sorrow of Russian and world, he found that he did have such talents, first organizing the conspiratorial agreement with Germany's military autocrats which allowed him to travel through Germany in the infamous "sealed train" in order to subvert Russian participation in the war on the side of the Allies.He was also able to counter accusations that he was a Russian traitor working for the Germans, eventhough that was the way it looked to many people.
This book sheds a lot of light on Lenin's relationship with Helphand-Parvus who was instrumental in arranging the passage through Germany. Once a radical revolutionary, he became a wealthy businessman who enjoyed the good life while still working for revolution that preached against all the values he himself came to embody. He even offered to make Lenin a rich man, but Lenin stayed away from that temptation, at least at that theim (After the revolution, Lenin moved into the dachas of the former ruling class in Russia and finally got to enjoy the luxuries he denied to his people, so he ended up succumbing to the same tempations as Parvus).Parvus even ended up sympathizing with the Kaiser's Imperial regime in Germany, opposing a socialist revolution there, while at the same time, working for one in Russia.Thus, we see what kind of values these "revolutionaries" really had...they claimed to want to improve the lot of their people, but really all they cared about was grabbing state power and lining their pockets along the way.
It was during his Swiss exile during the War that he coined his infamous phrase "Turn the Imperialist War into A Civil War". Unfortunately, those who sided with the Reds in the wake of his Bolshevik October coup (that's what it was, it was no "revolution") either forget about or weren't aware of this slogan, and instead fell for his enticing "Peace, Land and Bread" which they thought meant a quiet, prosperous life for all. Lenin had no such intentions, instead he was very serious when he promised a Civil War which he unleashed on the country in order to tear down its old aristocratic, capitalist structure which he despised (his hate for this far outweighed any humanitarian motives to improve the lot of his fellow Russians whom he secretly despised). This led to civil war, mass executions, famine and chaos.This is Lenin's legacy to Russia.The country is still suffering from it 90 years later.

Lenin did nothing in Zurich
I am a big Solzhenitsyn fan.I'd read any novel of his.I'd read it if he wrote a book about paper clips.Well, he did, sort of.He wrote a book about Lenin's activities and thoughts in Zurich, Switzerland, before theRussian Revolution.Lenin did nothing in Zurich.The communist revolutionhasn't happened yet in Switzerland, in case you haven't noticed.

So,Lenin's activities in Zurich are confined to his fruitless attempts tomotivate the Swiss to a communist revolution.I get the feeling that hecame to think of the Swiss as a bunch of cows going moooooooo."Downwith the bourgeouis (spelling?) state.Down with the rich pigs." "Mooooo."

We see how the author interprets Lenin's personality. As a thinker, a planner, a very suspicious person, with the mind of achess player, always thinking several moves ahead, always bluffing, neversimply honest and open.

In one conversation, the wealthy revolutionaryParvus is trying to convince Lenin to release his underground Russianforces for Parvus's planned revolution, financed by Germany.Parvus can'tunderstand why Lenin refuses to join.He is counting on the powerfulLeninist underground in Russia.What Lenin doesn't tell Parvus, as hestonewalls and counterattacks and raises innumerable objections about whowill lead the revolution, is that Lenin doesn't have any damn underground. Nothing.All Lenin has at this time is a small group of bovine Swissleftists.

I came away from the book believing that the Lenin in this bookwas a sincere humanitarian interested in protecting the masses (us) fromabuse by those in power, and frustrated at our lack of spirit to stand upfor ourselves.He was coming from a country where the peasants received anextremely raw deal from their tsar and ruling class, the patient andever-suffering Russian peasants.From this background it is easy tounderstand Lenin's frustration.Any government as oppressive as that oneneeds to be overturned.Lenin's older brother was executed by the tsar. Now we seem to understand him better.

A recent book claims that Lenin wasthoroughly evil, the author of the concentration camp and the cult ofpersonality dictatorship.But this book is of questionable merit becauseit was written by someone who may just be an anti-communist party hack ofthe new Russian regime.Do we believe him or Solzhenitsyn? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Great literature in here
Reading some of the lukewarm responses to this work from the two reviewers who posted before me, I'm inspired to add my two cents worth.I find what I've read so far in this collection - "Matronya's House", "For the Good of the Cause", "The Easter Procession", "Zakhar-the-Pouch", and "The Right Hand" - to be fantastic short fiction, powerfully felt and heard with the inner ear that Nabokov urges you to use when you read.I left work last week in a good mood, completed "For the Good of the Cause" on the 45-minute train ride home, and was downright bleak as a I walked in the front door.I'm not saying it's good to be down, but a story that can have such an impact that it actually changes your mood has to be tapping into a truly artistic vein.So I'm just going to be a voice here on this forum saying that Solzhenitsyn can really really write, and these stories range from very good to great.

Completists Only
That this book was published in the early 1970s is no accident. It was at this time that Solzhenitsyn was at the height of his influence and virtually any scrap of nonsense he managed to get to a publishing house would be ravenously devoured and shat out in cloth and paper post-haste. That's why you can find a million used copies of the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago but hardly any of the second or the third. It's not to say that Solzhenitsyn is a bad writer- he's very good- but he was beholden entirely to the Western audience that never understood him except in the crudest sense and would buy anything he wrote simply because his name was on it.

It's a shame that this book was published under such shady circumstances and without the prudent editing which would have been involved in a normal release, because some of the material here is quite good. Matronya's house is a charming provincial fable about the necessity of sacrifice, hard work and steely moral discipline to preserving civilization. The Right Hand is simultaneously tiny sliceof Cancer Ward and a bitter rebuke of those who collaborated with the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. For the Good of the Cause is a tale drawn from his days as a teacher and Incident at Keretchkova (I'm positive I misspelled that) Station is a story of wartime Russia and the chaos, confusion, distrust and anger which engulfed it during the most hopeless moments of the German onslaught.

Everything else is either middling or worthless. His maudlin Easter Procession is Solzhenitsyn's stubborn orthodoxy and mystic spirituality at its most unbearably preachy and every single one of the prose poems should have been sliced out and left for his Collected Works. Still, the book is cheap and if you're looking for a more nuanced portrait of Solzhenitsyn the man and less Solzhenitsyn the prisoner it can hardly hurt to pick it up.

One powerful story and a few lesser ones A great writer not always at his best
Solzhenitsyn is one of mankind's greatest writers. His 'Gulag Archipelago' is a most powerful work of witnessing which opened to the world the long dark night of the Soviet prison world. In that work he recorded the story of thousands of witnesses, allowed them to speak in their own voices. In this collection of stories and prose poems Solzhenitsyn is not always at his best. But in one story, the opening autobiographical story he tells of his life in a remote central Asian village where he boarded with a peasant woman Maryousha who in her humility is taken by him to be a kind of saint. His depiction of the poverty cruelty and greed of this world is Chekhovian .
In other stories Solzhenitsyn tells of the corruption of Soviet bureaucracy, and the distance the people seem to be from true religious life.
His love of and search for the true Russia is an implicit theme of the work.
It would have been helpful to have some kind of introduction to the work, some explanation of where the individual pieces stand in relation to Solzhenitsyn's work as a whole.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An amazing epic poem
It's incredible to realise that Aleksandr Isayevich kept this entire poem memorised in his head for many years before it was safe to write it down, esp. considering it has about twelve thousand lines and is over fifty pages long.It takes place during the early winter of 1945, in East Prussia, when WWII was ending, and describes what was going on during this time, like the fighting between the Russians and the Germans, the magnificent breakthrough into German territory from the East, and the ransacking of abandoned German houses by the victorious Russian army.Like all of the men in his unit, Aleksandr Isayevich is also a young soldier living for today, feeling he can do whatever he pleases because his side is winning and can do whatever he wants to the much-weakened enemies standing in his way, including stealing belongings from the houses which were abandoned by their owners, who were in a big hurry to flee westward with the Nazis once it became clear they were losing the war and the Russians were on their way.

The end is very powerful and tender; the young narrator has entered yet another house, only this time it isn't abandoned.Like most young soldiers in wartime, he wants to sleep with the woman he finds there alone, but unlike some other soldiers, he doesn't rape her or demand her services, rather letting her decide when she's ready (not like she has much choice anyway!).And after the woman has given her "consent," partly because she fears for her life if she refuses, the narrator already feels horrible about what he's done, while the woman is begging him not to kill her.The final three lines, of what is going through his mind and how he feels about what he's done to this woman, are very poignant and haunting. ... Read more