Memes

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He's essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.

Here's a real quote:

The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon.

From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:

In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.

According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and "strangled" the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people ("непроизводительный народ") who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews' own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, "200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica."

His own wife called the Gulag Archipelago "folklore," why on Earth are you listening to a rabid anti-semite and fiction author over actual historical evidence?