August 19, 2025
"Live Not by Lies!" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"He largely fabricated everything" - Natalya Reshetovskaya, first wife of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"His writings are a mixture of some truth and big lies (as any good propagandist Solzhenitsyn followed closely Dr. Goebbels' teachings)...The author is treated politely (in the Soviet penitentiary), has bread and bunk, warm clothes. He is not forced into hard physical labor, he reads books and has plenty of time to chat, ramble, gossip and spew out all his hatred for Stalin. He is an informant under the nickname ofVetrov, reporting his prison mates to the most hated NKVD/MGB officers. He plays chess, attends theatrical performances, listens to the radio, reads newspapers. All hisGulag Archipelago and other writings are simply a collection of unsubstantiated gossips and old Goebbels' fairytales. In the preamble he defines his main book as "literary [fictional] research" - it sold well in the West (as history not historical fiction and that's how he made a fortune). Horror fiction. Another "Martian War of the Worlds" thriller. Gulagis about 90% factually bullshit, anyone could easily test its veracity: just pull out any chapter and do extensive research (Solzhenitsyn did not use any archives, he in fact wrote a gigantic propagandistic article). - Rachid Masimov, Russian citizen
In 1986 Conquest affirmed that "a science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn't so much whether they're good or bad, exactly; they're not bad or good as we'd be bad or good. It's far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us." - Hillier Bevis, English historian, LA Times, Nov. 19, 1986, Robert Conquest Wikipedia, footnote 42.
In 1995, an investigative journalist pointed out that British agent turned-historian Robert Conquest's numbers in his famous 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930's of twenty million civilian deaths were obtained from the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office of war propaganda (see Wikipedia and Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-1953(2004).
Sometimes it is best for an investigative reporter to excerpt quotes from various sources at the start of an article as I have done above so the reader can connect the dots themselves rather than the writer constructing a long, boring article on the topic. I anticipate many readers will disagree with my conclusions about American propaganda unless they can understand how Russian and American historical realities have been constructed. Of course, it is imperative that this reporter not mislead readers, but I am permitted to make a case for a coherent journalistic thesis.
Below is what I have accidentally stumbled into finding about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous book The Gulag Archipelago as part of research for a prior article " How All Roads Lead to London". I now regret reading The Gulag in its entirety years ago (2,505 pages). However, this is not to just boringly set the historical record straight.
Pres. Donald Trump's current attempt is to reveal the RussiaGate scandal as a British Intelligence Psy Op by MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to smear him and bring down his 2020 presidential election. RussiaGate was influenced by the British and American media construction of a Cold War to keep Russia and the U.S. from forming any kind of alliance against the rump British Empire. Alex Krainer , a Croatian commodities trader, has been exposing the extent and importance of the British role in RussiaGate, and the Ukraine and Gaza Wars in a series of podcasts. Every player in RussiaGate except those who were part of the DNC (U.S. Democratic National Committee) has been a British intelligence operative.
How many James Bond action movies by Ian Fleming depicting a British espionage agent fighting a covert war against the Evil Empire did I watch with rapture when I was younger? There were 25 Bond movies from 1962 to 2021. Eon Productions in London holds the rights to the Bond movies. I still enjoy the genre of James Bond theme music sung by the attractive American singer Nancy Sinatra " You Only Live Twice ". Only in this case, it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had a double life. But I never thought of such entertainment movies as political propaganda that I had fallen for hook, line and non-thinker.
Solzhenitsyn became popular in America during the anti-communism era of the Cold War (1947's to end of Soviet Union 1991) but continues today in popular culture and election propaganda. He was the icon of anti-Communism and won the Nobel Prize for his books supposedly revealing Soviet mass crimes. In 1978 Solzhenitsyn gave his famous " A World Split Apart" speech at Harvard University, the high temple of globalism. The Gulag Archipelago became part of the genre of anti-communist literature (see John Fleming, The Anticommunist Manifestos: Four Books that Caused the Cold War - 2009).
The purpose of the Cold War to British intelligence services was to keep the U.S. and Russia from aligning politically against Britain and for the U.S. Deep State of intelligence agencies to justify their bureaucratic existence . Solzhenitsyn portrayed himself a political prisoner of the communist totalitarian rule of Joseph Stalin and touted himself a non-court historian whistle blower. He didn't need to be a paid intelligence operative, as American commercialism of his book was all that was needed. If the book sold, it must be truth seemed to be the advertising hook.
However, historians who have combed the Russian archives have found no records corroborating Solzhenitsyn's reports of mass murder and undue oppression of prisoners in Russia's Gulag prison system. One can retort that Stalin probably ordered the archives neutered of any such records. But the evidence for my thesis is derived from Solzhenitsyn's wife's statements in the New York Times, evidence that the Gulag death count came from the propaganda arm of British Intelligence, and massive newer evidence written by many historians, including RussiaGate.
More to the point, Solzhenitsyn's stories about the mass crimes and genocide have never been validated. This runs against British (underlined for emphasis) historian Robert Conquest's famous 1968 book The Great Terror wherein he estimated the total number of deaths from Communist Gulag and purges could not have been less than 13 to 20 million people (see Nikos Mottas, Gulag Archipelago: Exposing the Anticommunist Fabrications of Solzhenitsyn, 2018). Conquest also estimated that Stalin can be blamed for 5 to 7 million deaths due to the Holodomor famine and drought in Ukraine in the 1930's. The drying up and diversion of water from the Aral Sea followed unsustainable water management practices following British policies (source AI Yahoo.com).
Conquest criticized leftist intellectuals George Bernard Shaw, John-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, etc. for doubting his death statistics, accusing them of being "dupes" of Stalin. Conquest taunted his critics that his book should have been titled "I Told You So, You F___ing Fools". But Conquest was a British Intelligence operative later made into a hero at Stanford University ( a long-time recruiting hub for the CIA). May a Shakespearian plague strike both houses of propagandists.
In 1995, an investigative journalist pointed out that Conquest's numbers were obtained from the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office of war propaganda (see Wikipedia and Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-1953 (2004). In 1993, American historian J. Arch Getty also disagreed with Conquest on the basis that archive data did not support his figures (see Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence). Getty also challenged Stalin's own justification of his Great Purge but said Stalin's rule was "dictatorial but not totalitarian".
Stalin was also faced with large numbers of foreign Bolshevik Communists in his prisons as well as army defectors who did not want to fight German Nazis. Stalin was not a nice person, but neither were the Bolsheviks, including Stalin's opponent Trotsky who was a British agent (see Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism and Blamed it on the Jews, 2024). Conquest's book was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
But Getty's critical research about Conquest also failed to corroborate Zionist and leftist propagandist Hannah Arendt's book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". Arendt was a German émigré to the US who married a Communist and wrote the influential book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Before coming to America, she lectured in Britain, Stanford and went to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial. She was a Zionist who blamed the inaction of the American bourgeoisie and working class for Nazism and the genocide in German camps. America lost over 400,000 soldiers in WWII, mostly working class.
In 2018 Professor Grover Furr of Montclair State University, New Jersey, additionally wrote a series of objective books refuting the anti-communist lies about the Moscow trials in the 1930's and the lies about Stalin's Soviet Communism (see Grover Furr, " Stalin...Waiting for the Truth: Exposing the Falsehoods in Stephen Kotkin's 'Stalin Waiting for Hitler", 2019) and " Yezhov vs. Stalin: The Truth About Mass Repressions and the So-Called 'Great Terror' in the USSR", 2018). Kotkin is an historian at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. The Gulag prisoners were mainly not political dissidents thrown into the Gulags without cause; they were mostly WWII military personnel who committed treason during wartime or were foreign Bolshevik or Trotskyite Communists. Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician and commander of an enemy coordinate location battery for artillery bombardment. But he openly wrote letters critical of Stalin and the war. Treason was also a way for Russian soldiers to cowardly dodge having to fight Hitler's invading army.
It should be noted that the British invented Communism by subsidizing Karl Marx's propaganda writings in London and then placed blame on the Jews (again see Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed it on the Jews) 2024.
The amount of correction that an accurate interpretation of Solzhenitsyn's books would require is almost impossible given decades of brainwashing by the CIA and Hollywood movies which portray Russia as the evil empire and Stalin as one of the evilest rulers. Tony Shaw's 2007 book " Hollywood's Cold War" detailed the collaboration between filmmakers and government in the production of anti-Russian propaganda. This was followed by J. Hoberman's 2012 book " An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War".
But perhaps the most effective book is Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism written by Joseph M. Thompson in 2024. Patriotism became a tool of anti-communist propaganda. The description of the partnerships between the Pentagon and country music in Thompson's book sounds more like how the CIA's MK-Ultra program in the 1970's created rock and roll music, sexual liberation, rampant drug usage, and encoded films designed to de-moralize youth and create a degenerate (marriage-less/childless) generation (see Joe Atwill, Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2014 and " Gregory Bateson and the Counter Culture", 2015). MI-6 and the CIA made patriotism into anti-Communism that is prevalent today in America.
This is how effective propaganda works. But no Americans would believe anti-Communism is anti-American propaganda! Americans believe in simple dichotomies of good versus bad and propagandists exploit this to twist patriotism into an anti-Communist propaganda lie such as Solzhenitsyn's overkill story about the Gulag (called "cognitive dissonance" by social psychologists).
The apparent biggest swallower of Solzhenitsyn's self-serving Gulag propaganda is conservative, orthodox Christian columnist Rod Dreher, author of the book " Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents" (2020). Ironically, Dreher champions resistance against totalitarianism by psychological manipulation in his book. Dreher admonishes his readers to "protect truth" without any awareness he has been duped by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag "live not by lies" scam.
To be American and Christian is to be anti-Communist that is ingrained in Americans' psyches. Evangelical Christians have a similar social psychological dilemma about Zionism. Evangelical Christianity was birthed in Britain in the late 1800's, incubated in the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles in the early 1900's, and ended up the prevalent form of religion in the American South (see Sean Durbin, Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity and Myth in John Hagee' Christians United for Israel, 2020). Seventy million American evangelical Christians currently support the Israeli War against Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza, as an apocalyptic "end times" war against Communism prophesied in the books of Revelations, Ezekial and Isaiah.
The Gulag Archipelago has become the "bible" of anti-communists, without apparent awareness that Solzhenitsyn was a phony anti-communist and deserter when it came to fighting greater evil. Hitler was planted by British bankers to bring about the downfall of Germany so that it would not align with Russia against Britain (see Guido Preparada, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich and Destroyed Europe, 2021).
But Dreher, evangelical Zionists and pro-Solzhenitsyn Leftist intellectuals are no worse than the person described earlier in this article (myself) who is a James Bond movie fan. British anti-communist propaganda is embedded everywhere. This is how successful propaganda operates; it becomes an indistinguishable and taken for granted part of the ether. It is not how some British novels like 1984, or A Brave New World describe it as manifestly cruel and totalitarian. In fact, those novels were themselves pseudo-propaganda meant to make you unconscious about real, insidious propaganda.
This article should not be misconstrued as some pro-Communist refutation of anti-Communist criticism against Joseph Stalin. Nor is it a defense of 'useful idiots' George Bernard Shaw, John-Paul Sartre and Walter Duranty for being Stalin's dupes nor Hannah Arendt's warped resentful anti-totalitarianism that scapegoated the American working class for war crimes. Nor is this a condemnation of Evangelical Christianity carte blanche. To repeat, everyone's camp of propagandists and unconscious James Bond movie fans has been infected by the English Shakespearian plague of distorted anti-Communism. Truth has been murdered so many times by so many people taking their lines from the anti-Communist script written by British Intelligence that it is like the English Shakespearean play Titus Andronicus where there are fourteen murders as well as cannibalism and mutilations, that one can't keep track.
In closing, another dot that perhaps needs connected is that the Gulag Archipelago was originally published by the YMCA Press in Paris, France. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? The Young Men's Christian Association was founded by George Williams in London in 1844 and the YMCA Press was coincidentally formed in Russia and moved to Paris. All roads lead to London including Solzhenitsyn's, Robert Conquest's and Stephen Kotkin's books and all those Ian Fleming novels and movies. I rest my case.