(np) Palast on Putin

[Mark Thibodeau]

Yes, it's true,  Solzhenitsyn WAS more than a bit of an asshole.

And not that great a writer, either. Ever tried to slog your way through
the Gulag Archipelago? Yikes.

I recommend picking up Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. instead. A far
superior and more relevant work when it comes to the mysteries, both macro
and micro, of the human heart.

Jerky



On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 5:15 PM jody2.718 via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
wrote:

> Larry Summers- I'd half forgotten about that clown. What a disaster, along
> with the rest of the geniuses at Harvard, like Andrei Schleifer, who were
> going to "fix" Russia with "Shock Therapy," and ended up creating a feeding
> trough for the Oligarchs, and maybe themselves. But Pinochet was only a
> more recent model for Putin. From an historical perspective, Putin is more
> of what Solzhenitsyn was hoping for- a Tsar-like figure in concert with the
> Orthodox Church that would restore morality and order, as opposed to the
> decadence of the West, which, in his mind, was destroying Russia at that
> time. In fact, Solzhenitsyn, who passed in 2008, welcomed Putin.
> Solzhenitsyn also could not conceive of Ukraine being anything other than a
> part of Russia. Autocratic?- no problem, deeply ingrained in the Russian
> psyche.
>
> Right wing fascism has deep historical roots in Russia. No way was it
> going to be transformed into some Harvard version of western capitalism by
> "Shock Therapy". Palast is right on.
>
>
> _____________________________________________________________________________________________
>
> "Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone
> shell........."
> --
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>