Next up from the Successful Farmer May 1934 issue is the article Farming Under The Bolsheviks -by By William Stoneman Moscow Correspondent, Chicago Daily News .
But first here is a peek at the listing of articles in this issue.
Before coming upon this article by Stoneman I had only a scratch of insight into the Bolsheviks.
I am glad to have engraved some key awareness into my brain now, not only relative to the Bolsheviks, but the decades that led up to what William Stoneman calls
an episode in one of the most dramatic social struggles in history, the fight of the Bolsheviks, backed mainly by the factory-worker class to wrest control of agriculture from individual peasants and to establish it upon a socialistic basis, under the absolute and supreme control of the state
There was a phase in my life when I would sometimes say to a person "you don't even know what you don't know". Now I am applying the phrase to myself.
There is a depth of history unknow. But ocaisionally we stumble upon the story keepers.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn was a story keeper. Not only of his own experiences, but he also recorded the stories of the people who shared the period and places he lived through.
In his book THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. He wrote
I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it.
And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it.
He also wrote this Author's Note
For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately. In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described.
above- photo clip is from the 1934 Successful Farmer publication
I read Solzhenitsyn when I was in my mid 20's. It was a different book than the Gulag Archipelago. It was called The Cancer Ward
It was so hard. I read it through to completion but I was so grateful when it was finished. If it was that hard to read, we can only imagine the pain of writing.
I read several books of Tolstoy, all of Dostoevski, but no other Solzhenitsyn. I was too young I think for what he wrote about.
I am glad I read this article from 1934. I think it is important to review the scenes humanity has already played out so that collectively we might reject the rerun.
