Welcome to Young Heretics, it's back to the Gulag with all of you.

I probably should not be joking about this, but you have to laugh because this is such a dark subject.

I've said that we're going to be going through Alexander Solzhenitzin's entire Gulag archipelago.

There's an abridged version which is highly recommended. It's not like you miss out on

anything essential, but the entire thing is three volumes long, adds up to more than a thousand pages,

and I think it's crucially important. I think it matters that we dwell with each volume.

We've done the first volume. We did a while back, a couple episodes in the first volume.

Today we're going to start in on the second volume. The reason that I think it's so important

was actually expressed to me after I did those first two episodes. I thought I was dwelling

for too long on this dark, grisly subject of the Stalinist terror and the horrors that

Lenin accomplished before Stalin, and the famine, and the torture, and the interrogation,

and the unjust accusations, and all of that nightmare-ish stuff. Then I kept getting messages from

people saying, I can't believe I never learned about this. I cannot believe that we never talked

about the gulag once in history class, or we just briefly skirted, mentioned it, you know,

skirted over it, and then went straight to the Holocaust. There were a lot of people who said that.

This is, I think, a not uncommon experience. It was my experience too. I went to a great high school,

I had great history teachers, but we hardly dwell at all on gulag. We spent a ton of time talking

about World War II, of course, and the Holocaust, but Stalin was like, you know, some footnote,

essentially. And there are, I think, a lot of reasons for that, one of which is that, you know,

communism has an excellent PR wing. They're very good at propaganda, famously. And so people like

to sweep that kind of atrocity under the rug. They like to emphasize how evil the nationalism

Hitler was and the communism and the patriotism, of course. You know, nothing that I'm saying here

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