Jordan Peterson on history: what the evidence says · JRE #877
SUBJECT: HISTORY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
And Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for that book and for his other writing and it was one of the one of the key there was a couple of things that brought down the Soviet Union but one of them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Peterson says Solzhenitsyn won his Nobel Prize "for that book," referring to The Gulag Archipelago, which he had just told listeners to read. The historical record shows the Swedish Academy awarded Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, citing "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature," a citation covering his body of work at that point (including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward), not any single title. The Gulag Archipelago was not published until December 1973, in France, roughly three years after the 1970 award, and Solzhenitsyn did not personally accept the prize until 1974, after his exile. Because the book postdates the award by several years, the claim that Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel specifically for The Gulag Archipelago is false on the timeline, though his broader point that Solzhenitsyn's writing (a body of work that later included Gulag) helped discredit the Soviet system is a separate and more defensible claim.