Talk:Wrecking (Soviet Union)

Is work of art (Archipelago Gulag) is a reliable source?
--Dojarca (talk) 15:34, 6 November 2009 (UTC)


 * A note at the beginning of the English translation of The Gulag Archipelago says: "In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names."
 * The book has a lot of artistic metaphor and other poetic language, but it is a nonfiction book. --DavidCary (talk) 13:36, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

doesn't wreckingcome from russian word for a beetle
iirc college russian, wrecker in russian is the word for a siberian beetle that destroys wooden structures

Solzh removed
Solzhenitsyn is not an expert, he got it wrong in hearsay, see ru:Мекк, Николай Карлович фон (more detailed than enwiki). In fact, this was a common ...er... problem of uneducated Soviet managers and workers, who were notorious at "improving the performance" of foreign machinery by overloading them beyond stated operational limits to improve throughput. Needless to say, this had led to wreckage of equipment. And needless to say that an expert such as von Meck could not have possibly come up with a crazy idea described by Solzh. I remember that in fact the opposite case happened at Dneproges construction when American engineers who were opposed to overburdening American excavators were charged with wrecking and landed in gulag. I was planning to write about this in WP, but got distracted, lost the refs, forgot the name of the American company, ... - Altenmann >talk 18:55, 24 March 2024 (UTC)