Word: archipelago
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...Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenifsyn...
...Gulag Archipelago, Sotzhenitsyn...
...Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn...
...Gulag Archipelago was written expressly for Soviet readers. Again and again the author says, in effect: We thought the Moscow purges of 1937 were more or less isolated convulsions of terror. Not so. The corruption of Soviet justice did not begin with Stalin as we were taught, but with Lenin, in 1918. Then he goes back to document the successive waves of political prisoners-from engineer "wreckers" of the Revolution and peasants caught up in collectivization right down to whole divisions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans in World War II and then returned to the U.S.S.R...
...that the author depicts in most of his books is often compared to hell or a nightmare. Yet the author admits, "I have come almost to love that monstrous world." For, along with bestial cruelty and institutional torment, he found great courage and comradeship among fellow prisoners in the Archipelago. The memory of it has permanently shaped his attitude toward mankind. The "fearlessness of those who have lost everything" encourages him. "Own nothing," he counsels those who have been arrested. A food package, he warns, "transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly...