Word: archipelagos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn...
...GULAG ARCHIPELAGO Vol. I Translated by THOMAS P. WHITNEY 660 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50. (Paperbound...
Americans have followed Alexander Solzhenitsyn's distant struggle with the Soviet government and his final, forced hegira into exile with the kind of awe that might attend the trial and burning of Joan of Arc. He is the world's most celebrated writer. The Gulag Archipelago, with massive printings now pouring its cornucopia of Communist cruelties into book clubs and bookstores all over the U.S., seems about to become his most popular work...
...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...