Word: arrested
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cruel Mockery. The day of his arrest began as a normal, busy family day. While Solzhenitsyn worked, his mother-in-law looked after his five-month-old son Stepan; his two older boys, Yermolai, 3, and Ignat, 16 months, played in the park near by. As dusk fell, seven policemen entered the building and hurried up the stone steps to Apartment 169. Solzhenitsyn's wife was told that the men wanted to talk to her husband. Their leader announced that he had the authority to take Solzhenitsyn with him ?by force, if necessary. "There were seven of them," Natalya...
Clumsy Tactics. The reaction with in the Soviet Union of course was quite different. Prior to his arrest and deportation, Soviet papers were full of letters from citizens insisting that the authorities do just that. After his banishment, the letter-writing campaign continued with a new twist. Demands for his punishment were replaced by expressions of gratitude that Kremlin leaders had up rooted "the traitor." Only twelve hours after Solzhenitsyn's deportation had been announced on Moscow Radio, Izvestia was able to print a letter purportedly from a reader in Baku, although mail usually takes ten days to reach Moscow...
Solzhenitsyn views his arrest as a great personal turning point?the beginning of his life as a thinking being. At that same crossroads, he suggests, millions of Russians entered into one of two categories of Soviet citizens: the oppressed and the oppressors. This national dichotomy, he says, tragically disturbed the balance of good and evil that he perceives in every man. Speaking of the oppressors, he asks: "How did this tribe of wolves arise from among our people? Are they not of the same root, the same blood?" He confesses that he too might have joined the predators...
...Gulag, Solzhenitsyn describes his arrest for the first time. In February 1945, as the Red Army rumbled inexorably through Germany to Berlin, the battle-worn captain was suddenly seized near Konigsberg, on the East Prussian front. He was stripped of his rank, his medals and his gun, and escorted by armed guards back to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. It was then that the writer was born. Passing through a Moscow subway station en route to Lubyanka on that bitter winter day, Solzhenitsyn paused and surveyed the scene...
...appalling stories of the survivors. Recalling one of the horrors recounted to him by an ex-prisoner, Solzhenitsyn writes, "A crazed P.O.W. might have crawled up to me, too, as I was dying, and gnawed the flesh off my elbow ... Listening to such things, the story of my own arrest seemed to me insignificant...