Word: butyrki
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Scope of Evil. After a few weeks in Lubyanka, the seeds of doubt had been planted in the mind of the fervent young Marxist. But it was only after he was transferred from Lubyanka to another Moscow prison, Butyrki, that Solzhenitsyn began to perceive the scope of the evil that had befallen his country. In Butyrki, he met the first contingent of Russian soldiers and civilians who had been captured by the Germans during the war. These people were now being repatriated?straight into Stalin's prisons and camps. Nearly 2 million of the 5.7 million prisoners...
There is also some wild black humor, notably one episode that is a bitter comment on the outside world's long gullibility about Soviet Russia. Two prisoners invent a fantasy about a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Moscow's Butyrki Prison, just after the war. Inmates are washed in "Lilac Fairy" soap, offered wigs to cover their shaved heads. Their cells are temporarily transformed into elegant salons with foreign magazines on their coffee tables. When Mrs. Roosevelt picks out at random a man and asks what he is being punished for, the prison governor replies that he was a Gestapo...
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