Word: gulag
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Best Nonfiction Book The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...Russian State Archives (Rosarkhiv), Hoover initiated and directed the project. Since 1992, when I signed an agreement with the Russian State Archives, Hoover and Rosarkhiv have microfilmed over 12 million pages of documentation from the Communist Party and State archives, and are now filming documents on the Soviet Gulag. Hoover provided all the necessary resources for the project. An advisory board composed of scholars representing the Hoover Institution and Rosarkhiv selected the documents filmed for the collection...
...people than Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Lenin set the stage by creating the first totalitarian socialist state system of concentration camps, which exterminated 60 million Soviet citizens in 50 years. Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in prison camps and three years of internal exile and, in secret, wrote The Gulag Archipelago, revealing for the first time the existence of this chain ("archipelago") of death mills. The moment the manuscript of the book's first volume was smuggled out of Russia and published in France in 1973, it was as if a stake had been driven through the heart of Marxism...
BORN Dec. 11, 1918 1945-53 In prison 1970 Wins Nobel Prize for Literature 1973 The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. I, is published in France 1974 Expelled from Soviet Union 1994 Back to Russia
After 1945, Hitler's Germans replaced complicity with denial ("We didn't know!"). Stalin, while in power, achieved mass complicity by betrayal. People knew exactly what was going on, and informed on others to save themselves. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag, said bitterly, "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off. They fly off by themselves, like dandelions." Lourie has ingeniously captured the moment when the Soviet air was filled with dandelions...