Word: gulag
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Genovese's broadside, to some European intellectuals, is merely one new entry in an old and familiar debate that has been particularly vibrant in France. The 1973 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was a critical event for the French left. His searing expose of the vast Soviet prison-camp system, which sold 600,000 copies in France in less than a year, inspired a cadre of ex-radicals eventually known as "The New Philosophers" to issue its own critiques of communism. In Barbarism with a Human Face, for example, Bernard-Henri Levy demanded that French radicals confront...
...perished in the totalitarianism whirlwind of the '30s. Two young priests were reading the Orthodox "Eternal Memory" service from a prayer book. It was one of many symbolic moments on an odyssey that has become a kind of traveling metaphor: himself a survivor of eight years in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn is recognized as the person most responsible for bringing the crimes of that era to light. Obviously moved, he crossed his chest repeatedly, solemnly noting the plaque on the chapel's side that dedicates the site to the "memory of the innocent victims of lawlessness and tyranny...
...rare moment of humor in a listless campaign in which both candidate and voters have acted as if a week in the Gulag would be preferable to enduring one more speech. To break his deadlock with the nay-saying parliament, Yeltsin has organized a national vote on April 25 that will ask Russians whether they trust their President, whether they approve of his economic reform policies and whether they favor holding early elections for both President and the 1,033-member Congress of People's Deputies. Yeltsin is determined to win yes votes on all four points...
...imagine the fervent ideological objections: planned conversion, like planned anything, would be an "industrial policy," meaning "social engineering" in George Bush's lexicon, meaning socialism and leading straight to the gulag. But military pork-barreling is a kind of industrial policy itself, in which the "plan" seems to be that millions of Americans will make weapons or go without jobs. As for socialism, the military-industrial complex already represents a Soviet-style command economy in the midst of capitalism, a haven from the perils of the market, financed by public largesse...
Also buttressed by interviews and Chinese publications, The Claws of the Dragon describes Kang -- a Politburo member and one of Mao's closest confidants -- as an opportunist without principles, interested solely in power, and also as a torturer, creator of China's gulag and a habitual opium user. By the early 1940s, the head of the secret police had consolidated his control over the party's social-affairs department, which had a "liquidation" division: "So notorious was Kang's taste for inflicting pain . . . it earned him a title," the King of Hell. The authors compare him with Iago, Rasputin...