Word: gulag
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...vanished epoch, will probably be relegated to what Trotsky dubbed “the dustbin of history.” The standard by which he will ultimately be judged is his character and political commitment. Thus it is critical that we temper our paeans to this hero of the gulag with a sober analysis of his legacy both as an advocate and as a human being. There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s novels played a dramatic role in disabusing the left of its residual romanticism for the Bolsheviks. But as Theodore Dalrymple observed in a recent article...
...were standing in the living room, and I looked at the shelves full of foreign editions of The Gulag Archipelago and at the writer with the biblical beard and piercing gaze and thought perhaps I should consider studying Russian...
...went to Moscow in 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union and a year after Solzhenitsyn had returned from exile. By then I had read Gulag, and every time I walked through the Byelorusskaya metro station, I thought of the first chapter, in which he describes his arrival in Moscow in 1945, 11 days after he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter. He is escorted by three intelligence officers, but "not one of the three knew the city," he writes, "and it was up to me to pick the shortest route to the prison...
...camp experience, found favor during Khrushchev's thaw and was published in 1962. By the time the temperature chilled again, Solzhenitsyn's international fame was such that he could not be altogether dispensed with. In 1974, when the Brezhnev regime decided it would not tolerate the foreign publication of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and put on a plane. He breathed a little easier when the plane took off westward and not toward Siberia...
...helped him protect his writings from the state. It reads like a spy novel--coded messages, boxes with false bottoms--yet the danger was real. Were it not for these friends, from the fellow zeks (labor-camp inmates) who assisted him to the foreign journalists who smuggled out manuscripts, Gulag might not have seen the light...