Word: gulag
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...great prison memoirs spawned by Russia's cruel history are alike in essence. From Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and now Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil, they reveal a world of unrelenting human degradation: the bestiality of the jailers, the dog-eat-dog struggle among the prisoners, the treachery of the informers. Each account evokes the stench, the rattle of fetters, the heart-stopping cold, the killing hard labor. Still, each author used different stratagems to survive, to prevail as a human being and, ultimately, to bear witness...
Like Rybakov himself, Sasha Pankratov, the student hero of Arbat, lived in the capital's bohemian Arbat district during the '30s. Also like Rybakov, he was arrested on a trumped-up infraction and sentenced to three years in Siberian villages. These are not the feared Gulag but the world of administrative exiles living on odd jobs and packages from home. Sasha becomes an itinerant farmhand and because of his good looks has little trouble keeping warm on cold nights...
...generations of Russians, books have been surrounded by exaltation and tragedy. In a prison camp in the Gulag during the 1960s, the poet and essayist Andrei Sinyavsky hid hand-copied pages of the Book of Revelations in the calf of his boot. He wrote, "What is the most precious, the most exciting smell waiting for you in the house when you return to it after half a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books...
...talks after attacks by Iraq and Iran leave the waterway littered with damaged ships. -- In the Philippines, the aborted coup attempt uncovers a deep vein of dissatisfaction in the military. -- A Soviet court sentences the young West German pilot who landed outside Red Square to four years in the Gulag...
...danger from AIDS: the Gulag. A Soviet decree issued last week specifies prison sentences of up to eight years for spreading the disease and five years for exposing another person to the virus, even if the infection is not passed on. The law empowers authorities to conduct compulsory AIDS tests on those suspected of carrying the virus, and any foreigner who refuses to be tested may be expelled...