Word: gulag
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...city bookstore to the taiga of the Siberian north or the dim, stinking cells packed with starved and wretched men; from the quiet classrooms to the stark realities of a hunted existence in a totalitarian state. "Oh, freedom-loving 'leftist' thinkers of the West!" Solzhenitsyn writes in "The Gulag Archipelago." "Oh, leftist Laborites! Oh, progressive American, German and French students! For you, all this counts for little. For you, my entire book amounts to nothing. You will only understand it all when they bellow at you--'hands behind your back'--as you yourselves trudge off to our archipelago...
...specific written consent of the prisoner had been given. But it left the important questions unanswered, with its neutral, impersonal language. Who gave the order? Who administered the drug? Who took the prisoner to the room? Who "exercised" him? We are back in the world of Ivan Denisovich, of Gulag, of impartial officials and "broken consciences." It may be--it is hopefully--an isolated instance. But whenever a human being is considered manipulable, formable, breakable, at the last; whenever he is considered to be of no intrinsic worth, but only a thing, a useful thing or a useless thing; whenever...
...passages in Gulag about the Russian P.O.W.s are the first accounts of their tragic fate to come out of the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities have used these chapters to portray the author as a Nazi traitor. Most of the official attacks on the book have included falsified quotations purporting to show that Solzhenitsyn called General Vlasov a "hero" and "mocked the sacrifices made by the Soviet people during...
Inevitably, questions arise as to whether he had any sort of political strategy plotted out in the timing of Gulag's publication, which seemed to force the pace of retribution against him. By all accounts, apparently not. He has never directly engaged in polemics about detente, unlike his friend and fellow dissident, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who appealed to the U.S. Congress last year to make democratization of the U.S.S.R. a precondition for expanding trade relations with Russia. Solzhenitsyn's concerns have always been less political than moral. In his Nobel Prize lecture, he wrote: "The salvation of mankind lies only...
...libertarians. Last week Sakharov and nine other prominent dissenters issued an impassioned defense of Solzhenitsyn's actions: "His so-called 'treason' consists of his disclosure to the whole world, with shattering force, of the monstrous crimes committed in the U.S.S.R. not very long ago." They demanded the publication of Gulag in the Soviet Union and called for an international investigation of the crimes against innocent Soviet citizens...