Word: gulag
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...Much of Gulag's power to persuade lies in the author's unsparing personal account of the path he traveled before arriving at the convictions expressed in his book. An archetypal child of the Russian revolution, he was born in 1918, the son of an officer, and brought up in the provincial city of Rostov-on-the-Don. As a youth, Solzhenitsyn dreamed of writing a history of the revolution. "Then," he recalls, "I never needed anything but Marxism to understand the revolution." He failed to recognize signs of mass terror, like the column of prisoners he remembers seeing pass...
...refusing the second summons, he went back to his desk in his narrow, 6-ft. by 18-ft. study. Solzhenitsyn often worked here twelve hours a day. That kind of dedication made possible his prodigious production in two decades of novels, plays, short stories?not to mention the massive Gulag. Six weeks ago, when the official drive against Gulag began, he had vowed, "They will not make me lose a single day of work...
...superb earlier novels (The First Cir cle, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Cancer Ward) were fiction alized reflections of that experience. In the first two parts of Gulag, however, he set out to document the entire range of horrors inflicted upon the Soviet people from 1918 to 1956. A 260,000-word mosaic, composed of personal reminiscences, interviews with survivors, and documents, Gulag lays out the intricate patterns of terror...
True, that terror subsided after 1956, when, by Khrushchev's decree, millions were freed from the giant "archipelago" of prisons and camps run by "Gulag," the Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. But the significance of Gulag lies in its thrust into the present?and future?of the U.S.S.R...
...Gulag, Solzhenitsyn describes his arrest for the first time. In February 1945, as the Red Army rumbled inexorably through Germany to Berlin, the battle-worn captain was suddenly seized near Konigsberg, on the East Prussian front. He was stripped of his rank, his medals and his gun, and escorted by armed guards back to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. It was then that the writer was born. Passing through a Moscow subway station en route to Lubyanka on that bitter winter day, Solzhenitsyn paused and surveyed the scene...