Word: gulag
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Titled The Gulag Archipelago,* the book is based on Solzhenitsyn's eleven years in prisons, concentration camps and exile, as well as letters that he received from ex-prisoners and interviews that he conducted with 227 survivors of slave-labor camps. Last week, as the Russian text appeared in Paris, and the New York Times began syndicating a 10,000-word excerpt, Gulag struck its early readers as both a literary masterwork and an unparalleled indictment of the Soviet regime...
...Solzhenitsyn's condemnation seemed likely to bring down the Kremlin's wrath on the already beleaguered author (see BOOKS). In contrast to his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which dealt only with Stalin's terror, Gulag strikes out at the officially idolized figure of Lenin. Solzhenitsyn rejects the Kremlin's thesis that Stalin alone was responsible for the "excesses" of his time. Instead, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly demonstrates that the imprisonment of millions under Stalin was made possible by Lenin's establishment of a ruthless police...
...Solzhenitsyn off to the fact that one of his major new works was in the West. To his consternation and alarm, Solzhenitsyn read in the magazine's issue of March 21, 1969, that Western publishers were eagerly bidding for his massive documentary novel about Stalinist concentration camps, Arkhipelag Gulag...
...Solzhenitsyn's new novel, Arkhipelag Gulag, reached the West, smuggled out in manuscript form without the author's knowledge or consent, and was being eagerly bid for by Western publishers. Banned by the Kremlin, as were the author's two previous novels, the work has long been circulating in Russia by hand-copied samizdat, the underground press. The book is said to form the last part of a trilogy with The First Circle and Cancer Ward. In it, Solzhenitsyn takes Gleb Nerzhin, Circle's hero, from the relative comfort of the prison scientific community...
...Communism, and its dedicated, anonymous thousands of operators not only controlled the police, espionage, security and surveillance agencies, but by dominating innumerable inspection, control, auditing and credentials committees and commissions, reached down into every corner of Soviet life; their chauffeurs abroad gave orders to ambassadors. In the shape of Gulag (literally, State Administration of Camps), the NKVD was the undisguised administrator of vast areas of the Soviet hinterland...