Word: gulags
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gulag III Solzhenitsyn abandons the thesis that Soviet totalitarianism could not have developed had there been resistance from below. "A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf," he once raged. "We didn't love freedom enough. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!" If only people had fended off their arresting officers with pokers instead of cowering "like rabbits in their warrens, paling with terror," then the cursed machine would have come to a halt," he added...
...turns out, that hypothesis was mostly hyperbole, the outgrowth, perhaps, of fantasies spun by helpless Russians who in fact could scarcely utter a whisper against the system of mass police terror. Gulag HI marks a judicious turnabout: "The Communist regime has not been overthrown in sixty years, not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West...
...same time, the prewar prisoner population of 15 million was swollen by the arrival of millions of young Red Army veterans. Most were survivors of the Nazi P.O.W. camps whom Stalin had dispatched to the Gulag for the crime of having been captured. Though Solzhenitsyn had never been taken, he belonged to this new breed of camp rebels; a much decorated artillery captain, he had been arrested at the front for having written letters critical of Stalin. Leadership of the resistance movement was provided by prisoners from the western Ukraine, former guerrilla fighters who had alternately fought the Nazis...
...Gulag III's most riveting chapters describe the great escapes. Invariably, each ingenious attempt brought pride to the camp-even when the severed head and right arm (for fingerprints) of the escapee were brought back by the police and army units that had scoured desert, tundra and taiga for him. Those who survived capture were likely to try again, like the legendary Estonian Georgi Tenno. Between his ultimately unsuccessful breakouts, prisoners would wonderingly ask Tenno, "What do you expect to find on the outside?" His reply: "Freedom, of course! A whole day in the taiga without chains-that...
...Solzhenitsyn participated in one of the first prisoner strikes at Ekibastuz. In 1953 the death of Stalin, followed by the fall of the mighty emperor of Gulag, Lavrenji Beria, set off mutinies on many islands of the Archipelago. In Kengir, near Ekibastuz, 8,000 men and women prisoners liberated the camp for 40 days. Though ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks, this and other uprisings aroused hopes among prisoners that resistance to the regime would spread out side the camps. Instead, change was ordered from above. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev set out to disband most of the slave labor camps...