Word: gulags
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gulag Archipelago, Sotzhenitsyn...
...Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn...
...Gulag Archipelago was written expressly for Soviet readers. Again and again the author says, in effect: We thought the Moscow purges of 1937 were more or less isolated convulsions of terror. Not so. The corruption of Soviet justice did not begin with Stalin as we were taught, but with Lenin, in 1918. Then he goes back to document the successive waves of political prisoners-from engineer "wreckers" of the Revolution and peasants caught up in collectivization right down to whole divisions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans in World War II and then returned to the U.S.S.R...
...prime historic target is revolutionary ideology, because of its power to subvert private conscience, encouraging men to see their fellow men as "insects" (Lenin's word) to be virtuously crushed for the good of the cause. It was in the name of Marxism-Leninism that the horrors of Gulag were visited upon the Russian people. The book is one of the most overwhelming attacks on the practical applications of that ideology ever written. What Solzhenitsyn urges in another remarkable document, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, is that the Soviet government abandon its ideology entirely...
...into a war with China. Shrimps may learn to whistle -as Nikita Khrushchev said in another connection-before such a thing is done by the Soviet government. "Human nature," Solzhenitsyn once wrote, "changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth." The author's suggestion-in Gulag-that the masters of the Kremlin put on trial the men most evidently guilty of the past imprisonment, torture and murder of so many millions of their countrymen will probably be ignored...