Word: gulags
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...demonstrating their power on the bones of the best citizens of Russia." Biologist Vladimir Bukovsky, 38, who had spent nine years in Soviet prisons and camps before he was exchanged for a Chilean Communist in 1976, listed some of the dissidents who have recently been dispatched to the Gulag, including Historian Arseni Roginsky, who was arrested last month on the charge of forging a library card. Said Bukovsky: "If all these writers, poets, editors and journalists were allowed to attend the present reception, this room would be too small to admit them. Only Soviet prisons are spacious enough for that...
...power to arouse the wrath of a dictator bent on destroying his country's intellectual and spiritual resources. At the same time, poetry had the power to console Stalin's victims, as has been amply documented in the writings of survivors of Stalin's gigantic Gulag of prisons, camps and places of exile. A compelling example is Eugenia Ginzburg's description of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison in Yaroslavl. A former schoolteacher and an ardent Communist, Ginzburg was arrested in 1937, like millions of other innocent citizens caught up in Stalin's Great...
That haunting passage is from Journey into the Whirlwind, the first volume of Ginzburg's memoirs, published in the U.S. in 1967. There, she began recounting the 18 years she spent in the Gulag, mostly in the Arctic death camps of Kolyma. In this, the second volume, Ginzburg, who died in 1977, picked up her story about "the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...
...story of good and evil to Russia and the world. As her husband observed, "You just aren't very good at hating " How striking is the difference between Ginzburg's account of the camps and that of Solzhenitsyn, whose governing passion in the writing of The Gulag Archipelago was an unconquerable rage. No outsider in the West can hazard a judgment as to why the experience of the Gulag should have softened the heart of one prisoner while it hardened the purpose of another. Unquestionably, both pieces of testimony contain their own profound truth. -By Patricia Blake...
only in the province of irony. He can no longer adhere to the liturgical beliefs of his father, but he refuses the blandishments of Stalin's comrades, many of whom will later perish in the Gulag. On his way to Paris, he rides through Germany eating matzohs and looking numbly through train windows at German flags displaying an unfamiliar design: the swastika...