Word: gulags
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Solzhenitsyn, author of "The First Circle" and "The Gulag Archipelago," was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 after repeated criticism of the Soviet government...
...today the record of socialism deserves even more careful scrutiny than that of capitalism. In whatever form, socialism makes far greater claims and far more sweeping promises than capitalism does, which is a major reason for its wide appeal. But socialism rarely lives up to its promises. Stalin's Gulag and Mao's violent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?which represents socialism in its extreme form?give the lie to the Marxist claim that it is necessarily capitalism and not socialism that enslaves the human spirit. Economically, socialism has logged impressive achievements, sometimes against tremendous odds. Yet in comparing neighboring countries...
...that it need not be repressive. A group of young French leftist intellectuals known as the "New Philosophers" is not so certain. Bernard-Henri Lévy, 28, one of the movement's most prolific members, has concluded that Stalinism, rather than being an aberration, "is a mode of socialism. Gulag is not an accident." At fault, he argues, is socialism's obsession with homogeneity, "expelling from its borders the forces of heterogeneity and ... squelching its rebels." Compared with socialism's seemingly intrinsic dangers, capitalism seems a lesser evil to some of the New Philosophers. Admits Levy: "Between the barbarity...
Later Chirac declared that no country had ever gone from a "regime of liberty to a regime of socialism and back again to liberty. I don't say that Monsieur Mitterrand wishes to install a gulag in France," he conceded, but he warned that France under leftist rule would eventually resemble the Soviet-bloc countries. Back in Strasbourg that evening, Chirac delivered another rousing denunciation of the left to 4,500 Gaullist faithful. Sighed one elderly admirer: "He is the dauphin of Charles de Gaulle...
...memoirs Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that Pasternak was the only person who dared visit her when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in a concentration camp. Pasternak bravely directed that the royalties for his translations of Shakespeare's tragedies be spent to help prisoners in the Gulag. When prison regulations eased after Stalin's death, a flood of letters arrived from strangers in the camps, thanking him for the succor of his poetry. Ivinskaya has provided what might be his epitaph, in the first lines of a Pasternak poem that remains unpublished in Russia...