Word: gulags
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...GULAG ARCHIPELAGO Vol. I Translated by THOMAS P. WHITNEY 660 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50. (Paperbound...
Americans have followed Alexander Solzhenitsyn's distant struggle with the Soviet government and his final, forced hegira into exile with the kind of awe that might attend the trial and burning of Joan of Arc. He is the world's most celebrated writer. The Gulag Archipelago, with massive printings now pouring its cornucopia of Communist cruelties into book clubs and bookstores all over the U.S., seems about to become his most popular work...
...contrast, is that Solzhenitsyn's fame depends on politics more than art, that he is a great man, but not a great writer. That is probably a shortsighted judgment. In America it will be necessary to wait for first-rate translations of his books, since each succeeding volume (Gulag will be no exception) stirs more than the usual storm about inaccuracies and betrayal of spirit that mars most translations. More important, one will have to see completed the already vast and elaborate mixture of fact and fiction through which he is attempting to restore to his countrymen the history...
...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...
...Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Vol. I, Solzhenitsyn...