Word: gulags
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn has resumed his unrelenting chronicle of Soviet terror, which provoked the Kremlin into deporting him four months ago. From his home in exile in Zurich, the Russian writer gave the signal for the publication of the oft-postponed second volume of his trilogy, The Gulag Archipelago, by the Russian-language Y.M.C.A. Press in Paris.* An exhaustive, harrowing 657-page account of the forced-labor system under Lenin and Stalin, Gulag II may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning achievement to date...
Composed with the novelist's superb literary skill and his eye for compelling human detail, Gulag II is based on a wealth of solid documentation. This includes official Soviet records and the testimony of hundreds of victims, including that of Solzhenitsyn himself, a prisoner for eight years in the gigantic "archipelago" of Stalinist labor camps run by "Gulag," the Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. Between 1918 and 1959, Solzhenitsyn believes, 66 million men, women and children were shuttled to these islands of slavery under the pious official slogan "Correction through labor." In fact, Solzhenitsyn charges, it amounted to "extermination...
...Gulag I, Solzhenitsyn puts the blame for the introduction of systematic terror squarely on Lenin. He notes that Lenin was the first Soviet leader to use the designation "concentration camps," thus "launching one of the most important terms of the 20th century." Indeed, he adds, "The Archipelago was born with the first gun salvos of Aurora" -the battle cruiser that signaled Lenin's seizure of power in October 1918. The "alma mater," as Solzhenitsyn calls it, of all subsequent forced-labor camps was established under Lenin in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the Arctic. Later, Stalin made slave...
...months. Behind them came his wife Natalya, stepson Dimitri, 12, mother-in-law and youngest son Stepan, six months. Then the Solzhenitsyns drove to their home in exile, a seven-room villa. Deported from Russia in February for publishing in the West his account of Stalinist terror, The Gulag Archipelago, the novelist was concerned that his archives, which he needs to continue his series of novels about modern Russian history, had not been tampered with. But the documents arrived safely, filling most of 14 suitcases and trunks, which weighed some 800 Ibs. Solzhenitsyn's literary success in the West...
...Estonian lawyer to whom Solzhenitsyn attributes his conversion from Marxism to democratic principles was Arnold Susi (named in The Gulag Archipelago), a member of the last legitimate Estonian government on national soil. He could not make it to freedom abroad in 1944 when the Russians again invaded Estonia, and was subsequently arrested by the Soviets solely because he was a well-known national figure. He was sent to prisons and labor camps in Russia, where he met Alexander Solzhenitsyn...