Word: gulags
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After a massive, three-week Soviet press campaign against him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week raised his voice in counterattack. In a statement issued to foreign newsmen from his Moscow home, the besieged writer defied the Kremlin to refute the charges made in his new book, The Gulag Archipelago. He accused the Soviets of damning Gulag 's description of Leninist and Stalinist terror out of "an animal fear of disclosure." To his critics he said: "You liars!" It was an unprecedented moment of confrontation between the Soviet state and a lone, heroic...
Solzhenitsyn's outburst was sparked by charges in Pravda that his new book was "slanderous," "counterrevolutionary" and "treasonable." In support of these contentions, other Russian newspapers weighed in with quotations allegedly drawn from the Russian text of Gulag, which was published in Paris last month. All the Soviet accounts of his book, Solzhenitsyn said, were distortions designed to conceal its real content from Russian readers. Thus do Soviet leaders show, he declared, "how tenaciously they cling to the bloody past and how they want to drag it with them, like a sealed up sack, into the future...
...ticked off some of the Russian press's misrepresentations of Gulag. "I am alleged to have written that 'Hitler's Nazis were gracious and merciful to enslaved peoples.' All lies, Pravda comrades! Point out the exact pages! Tass says that in my autobiography I admitted my hatred of the Soviet system and people. My autobiography was published by the Nobel Foundation in 1970. It is available for the whole world to see how insolently Tass lies...
Soon millions of Soviet citizens will also be informed. Next week Radio Liberty will start broadcasting to the U.S.S.R. the entire text of Gulag in Russian, and, later, extracts will be beamed in 17 other Soviet languages. Moreover, the 606-page paperback Russian-language edition, printed in Paris on onionskin paper, and only %½ in. thick, could pass unnoticed through Soviet customs in the vest pockets of Western travelers...
Underlying the Kremlin's dilemma is Gulag's unanswerable challenge to the authority, indeed the legitimacy of the post-Stalin regime. This challenge is implicit in Solzhenitsyn's call for the punishment of the more than 250,000 people that he estimates are guilty of the crimes he details in his book. Responsibility reaches far beyond former concentration-camp guards. By implication, myriad Soviet bureaucrats in the entire present-day chain of command are culpable. Recalling the punishment inflicted on prisoners like himself, Solzhenitsyn writes of those accountable: "We must be generous and not shoot them...