Word: gulags
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After a stolid five-day silence, the Soviet government last week lashed out at Alexander Solzhenitsyn's sensational new book, The Gulag Archipelago (TIME, Jan. 7). It called the work "an anti-Soviet lampoon sent abroad by Mr. Solzhenitsyn in the guise of a New Year gift." Far from being a lampoon, the book is a meticulously documented account of the agony of millions of innocent people who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were imprisoned in the vast "archipelago" of slave-labor camps...
...Gulag also recounts the better-known horrors of the Stalin era while adding some sensational disclosures and intimations. Solzhenitsyn suggests, for example, that Stalin was an undercover agent of the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) in the disguise of a Bolshevik revolutionary-thus reinforcing the suspicions of several Western scholars. Gulag also says that Stalin planned a large-scale "massacre" of Jews that was thwarted by his death in 1953. In that year the arrest of several Jewish physicians, accused of plotting to assassinate high government officials, unleashed a wave of antiSemitism...
...history of the manuscript of Gulag is nearly as tragic as its subject matter. Although Solzhenitsyn had begun researching the book in 1958, he did not start writing it until 1964, just as official Soviet acceptance of his works had be gun to wane. The 1962 publication in Russia of One Day, by Premier Nikita Khrushchev's order, had prompted hundreds of former prisoners to write to Solzhenitsyn, detailing their own experiences. Deeply moved, Solzhenitsyn shut himself up in a ramshackle dacha to work. He completed Gulag four years later. Solzhenitsyn was then unwilling to risk endangering his correspondents...
Last fall one of his friends yielded to five days of brutal KGB interrogation; after giving up a copy of the manuscript, she hanged herself (TIME, Sept. 17). Once Gulag was in the hands of the security police, Solzhenitsyn could no longer protect his informants, most of whom are named in the book. In the preface, he explains his decision to publish: "For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book. My obligation to those who are still alive outweighed my obligation to those who are dead. But now that State Security has seized...
Surprise Publication. Plans for publication of Gulag were kept secret by the author's Swiss lawyer. Though ru mors about the work had circulated for several years, its existence was denied by everybody close to Solzhenitsyn. Thus the announcement of imminent publication by Harper & Row and four European publishers took the world by surprise last week - as did the serialization of excerpts by the New York Times...