Word: iii
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After a two-year delay following its Russian-language publication in Paris, Gulag III has reached the U.S. It is the last volume of Solzhenitsyn's 1,800-page chronicle of the Soviet penal system, beginning with the Red Terror of 1918 and ending with the release of millions of political prisoners from slave labor camps in 1956. Up to now the narrative has been one of unrelenting horror, recounted at a high pitch of indignation modulated by black sarcasm...
...Gulag III should prove less formidable than its predecessors. The bleak panorama of I (the prison system) and II (the labor camps) opens on to more heartening vistas of resistance and rebellion in III. The book is principally an enthralling account of the first postwar escapes and strikes in the camps that exploded into full-scale mutinies after Stalin's death. That heroic era coincided with Solzhenitsyn's own eight-year term, and its heady air still exhilarates him. The pride and zest with which he describes the convicts' resistance contrast sharply with the fury he expended...
...Gulag III Solzhenitsyn abandons the thesis that Soviet totalitarianism could not have developed had there been resistance from below. "A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf," he once raged. "We didn't love freedom enough. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!" If only people had fended off their arresting officers with pokers instead of cowering "like rabbits in their warrens, paling with terror," then the cursed machine would have come to a halt," he added...
...Gulag III's most riveting chapters describe the great escapes. Invariably, each ingenious attempt brought pride to the camp-even when the severed head and right arm (for fingerprints) of the escapee were brought back by the police and army units that had scoured desert, tundra and taiga for him. Those who survived capture were likely to try again, like the legendary Estonian Georgi Tenno. Between his ultimately unsuccessful breakouts, prisoners would wonderingly ask Tenno, "What do you expect to find on the outside?" His reply: "Freedom, of course! A whole day in the taiga without chains-that...
Following complaints from some Adams House members. Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, wrote a letter to Mitchell L. Pross '79, president of the Lampoon...