Word: solzhenitsyn
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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...
...Soviet musician has been an outspoken defender of artistic freedom in the USSR, and he sheltered novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn prior to the author's exile...
...brash, opinions on practically everything of importance and is not overly modest. "If I may say so, writing Napoleon Symphony was probably more difficult than writing a War and Peace, which can go on as long as it likes, and does." He kicks another sacred Russian cow in Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "The most swollen reputation of our day," he observes of the Nobel-prizewinning exile. "They say he is a great writer because he is a great...