Word: solzhenitsyns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first acts of rebellion in the camps were made possible by a miscalculation of Stalin in 1948. Desirous of worsening thelot of political prisoners, he established the Special Camps described in Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For the first time, vast numbers of politicals (incorrigible "enemies of the people") were segregated from common criminals (redeemable "class allies"). Once free from the scourge of the murderers and thieves who terrorized them, the politicals gradually gained courage...
...same time, the prewar prisoner population of 15 million was swollen by the arrival of millions of young Red Army veterans. Most were survivors of the Nazi P.O.W. camps whom Stalin had dispatched to the Gulag for the crime of having been captured. Though Solzhenitsyn had never been taken, he belonged to this new breed of camp rebels; a much decorated artillery captain, he had been arrested at the front for having written letters critical of Stalin. Leadership of the resistance movement was provided by prisoners from the western Ukraine, former guerrilla fighters who had alternately fought the Nazis...
...informers. First, there were strange accidents: a log would roll off a pile and cast a stoolie into the river. Then came apparent suicides. Finally, teams of masked men entered the barracks to stab informers with primitive knives. "This was a new period, a heady and spine-tingling period," Solzhenitsyn recalls. "Retribution was at hand-not in the next world, not before the court of history, but retribution live and palpable, raising a knife over you in the light of dawn. It was like a fairy tale: the ground is soft and warm under the feet of honest...
...Solzhenitsyn participated in one of the first prisoner strikes at Ekibastuz. In 1953 the death of Stalin, followed by the fall of the mighty emperor of Gulag, Lavrenji Beria, set off mutinies on many islands of the Archipelago. In Kengir, near Ekibastuz, 8,000 men and women prisoners liberated the camp for 40 days. Though ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks, this and other uprisings aroused hopes among prisoners that resistance to the regime would spread out side the camps. Instead, change was ordered from above. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev set out to disband most of the slave labor camps...
Beyond ignorance, fear and greed, such actions are emblematic of the moral degradation visited upon the Soviet people by the regime, Solzhenitsyn believes. It is scarcely surprising, then, that he experienced a stab of regret when he was re leased from the camp in 1953: "Only on the threshold of the guardhouse do you begin to feel that what you are leaving be hind you is both your prison and your homeland. This was your spiritual birthplace, and a secret part of your soul will remain here forever - while your feet trudge on into the dumb and unwelcoming expanse...