Word: solzhenitsyns
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Scope of Evil. After a few weeks in Lubyanka, the seeds of doubt had been planted in the mind of the fervent young Marxist. But it was only after he was transferred from Lubyanka to another Moscow prison, Butyrki, that Solzhenitsyn began to perceive the scope of the evil that had befallen his country. In Butyrki, he met the first contingent of Russian soldiers and civilians who had been captured by the Germans during the war. These people were now being repatriated?straight into Stalin's prisons and camps. Nearly 2 million of the 5.7 million prisoners...
...Solzhenitsyn began to hear the appalling stories of the survivors. Recalling one of the horrors recounted to him by an ex-prisoner, Solzhenitsyn writes, "A crazed P.O.W. might have crawled up to me, too, as I was dying, and gnawed the flesh off my elbow ... Listening to such things, the story of my own arrest seemed to me insignificant...
...Solzhenitsyn regards the brutal fate of these returned P.O.W.s as one of the most frightful of Stalin's crimes. "They were called traitors, " he writes of them, "but they did not betray the motherland. The motherland betrayed them, and betrayed them three times." The first betrayal was Stalin's bumbling strategy, which nearly lost the war and allowed the Germans to capture vast numbers of prisoners. Then these Soviet P.O.W.s were virtually abandoned by Stalin and left to die in Nazi camps. Finally the survivors were lured home by the oft-repeated promise of forgiveness...
Some of the repatriated Russians were, as Solzhenitsyn concedes, Nazi collaborators. He does not condone the fact that more than 500,000 Soviets served in the German army?mostly as noncombatants. But he also points out that this was the first tune in history that a nation had formally and officially renounced its P.O.W.s, refusing to sign the Geneva Convention on prisoners...
...result, many felt compelled to serve the Germans in order to survive. Solzhenitsyn is careful to distinguish between degrees of collaboration. Some "scum" joined the Nazi polizei. Ukrainians, Latvians and other national groups, deeply embittered by Soviet persecution, joined Waffen SS divisions. The so-called "Russian Army of Liberation"* held the pitiful belief that a German victory would enable them to bring democracy to Russia. Other P.O.W.s escaped the Nazis to fight with the Soviet partisans or try to rejoin the Red Army. Whether scum or hero, all received the same sentence when they returned home: ten years...