Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Instead, Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. After that, he confesses, he acquired the habits of the Soviet elite: "I ate my officer's butter with pastry, without giving a thought to why I had a right to it, while rank and file soldiers did not... This is what happens when you put epaulets on people's shoulders; they begin to feel like little gods." Rising to the rank of artillery captain, Solzhenitsyn was decorated several times for bravery while serving on three fighting fronts. Then, in the midst of a battle in 1945, he was arrested...
...Solzhenitsyn views his arrest as a great personal turning point?the beginning of his life as a thinking being. At that same crossroads, he suggests, millions of Russians entered into one of two categories of Soviet citizens: the oppressed and the oppressors. This national dichotomy, he says, tragically disturbed the balance of good and evil that he perceives in every man. Speaking of the oppressors, he asks: "How did this tribe of wolves arise from among our people? Are they not of the same root, the same blood?" He confesses that he too might have joined the predators...
...Gulag, Solzhenitsyn describes his arrest for the first time. In February 1945, as the Red Army rumbled inexorably through Germany to Berlin, the battle-worn captain was suddenly seized near Konigsberg, on the East Prussian front. He was stripped of his rank, his medals and his gun, and escorted by armed guards back to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. It was then that the writer was born. Passing through a Moscow subway station en route to Lubyanka on that bitter winter day, Solzhenitsyn paused and surveyed the scene...
Bitter Paradox. Gifted with near-total recall, Solzhenitsyn set out to develop his powers of observation while in captivity. In the monotonous daily routine of his first weeks in Lubyanka, he noted that "the events are tiny, but for the first time in your life you learn to examine them under a magnifying glass." For the first time, too, he encountered the victims of Soviet terror whom he would meticulously interview for the next 23 years. He was struck by a bitter paradox: prison offered the possibility of discussing freely what was unthinkable "outside." Meetings with prisoners...
...Solzhenitsyn also became aware at that time of alternatives to Communism. From an Estonian lawyer he heard about the democracy that was finally crushed by the Soviets in 1944. "I had never before dreamed that I would become interested in Estonia or bourgeois democracy," he writes. "It was not clear why, but I began to like it all, and the new information was stored away in my mind." His education continued as he learned of the mass arrests that had swept millions of peasants, as well as hundreds of thousands of party members and Soviet intellectuals into prison camps...