Word: solzhenitsyns
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...unsparing personal account of the path he traveled before arriving at the convictions expressed in his book. An archetypal child of the Russian revolution, he was born in 1918, the son of an officer, and brought up in the provincial city of Rostov-on-the-Don. As a youth, Solzhenitsyn dreamed of writing a history of the revolution. "Then," he recalls, "I never needed anything but Marxism to understand the revolution." He failed to recognize signs of mass terror, like the column of prisoners he remembers seeing pass through Rostov in his boyhood. Solzhenitsyn entered Rostov University to study mathematics...
...Soviet papers were full of letters from citizens insisting that the authorities do just that. After his banishment, the letter-writing campaign continued with a new twist. Demands for his punishment were replaced by expressions of gratitude that Kremlin leaders had up rooted "the traitor." Only twelve hours after Solzhenitsyn's deportation had been announced on Moscow Radio, Izvestia was able to print a letter purportedly from a reader in Baku, although mail usually takes ten days to reach Moscow from there. Other minor miracles were performed by letter writers from Minsk and Kiev: their messages of approval were also...
Soviet leaders have reason to fear him: no man alive today has more au thority than Solzhenitsyn to draw world attention to the Kremlin's long record of inhumanity. In an era of detente, many would prefer to have that record forgot ten. Yet Solzhenitsyn ? martyr, survivor and great writer ? demands a hearing...
...Solzhenitsyn perceives that an entire nation has been debased by four decades of totalitarianism far more oppressive than Czarist authoritarianism. Ordinary people have been rendered indifferent to injustice and pitiless toward the suffering of others. Among bureaucrats, the absolute exercise of power in the past continues to corrupt absolutely in the present. "Thus," he mourns, "have we been driven to become savages...
...Accident. Solzhenitsyn argues that Stalin's rule by terror was no mere aberration in the development of Communism. Instead, he writes, it is inherent in the system established by Lenin, consolidated by Stalin and preserved, in essence, by the present Kremlin leaders...