Word: solzhenitsyns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Striking at Lenin. The power and substance of Solzhenitsyn's condemnation seemed likely to bring down the Kremlin's wrath on the already beleaguered author (see BOOKS). In contrast to his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which dealt only with Stalin's terror, Gulag strikes out at the officially idolized figure of Lenin. Solzhenitsyn rejects the Kremlin's thesis that Stalin alone was responsible for the "excesses" of his time. Instead, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly demonstrates that the imprisonment of millions under Stalin was made possible...
Gulag also recounts the better-known horrors of the Stalin era while adding some sensational disclosures and intimations. Solzhenitsyn suggests, for example, that Stalin was an undercover agent of the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) in the disguise of a Bolshevik revolutionary-thus reinforcing the suspicions of several Western scholars. Gulag also says that Stalin planned a large-scale "massacre" of Jews that was thwarted by his death in 1953. In that year the arrest of several Jewish physicians, accused of plotting to assassinate high government officials, unleashed a wave of antiSemitism...
...Writes Solzhenitsyn: "According to Moscow rumors, Stalin's plan was this: at the beginning of March, 1953, the 'doctor-murderers' were to be hanged on Red Square. Aroused patriots, naturally led by instructors, were to rush off to in cite an anti-Jewish pogrom. And at this point . . . the government would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people. On that very same night it would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and Siberia, where barracks were already prepared for them...
Equally inflammatory, from the Soviet point of view, are Solzhenitsyn's meticulously documented comparisons of Czarist authoritarianism and Communist dictatorship. In terms of numbers of arrests and executions, and lengths of prison terms, he declares, the Soviet regime has exceeded imperial rule by factors ranging from 10 to 1 to 1,000 to 1. Solzhenitsyn also asserts that the Soviets killed and imprisoned far more people than the Nazis did, excluding wartime casualties on both sides. He estimates that in any one year of the Stalin era, 12,000,000 people were held in prison. "As some departed beneath...
...Perhaps Solzhenitsyn's boldest and most dangerous assertion concerns a former Red Army general who is anathema to the Soviets. He was Andrei Vlasov, who commanded Russian units in the German army after 1942. Although Solzhenitsyn does not condone Vlasov's wartime defection, he praises him as "one of the most talented" of the Soviet generals who conducted the earlier defense of Moscow...