Word: solzhenitsyns
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...shabby as the New York City subway. The typical building is a grim fortress with old equipment in poor repair. The food is plentiful but dull; instead of tissues and toilet paper, the patient makes do with yesterday's Pravda. The institutions are well described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his novel, The Cancer Ward. To some patients, though, such hospitals look like paradise. Among them are alcoholics, a major Soviet problem, who can wind up in "corrective-labor detention centers...
...current Russian practice of samizdat (self-publishing) is well-known in the West. By samizdat, Russians endlessly retype and clandestinely circulate the work of such banned Russian writers as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. With the increasing availability of tape recorders, another practice, called magnitizdat (publishing by tape recorder), is becoming even more popular than samizdat. Through magnitizdat, artists record songs that are not acceptable for official release. The tapes are then passed from hand to hand with lightning rapidity as each person makes copies for his friends...
...most celebrated of the modern Russian songwriters, Alexander Galich, is himself a longtime veteran of prisons and camps-his admirers call him "the Solzhenitsyn of song." In his unmusical but strangely compelling bass voice, Galich sings of the complicity in Stalin's crimes of people who kept silent out of cowardice or self-interest. "We all know silence can be profitable," he sings, "It's golden, after all. It's easy to join the ranks of the rich. Very easy to join the leaders. So easy to join the executioners. Just keep quiet, keep quiet...
Doubtful Tactics. In the past, protests against the incarceration of dissidents have, in Solzhenitsyn's words, "bounced back like peas off a wall." But this time the authorities seemed to take some heed of the remonstrances. In a surprise move, Soviet authorities last week told Medvedev that he was free to go home. His release, however, was only a temporary reprieve, for he was warned that he might be recalled at any time for further observation...
...Solzhenitsyn get away with his brave and outspoken protest? Dissenters in Russia today walk a highly precarious line. Solzhenitsyn, who served eight years in Stalinist labor camps, was summarily dismissed from the Soviet Writers' Union only last year. More recently, it has been rumored that his persistent protests might cause the state to declare him, too, mentally unbalanced, thus inflicting on him the very punishment he denounced. His latest protest may be a straightforward act of great courage, in disregard of consequences. But it may also be a last-ditch effort at self-preservation since, in view...