Word: sovietize
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...went to Moscow in 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union and a year after Solzhenitsyn had returned from exile. By then I had read Gulag, and every time I walked through the Byelorusskaya metro station, I thought of the first chapter, in which he describes his arrival in Moscow in 1945, 11 days after he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter. He is escorted by three intelligence officers, but "not one of the three knew the city," he writes, "and it was up to me to pick the shortest route to the prison...
...keep silent. His writing alternately saved and condemned him. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his searing account of the Soviet--labor camp experience, found favor during Khrushchev's thaw and was published in 1962. By the time the temperature chilled again, Solzhenitsyn's international fame was such that he could not be altogether dispensed with. In 1974, when the Brezhnev regime decided it would not tolerate the foreign publication of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and put on a plane. He breathed a little easier when the plane took off westward and not toward Siberia...
...time, the Soviet government tolerated Solzhenitsyn. Khrushchev was eager to discredit Stalin and consolidate his own power, and Solzhenitsyn's work served his political aims. He became a global literary celebrity. But he quickly outlived his political usefulness, and his next two books, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, had to be published abroad. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature, but he wasn't permitted to leave the country to accept it. In 1973 he completed the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, a thundering, encyclopedic indictment of the Soviet labor camp system and the government...
...First Circle Solzhenitsyn wrote: "For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones." With The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn had become too great for the Soviet government. After years of harassment he was put on a plane and expelled from Russia...
...Then what Solzhenitsyn had long predicted came to pass: the Soviet Union ceased to be. In 1994, at age 75, a bearded, patriarchal Solzhenitsyn returned from exile to his native Russia, where he was welcomed as a hero, the prophet of the post-Soviet era. But his home had become strange to him. He had imagined himself as the conscience of his native land, and he certainly commanded a great deal of cultural authority - he was given his own TV show, and in 2007 Vladimir Putin visited him personally to present him with a state medal. But he was never...