Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bleak panorama of I (the prison system) and II (the labor camps) opens on to more heartening vistas of resistance and rebellion in III. The book is principally an enthralling account of the first postwar escapes and strikes in the camps that exploded into full-scale mutinies after Stalin's death. That heroic era coincided with Solzhenitsyn's own eight-year term, and its heady air still exhilarates him. The pride and zest with which he describes the convicts' resistance contrast sharply with the fury he expended on their earlier docility. In Gulag II he had thundered...
...first acts of rebellion in the camps were made possible by a miscalculation of Stalin in 1948. Desirous of worsening thelot of political prisoners, he established the Special Camps described in Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For the first time, vast numbers of politicals (incorrigible "enemies of the people") were segregated from common criminals (redeemable "class allies"). Once free from the scourge of the murderers and thieves who terrorized them, the politicals gradually gained courage...
...same time, the prewar prisoner population of 15 million was swollen by the arrival of millions of young Red Army veterans. Most were survivors of the Nazi P.O.W. camps whom Stalin had dispatched to the Gulag for the crime of having been captured. Though Solzhenitsyn had never been taken, he belonged to this new breed of camp rebels; a much decorated artillery captain, he had been arrested at the front for having written letters critical of Stalin. Leadership of the resistance movement was provided by prisoners from the western Ukraine, former guerrilla fighters who had alternately fought the Nazis...
...Solzhenitsyn participated in one of the first prisoner strikes at Ekibastuz. In 1953 the death of Stalin, followed by the fall of the mighty emperor of Gulag, Lavrenji Beria, set off mutinies on many islands of the Archipelago. In Kengir, near Ekibastuz, 8,000 men and women prisoners liberated the camp for 40 days. Though ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks, this and other uprisings aroused hopes among prisoners that resistance to the regime would spread out side the camps. Instead, change was ordered from above. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev set out to disband most of the slave labor camps...
...part of the rules and perfectly appropriate for anyone who has been out of Government service for more than a year." Those questioned, however, found it odd. "What are you supposed to say?" asked Columnist Art Buchwald, a family friend. "Ah, yes. I believe he knew Stalin well...