Word: stalinists
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DISCUSSION OF THE political aspects of Solzhenitsyn's fiction is not a bad thing in itself, and any attempts at uncovering and commenting upon the nature of neo-Stalinist literary controls is interesting for its own sake. Solzhenitsyn must be discussed in his political context, for he is an intensely Russian writer. His medium is a difficult vernacular that is uncertainly translated, and his concerns are deeply nationalistic. By the choice of his subject matter he became a political writer, and the politics on which he writes are clearly very sensitive to his government. But a concern with the writer...
Solzhenitsyn is a controversial world figure, sadly, inevitably praised and blamed for reasons that have more to do with politics than literature. Cancer Ward, The First Circle, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ring with a high purpose that goes far beyond the exposure of Stalinist terror. Though August 1914 departs for the first time from the author's own immediate personal experience, it continues the work begun in earlier books. Solzhenitsyn is attempting nothing less than to restore to the Russian people a whole segment of personal experience never truthfully written about or discussed, as well...
...lecture was supremely worth waiting for. The persecuted author, who has spent eleven years in Stalinist prisons and in exile, mourns his fellow Russian writers who died in concentration camps. Solzhenitsyn writes: "In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read...I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps but hundreds and even thousands of them-steep, unyielding, frozen steps leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others-perhaps with greater gifts and more strength than I-have perished...As I stand here today, accompanied...
...Marxian theory and practice that bode ill for revolution: the assumption that unlike other classes, the working classes once in power will act justly; the double standard of moral behavior that justifies any cruelty for those working with history's revolutionary blessing. But further speculations about whether a Stalinist tyranny could have been avoided are beyond Wilson's province. So, too, are more recent developments in the Kremlin and Peking, though they suggest that there will always be revolutionary movements, if only because revolutionary ideals will always be betrayed...
Yakir practically grew up in Stalinist concentration camps. At the age of 14, he was swept up in the mass arrests of 1937, the year his father, Major General lona Yakir, was executed during Joseph Stalin's purge of the Red Army. Pyotr Yakir was released after 17 years and rehabilitated as part of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign in 1956. It is rare-and therefore especially ominous-for the Soviet authorities to rearrest a former inmate of a Stalinist labor camp...