Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Russia's present masters do not rule like Stalin; the camps of which Solzhenitsyn writes are mostly gone. But more and more Russians are beginning to realize that these men did share complicity in Stalin's crimes. And thousands of ordinary Russians were touched by guilt, because they let friends, neighbors, and members of their own families be taken away in the night without protesting. Could anything have been done to stop Stalin's police? Probably...
Gleb Nerzhin, in many ways a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself, makes an opposite choice to Rubin's. By refusing to work on a new bugging device, he condemns himself to Siberia. He is the character most conscious of the paradox that pervades the novel: that in Stalin's Russia only those in prison are truly free to be honest with one another. "When you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power ?he's free again...
Irreparably Deluded. Solzhenitsyn escaped his prison hell on March 5, 1953, when he was released after serving his eight-year sentence. On the first day of his freedom, the local radio carried the bulletin announcing Stalin's death. Even though out of the camp, he still had to live in exile in Siberia. He began putting down on paper the stories he had worked over in his mind during his imprisonment...
...abrupt end soon after. The failure of Khrushchev's Cuban missile adventure was the last in a series of catastrophes in foreign and domestic policy that put him under increasing pressure from political opponents. Freeze-and-thaw was replaced by steadily deepening freeze. Khrushchev began a partial rehabilitation of Stalin that his successors continued and added...
...unmistakable signal of what was in store for the liberals came in May of 1965, when Brezhnev cited Stalin, who had become virtually an unperson, favorably in a public speech. A day later, Stalin's picture flashed on Moscow television screens for the first time in nine years. The initial effect was to arouse and unify the liberal intelligentsia as never before, a unity that has largely managed to hold through the ensuing crackdown...