Solzhenitsyn: Truth and Politics
Medvedev, Roy
Two and a half years after the publication in the West of the first volume of Gulag Archipelago, with the sensation that produced and the subsequent expulsion of the author from the U.S.S.R.,...
...After the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress in 1956, largely under the impact of these revolts, the bulk of political prisoners were released and most of the large camp complexes dismantled...
...For the terrible truth the great artist has revealed to the world in his book bears within it a layer of untrue and tendentious argument that, though not great in size, is rather obtrusive in substance...
...Still the mass meeting in front of the party headquarters did not disperse...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that Solzhenitsyn found himself at no loss for materials for his third volume...
...But Solzhenitsyn does not leave it at that...
...they had not even kept alive the national spirit that one finds in other countries...
...A question involuntarily occurs to the reader: how to explain this striking shift in the author's position...
...In fact virtually all of the purely literary works that Solzhenitsyn has published in the last three years (including Gulag Archipelago) were written in the U.S.S.R...
...Pavel N. Milyukov (1859-1943), Russian historian and politician, central leader of the liberal Cadet (Constitutional Democratic) party, which he helped found in 1905...
...And there were even quite a few young people, including those who had grown up after October...
...His army was surrounded and virtually annihilated (losses of 250,000 or more) at the battle of Tannenberg, Aug...
...For example, there is an erroneous legend, which Solzhenitsyn himself presents only as a rumor without citing any evidence, having to do with disabled veterans of the Great Patriotic War...
...No, the natural thing to do was imitate the trick used by Bolshevism itself...
...In 1939 appealed to White emigres not to support Nazi Germany in the event of a war between it and the Soviet Union...
...They also fostered and developed in him such traits as bitter intransigence bordering on fanaticism, fierce attachment to a single, narrow idea, inability to feel anything but hatred for people with other views or convictions, incapacity to see life and reality in all its multiplicity, and indifference in regard to the means chosen to attain one's ends...
...The last, relatively brief section, Part Seven, gives the reader a picture of the present system of Gulag, where relatively few "politicals" still remain but where, as before, we are far from the justice and humaneness that even the criminals deserve—those Solzhenitsyn writes of with such distaste in the first two volumes of his book...
...apologies are needed least of all in regard to the third volume...
...2. Novocherkassk.— On June I. 1962, the Soviet government announced sharp increases in the prices of meat and butter...
...only a few of them were able to work in the shops attached to the hospital...
...That means their earliest childhood impressions were formed after October, in Soviet schools and by Soviet ideology...
...q 155...
...Constantly returning to this theme, he apparently regrets that the last Russian autocrats were so excessively "liberal...
...Does that mean Kuznetsov proved to be a provocateur...
...During the disastrous battle of the Kerch Peninsula in the summer of 1942, several Georgian regiments fell into encirclement and thousands of Georgian soldiers were taken prisoner...
...Although Solzhenitsyn's efforts are now focused entirely on combating socialism and the "Progressive Doctrine" that he hates, the techniques he uses in this struggle are all too reminiscent of everything he justly denounces in Gulag Archipelago...
...And as a writer Solzhenitsyn is especially strong precisely in describing events he himself has seen...
...And if Solzhenitsyn met few Georgians in exile, that is mainly because these people of Southern birth and sensitive temperament nearly all died in the camps well before the end of their term...
...And this is not the only example of the double standard Solzhenitsyn applies when he writes about Communists who distinguished themselves in the camps...
...and by 1894 the organization was destroyed...
...Nevertheless, despite the fact that the third volume is a worthy conclusion to this tremendous work, the general attitude toward the book has subtly changed during the last year or year and a half in the West and in the U.S.S.R...
...Presumably Kuznetsov was a party member, but Solzhenitsyn says nothing about this...
...Moreover, it was not only the women who slept with Hitler's men (and with the camp bosses in the camps) whose "earliest childhood impressions had been formed in Soviet schools and by Soviet ideology...
...Yet if one were to follow the formula used in the American court system (and apparently the British, too), "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...
...And let us not forget [Solzhenitsyn continues] that among these our countrymen who came against us with the sword and made speeches against us, there were completely unselfish people whose property had not been taken, who had not sat in the camps, and who did not have family in the camps, but who had for a long time felt stifled by our entire system— the contempt for the fate of the individual, the persecution of people for their beliefs, the mocking song "Where people breathe so freely," the worshippers bowing to the Great Leader, the official yanking at the pencil, "Hurry up and sign the loan...
...How typical of German obtuseness," Solzhenitsyn writes (p...
...Alexander 111, 188194...
...And were they supposed to take up the struggle against it only afterwards (a struggle that has not begun anywhere in the world to this day...
...and the applause rising to an ovation...
...And apparently that is the reason his three years in the West have not had a very beneficial effect on Solzhenitsyn the artist...
...Oh, what a shame that so few revolutionaries were trampled on, and so mildly: How good if they had all been strangled in the cradle...
...But there were children in the trees, and they were hit...
...The prisoners maintained an orderly routine in the camp, providing themselves with the necessities of life and making rudimentary weapons and defenses...
...If a Communist conducted himself or herself in a worthy manner, he mentions it only in passing...
...On June 3 speeches by Mikoyan and Kozlov were broadcast on the local radio...
...Who were these people...
...Supported by discontented elements of the lower classes—serfs, Cossacks, oppressed nomadic natives—it was led by the adventurer Yemelyan Pugachov (1726-75), who claimed to be Czar Peter Ill and decreed an end to serfdom...
...There on an unknown island, these unlucky heroes of the war were held, naturally without the right of correspondence (an occasional letter got out, that is how this became known), and just as naturally, they were 143 kept on meager rations because only their labor could warrant a lavish one...
...5. Ye/im Etkind.— Soviet dissident, taught literature and language at a pedagogical institute in Leningrad from 1951 to 1974...
...An evergreen had to be decorated, not for New Year's, but for Christmas, and on that occasion (and on some imperial anniversary instead of October), the principal had to give a speech praising the wonderful new life, when in fact things were pretty bad...
...He 149 had commanded a regiment in Germany after the war and was given a prison term because "someone under him had escaped to the Western Zone...
...Solzhenitsyn knows very well that the Communists arrested in the 1930s came back, not from a "musty old trunk" but from the same dreadful labor camps that he writes about, bearing the marks of torture and harsh trials...
...Or, knowing his ability as a commander, did he do it in order to calm the flood, bring it back into the riverbanks, and when the movement had spent itself, to lay it at the boots of the bosses...
...But what is this...
...review of all prisoners' cases...
...They not only stood up against the massive German military machine, which was backed by the economic resources of all of Europe and by dozens of divisions from countries allied with Hitler, but they overcame the enemy...
...Why, they had sent petitions to this effect four times a year: "Let me go back...
...Rudnev...
...But Lord, what a fuss was made over their sufferings...
...The population turned out in large numbers...
...51.] Here once again Solzhenitsyn presents his own feelings as those of all the prisoners...
...The appearance of the third volume no longer caused a sensation...
...Isn't he resorting to falsification here too...
...He died in 1968 after resigning from the party to protest repression and the invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...People's Will...
...Not only the history and structure of Gulag but all aspects of the life of the prisoners and of their keepers, the types of concentration camps, and the character of the different "waves" of unfortunates who replenished the "population" of this fearsome Archipelago by the millions—all this was dealt with in the first two volumes of Solzhenitsyn's book...
...Rudnev...
...Solzhenitsyn understands very well that Hitler's forces wished to destroy not only Bolshevism but Russia as a state, and that in our prewar newspapers not everything was untrue...
...asks Yefim Etkind in one of his articles...
...Mihukov.-- Anton I. Denikin (1872-1947), Czarist general in World War I, one of the main White leaders in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20...
...he organized the effort to break open the walls, take out the bars, and make spears from them...
...In 1951...
...they believed as much in the verities of Marxism-Leninism as the young Solzhenitsyn did then...
...He was a former Red Army colonel, a graduate of the Frunze Academy, 13 a man well on in years...
...Rudnev (1899-1943) organized and led a big partisan unit in his native Ukraine, where he died in battle...
...2 141 However, the main theme of the new volume is a detailed description of the gradual, slow, but steadily intensifying change of mood and behavior among the prisoners, the various forms of passive and active resistance, beginning with escape attempts and protest actions and ending with armed uprisings...
...In April 1974 the faculty council at his institute "unanimously" voted to remove him from his post as professor...
...390...
...A great deal of evidence can be cited, however, to show that the terror of the 1930s raged even more furiously in Georgia than in most of the other republics, that it was precisely the death sentence that was handed down there most often, and that the methods of torture there were notorious for their refined cruelty...
...The fate of these people was, of course, hardly enviable...
...A vicious ideological mishmash like this, the idea of a "Pugachov rebellion" headed by Hitlerites, was bound to develop among those 147 who fled to the West after serving Hitler as police, punitive troops, and hirelings of other sorts...
...Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn takes up this theme again at the end of his book: No safe and happy person, either in the West or in the East, can understand or sympathize with the mood of those days behind bars, and it may be that none can forgive us for it...
...And just before he died," Solzhenitsyn tells us, "he wrote words of his own, such words as to make you tremble—What is this, mysticism...
...Apparently Solzhenitsyn's present circle of intimates consists largely of such people...
...five of the top leaders were executed...
...But Solzhenitsyn's entire tone, when he deals with this topic, is one of regret that the Czarist repression was not harsh enough...
...January 1905.— Okhrana (literally "protection...
...That is why the best of them, like the hero of Vasil Bykov's short novel Obelisk, joined the partisans and did not give speeches in praise of the occupation...
...9, 1905, when troops fired on a crowd of St...
...At the end of the war, it is true, these people somehow disappeared unnoticed from the streets of the big cities...
...Medvedev quotes from Etkind's review of Gulag Archipelago, vol...
...Solzhenitsyn knew this when he fought bravely as an officer in the Soviet army...
...Tensions mounted...
...He understands very well that "for the new arrivals Russia was even more insignificant and loathsome than for those departing...
...12 Hasn't all of [pre-Stalinist] world literature glorified love that is free of national bonds and the wills of generals and diplomats...
...Often called the "Russian Anne Frank" because of her diary, published in Novr Mir in 1962, available in English (New York, 1968...
...it is now part of the city of Dzhezkazgan in western Kazakhstan...
...This major setback to the Czarist war effort is the central subject of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914...
...A line of submachine gunners pushed the crowd back from the building...
...He is ready to understand, forgive, and justify the collaborationist "burgomasters," "elders," police, and even those who served in punitive detachments recruited and formed by the Germans, not to mention the Cossack regiments and divisions organized by Hitler's forces in the Don and Kuban regions...
...Didn't you think, they say, what calamities this would bring to the vast world out in freedom?—But those who were free never thought one bit about us!—So what did you do, they say, start dreaming of a world war...
...Nobel Prizewinning French author, humanitarian, pacifist and opponent of World War I, in the 1930s was regarded by the Stalin regime as one of its best "friends" in the West...
...At the time the uprising began he was in a camp prison for having "blackened the reality of camp life" in letters sent out through free women workers...
...There is also the question of Solzhenitsyn's way of defending his views, the polemical methods he permits himself to use in combating his political opponents...
...IT IS LOGICALtO wonder how such a question could arise...
...in January 1952, 3,000 prisoners at Ekibastuz in eastern Kazakhstan held a 3-day work stoppage and hunger strike jdescribed by Solzhenitsyn, a participant): and in September 1952 at the "Ozerlag" camp complex there were disorders protesting the killing of a prisoner by guards...
...The People's Wi// was a revolutionary terrorist organization that emerged from the Narodnik movement in 1879, dedicated above all to assassinating Alexander II, which it did in 1881...
...Not older than thirty, it would seem, perhaps even twenty-five...
...What is wrong with that...
...And that is why many of them ask, Isn't he exaggerating in Gulag Archipelago...
...Turned over to the Soviet authorities...
...he couldn't deal properly with the workers in January 1905, and in 1917 he shamefully lost his self-possession and his crown...
...Khorusha...
...briefly foreign minister of the Provisional Government in 1917, he cooperated with the Whites in the Civil War...
...Alexander III also was essentially a "liberal...
...579...
...In the Attica-like denouement, more than 700 prisoners were killed and wounded...
...In the third volume, however, the author has decisively altered his conception...
...The prisoners took over the five sectors of the camp compound, from which all guards withdrew...
...Vladimir Ulyanov...
...However, the authorities retained control of the machinegun towers and surrounded the camp with troops, cutting it off from outside...
...can make the bold assertion that the Czarist government not only failed to hunt down the revolutionaries but tenderly nurtured them, bringing on its own destruction...
...It was Victor Hugo who, with good reason, regarded him as a revolutionary writer...
...Solzhenitsyn would not be able to assent to the last two parts of this formula...
...The local authorities had fled...
...And the present volume has come out in 1976, with the author preparing it for publication in Zurich, where his desk was not "burning up beneath him," nor the ground under his feet...
...567.] It is obvious how wrong this position is...
...But in the ensuing months conditions were greatly liberalized, and in 1956 the camp itself was dismantled...
...And there were many more of these—millions of them...
...Emphasis added...
...In 1887 some students revived the name, and began a poorly organized conspiracy to assassinate the new Czar...
...On the other hand if a coward, traitor, or artful dodger is a Communist, he spares no detail in writing about it...
...In general, he claims, the Orthodox want to forget about the camps and prisons and avoid any acquaintances from the camp days...
...forced even the MVD generals to remove their hats to show respect for the corpses of the zeks who had been killed...
...G.S...
...elimination of barriers between different sectors of the camp compound...
...5 This question is being asked more and more often...
...Briefly commissar of war in 1925...
...volunteered for duty in the early months of the Nazi-Soviet War, and died in a partisan operation...
...As for the revolt of the prisoners at Kengir3apparently the biggest revolt in the entire history of Gulag—the description of that event is the central and most important part of the third volume...
...His funeral became the occasion for an oppositional rally by hundreds of dissidents...
...January 1905 refers to the "Bloody Sunday" of Jan...
...A leader of anti-Soviet emigres, he edited a Russian paper in Paris, 1921-40...
...before the writer was expelled...
...It was not fated, however, to develop to the full, but to perish in dishonor, branded with the words "Betrayal of our sacred homeland...
...Translated from the Russian by GEORGE SAUNDERS q Translators Notes I. Zek.— Camp slang for "prisoner," abbreviated from the Russian word zaktvuchennv...
...But they were not shipped off to some unknown northern island to die in order to "contribute to the health of the nation...
...After all, we know Solzhenitsyn as a passionate lover of truth, author of the appeal "Do Not Live by the Lie, "4 fearless critic and exposer of the crimes and lies he saw around him...
...Moreover, he particularly singles out the Soviet soldiers and commanders who went over to the fascist side not in 1943 but in 1941, right after the outbreak of the war, in the months when the German army was moving rapidly and victoriously eastward...
...Our top generals were worthless, corrupted by party ideology and self-seeking...
...but it is precisely what he is hinting at...
...On the contrary, we learn from Solzhenitsyn's account that Kuznetsov behaved admirably throughout the 40-day uprising...
...Toward evening a crowd reassembled in the central square larger than ever...
...And were they supposed to sit still and let Bolshevism survive its final hour, to grow again in all its savage oppression...
...Probably Sluchenkov, Mikhail Keller, and Knopkus were shot...
...Let me go back...
...Despite arrest and imprisonment, all three fought zealously on the Soviet side after the June 1941 Nazi invasion...
...What made them do it...
...The author of Gulag Archipelago no longer has anything to say about him...
...9. Pugachov rebellion.— Peasant revolt of 1773-74 in the Volga region during the reign of Catherine 11...
...They no longer suppressed anyone, but simply squeezed them a little and then let them go...
...479.] Both the tone and the content of this tirade call for strenuous objections...
...Signs were up on the factory walls: "Down with Khrushchev...
...During the afternoon, ferment continued...
...We are inclined to attribute to Solzhenitsyn's new milieu many of the other pages in the third volume, for it is simply hard to believe that he wrote them in the U.S.S.R...
...7. Denikin...
...an eight-hour workday (instead of eleven hours...
...this ministry, which had its own troop units, was in charge of the camps...
...An appeal circulated by Solzhenitsyn in Samizdat (uncensored material passed from hand to hand) on the eve of his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974...
...Such inaccuracies are perhaps even fewer in the third volume than in the first and second...
...Khoruzha...
...As they began to fall from the trees, the crowd grew angry...
...Solzhenitsyn, who fought in the war himself and more than once has shown a certain feeling of pride in his own military record (this can be felt even in the first volume of Gulag Archipelago), must have seen how selfsacrificingly the Soviet soldiers fought against the fascist armies...
...The only other inaccuracy I will mention is Solzhenitsyn's remark, made in passing but highly meaningful, that he had met quite a few people from the Baltic countries and Western Ukraine in the Special Camps, but hardly any Georgians, and although in exile there had been "some people from the Caucasus, no one could recall a single Georgian among them" (p...
...Okhrana...
...But all these, put together, still do not exhaust the dreadful subject...
...another section took a neutral position...
...Solzhenitsyn is outraged at the Bolsheviks for many of the unworthy means they employed to achieve a goal they considered worthy, but he is not at all hesitant in his own choice of means...
...A massacre ensued, with at least 70-80 of the crowd killed, most by dumdum bullets...
...Obelisk (published in 1973) deals with the rural teacher Moroz, who during the war cooperates with Soviet partisans but continues to run the Byelorussian village school...
...A world war could have brought us a quicker death (to be shot down from the towers, 151 or poisoned by bread or bacilli, as was done by the Germans), or it could have brought us freedom...
...I remember, even at the end of the first year of the war, how many of these unfortunates were begging on the trains, near the markets and tearooms, or simply on the streets...
...Continued to hold prominent posts in the U.S.S.R...
...However, labor camps for political prisoners continue to exist, on a reduced scale, notably those in Mordovia (Dubrovlag) and the Perm region...
...They were discovered, arrested, tried...
...Solzhenitsyn merely tried to show some of the circumstances that would seem to mitigate the guilt of these people and render the postwar reprisals against them excessively harsh...
...15 This Czar and all those who controlled him no longer had the determination to fight for their power...
...30.1 It is impossible to believe that this is a sincere explanation...
...But unfortunately it is not only Solzhenitsyn's reactionary and utopian views that are at issue...
...What did he go through during his imprisonment and what was his attitude toward it...
...For example, Alexander II and the Okhrana did not hunt down the People's Will members the way they should have...
...This disdain for moral considerations on the part of Solzhenitsyn the politician undermines the trust of a good part of his readership in Solzhenitsyn the artist...
...Solzhenitsyn painstakingly gathers information about the military and semimilitary formations that were created long before the Vlasov units, and about the establishment of "people's militia" in Byelorussia for "defense" against the partisans...
...But after all, Hitler went to war in order to establish German domination over all of Europe and to extend Germany's Lebensraum at the expense of the "inferior" Slavic nations, which were in fact scheduled for partial annihilation, removal to the East, 146 denial of any form of state or independent status, and conversion into the slaves of the "superior" race of "Aryans...
...Although Solzhenitsyn nowhere speaks of it, it is not hard to conclude, by comparing the first and third volumes, that by this time the author did have the entire book before him "on one and the same desk" and that quite a few pages, even the better part of the first chapter, were inserted during the past few years in the West...
...Hundreds of thousands of people could be named—from Vera Khoruzha and Nina Kosterina to S. V. Rudnev and Konstantin RokossovskyK who had also been "run over by the tank treads" of the 1930s but who fought courageously to defend their homeland from Hitler's forces...
...That is what I think...
...Solzhenitsyn emphatically disagrees...
...Can it be that the civil war was still smoldering and had flared up again...
...The effect of this, and the earlier Trial of the 50, was to publicize the radical movement and win it broader sympathy...
...Those of a fourth group were simply hungry, with a primitive kind of hunger, that is, they had nothing to put in their mouths...
...If the moods that Solzhenitsyn attributes to the "rank and file," that is, the majority of the population, had really existed the army could never have won the war or even continued to function...
...This is an ancient theme, and Maupassant, for one, handled it brilliantly as long ago as 1880 in his celebrated Boule de suif...
...Solzhenitsyn began the first volume of his book with the chapter "Arrest" and he now concludes Part Six with the chapter "Zeks in Freedom"—a description of the release of those prisoners who managed to survive into the 1955-57 period of rehabilitations...
...and only a small section went along with the fascists...
...Solzhenitsyn expresses this quite openly: And so the Soviet-German war—to our pride and joy—showed that we were not such slaves as we were written off to be in all the liberal historical studies...
...A fifth group, perhaps, saw no other way to save themselves or 148 their relatives and not to be parted from them...
...or that he gave them to some of his friends to read while still there, as he claims in his second Afterword (p...
...Two and a half years after the publication in the West of the first volume of Gulag Archipelago, with the sensation that produced and the subsequent expulsion of the author from the U.S.S.R., the third volume of this monumental work has come out in Paris, in both Russian and French...
...These tens and hundreds of thousands of police and punitive troops, elders and interpreters, all 145 came from the ranks of Soviet citizenry...
...Vlasov and his subordinates were executed in August 1946...
...Somehow it is awkward even to refute these arguments that Solzhenitsyn piles up, one upon the other...
...Above all, what age were these women when they met the enemy not in battle but in bed...
...He has discredited himself as either politician or prophet precisely with that part of the Western public that reads the most and is traditionally liberal...
...The majority of relatives and friends kept alive the memory of their imprisoned husbands, brothers, and dear ones, waited for them, wrote them letters, and put together packages for them...
...35.] All of this is fantasy and imagining, based on no reality whatsoever...
...return of prisoners taken from the camp because of an earlier work stoppage...
...As the Nazi regime collapsed in April 1945, Vlasov struck out on his own, supported the Czech uprising in Prague against the Nazis, and surrendered to American forces in Bavaria...
...They seek in these hallucinations some justification for their rather tainted performance under the fascist occupation and wish now to present themselves as "ideological opponents" of Soviet power...
...removal of bars from barracks windows and numbers from prisoners' clothing and an end to the locking of barracks doors at night...
...He spoke smoothly and easily and held his ground firmly...
...Now he quite plainly whitewashes and justifies the Vlasovites...
...Her father, Aleksei Kosterin, held in the camps for 18 years and rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, became a prominent figure in the dissident movement...
...Or who themselves had sunk and reemerged in camp or in exile...
...One can say with certainty that if there had been no mass terror in our country in the 1930s, no forced collectivization, and no famine of 1932-33, the occupation regime would not have been able to find nearly so many supporters in the captured Soviet territories...
...31.] Solzenitsyn continues: I will be so bold as to say that the Russian people would have been worth nothing, would have been a nation of hopeless chattel, if they had let slip the chance, during war, at least to draw back and fire a few curses at the Beloved Father...
...It was entirely a movement of the ranks—so close to the vanishing point was the part played by the emigre former gentry, the former wealthy elements, and the intelligentsia...
...No, Solzhenitsyn does not assert that in so many words...
...He takes his stand entirely on the side of the people for whom indignation and outrage at Stalin's crimes, natural to any honest person, had passed over into blind hatred and brought them into a dead end of unreasoning embitterment, so that they no Ionger thought of changing or removing the bad or evil system in their own country but were ready, out of hatred for one satanic tyrant, to surrender their entire country to another kind of fiend...
...Meanwhile, the authorities cordoned off the city and began a troop buildup inside it...
...It is unquestionably to the author's credit that he has given the first detailed description of the tragic events in Novocherkassk in 1962 and of a number of other hushed-up tragedies of the post-Stalin years...
...389...
...The future historian of the Kengir revolt will have to explain this man for us...
...It is generally known that after Hitler's attack on the U.S.S.R...
...Stalin placed him at the head of the armed forces of "fraternal" Poland in 1949, a post he left after the Polish October of 1956...
...Khoruzha (1903-42) served as a partisan and in the underground of her native Byelorussia, where she was captured and killed by the Germans...
...This has its source primarily in certain concepts new to Solzhenitsyn (at least, they are expressed for the first time in Gulag Archipelago) and in his attempts to twist reality to fit these concepts...
...Despite that, the question arises, especially in Western Europe, where he now lives and has the opportunity to say what he thinks for all to hear and to publish everything produced by his pen...
...While I am not one of Solzhenitsyn's cothinkers and do not share his political views, I must attest that all of the basic facts about the Gulag Archipelago presented in the third volume do correspond to the truth...
...And they will overcome your weaponry too" (p...
...We do not know what the sentences were...
...This is how Solzhenitsyn concludes his account: Kapiton Kuznetsov...
...He has no facts to compromise Kuznetsov with...
...This is what he writes: First, about the women, who as we know are now emancipated...
...First of all it meant reclaiming their party cards, their service records, their seniority, the honors they had been awarded...
...He is a favorite of Soviet liberals and a frequently published author, though his writings, mainly about the war, are often at variance with officially approved views...
...There, at the beginning, when the reader had not yet walked with us the full length of the road through the camps, he was only asked to perk up his ears and invited to think a little...
...Revered in official Soviet history as a model of military virtue...
...Le Monde, March 10, 1976.] However, this covers only part of the truth...
...For example, he reports that the committee that led the Kengir uprising included women, among them "Shakhnovskaya, an economist and party member, a woman already gray...
...Kengir.— In the early 1950s a wave of protest actions began in the camps for political prisoners...
...Did he only feel the pride of the professional military man in maintaining such good order in the rebellious camp...
...And here a time had come when weapons were placed in these people's hands...
...It has already been mentioned that many White emigres (including the foul and accursed Denikin) took the side of Soviet Russia against Hitler...
...In either case deliverance would have come sooner than the end of our terms, in 1975.[P...
...The vampire only wanted Russia's vital juices...
...This scorn for Western political figures is perhaps most blatant in the third volume...
...In my reviews of the first and second volumes of Gulag Archipelago I have already given my estimate of this book as one of the most valuable documents of our era, one of the greatest books of the 20th century.* I have no reason to change this assessment after reading the third volume...
...A great deal was even worse, for there are more than a few "islands" of the Archipelago that Solzhenitsyn did not describe, that he does not even know about...
...The biggest of the June 1962 protests was apparently in Novocherkassk, a city near Rostov in the Kuban region of southeastern European Russia...
...328...
...Kolyma.— Subarctic region of northeastern Siberia, named after the Kolyma River...
...There are apparently several reasons for this...
...It called on Soviet citizens, especially young people, to break from conformity and stop complying with the hypocritical rituals imposed by the regime, such as voting "unanimously" at meetings for things they do not believe in, stating views they do not hold, etc...
...But now I am a different person and I no longer judge from myself alone...
...If millions had rotted in prison and at hard labor, if tens of thousands had been shot, not under Stalin but under Nicholas II or Alexander III, would those corpses have smelled sweeter...
...MVD.— Ministry of Internal Affairs...
...I always was...
...It is with emotion that we read the scrupulously detailed descriptions of several escape attempts known to Solzhenitsyn (usually unsuccessful ones...
...The Kengir revolt involved some 8,000 prisoners and lasted from May 16 to June 25, according to Solzhenitsyn's account...
...But the overwhelming majority of educators at that time believed what they said...
...East and West ANOTHER FAVORITE theme of the author of Gulag Archipelago, a kind of persistent refrain mixed in with his truly awe-inspiring scenes of the crimes of the recent past, is his jeering at the West, not only the Western leftists and liberals whom he hates but even the right-wing circles, the West as a whole...
...In Germany there was a conspiracy of the generals, but what did we have...
...In my review of the first volume of Gulag Archipelago, I wrote that Solzhenitsyn nowhere tried to whitewash, justify, or praise 144 the Vlasovites, 6 let alone all the other former Soviet citizens who fought on Hitler's side against the Soviet army...
...The fascists recruited quite a few traitors in all the occupied countries of Europe...
...How could you!—But when they gave these people prison terms in 1950 that would last to the mid-1970s, what choice did they leave them except to wish for a world war...
...In the Russian literary tradition, Kabanikha came to symbolize heartless despotism clothed in a rigid and backward observance of the proprieties...
...New Motifs and Influences in "Gulag Archipelago" IN HIS Afterword the author writes: "I must explain that never once was this entire book, with all its parts, on one and the same desk...
...old Tolstoy...
...But Solzhenitsyn gets around the problem very simply...
...Emigrated to Constantinople, then France...
...Le Monde identifies Etkind at that time as "professor associe a l'universite de Paris-X...
...short for the Czarist Department of Police's "division for the protection of public security and order") was the general term for the political police under the last three Czars (Alexander 11, who ruled 1855-81...
...But not to know about the crimes of the occupation regime, while living in the fascist-held territory, was impossible...
...Another type of these women were bored with the pristine puritanism of our meetings, rallies, and demonstrations, cinematography without kisses, and dances without embraces...
...27-30, 1914...
...True, he does write something vague about moral censure, qualifying it with a "perhaps...
...But Solzhenitsyn is right that the kind of brutal and drastic measures that Stalin later applied to families of his opponents were not used by the Czarist regime of that time...
...And they did not come "flooding back" from the camps, but returned to freedom in a thin, straggling line, for most of the Communists arrested in the 1930s were shot or died in the camps...
...That novel, published in the Moscow literary monthly Non' Mir in 1966, was denounced by Pravda and other official publications...
...There was a big strike in Norilsk in May 1953, another in Vorkuta in July and August 1953 (and additional ones there in the summer and fall of 1954), one in Taishet in early 1955, and one in Khabarovsk in December 1955...
...five of them were executed, among them Alexander Ulyanov, whose younger brother was Vladimir Ulyanov, the future Lenin...
...Yes, it is true that much of what teachers and principals told their pupils in the 1920s and 1930s did not, to put it mildly, correspond to the truth...
...On the "Liberal" Russian Autocracy ANOTHER TYPICAL feature running through the entire third volume, and through the book as a whole, is the tone of constant ridicule in reference to the supposed "savagery" of the Russian Czars and, balancing that, the scornful attitude toward the Russian revolutionaries and liberals who considered the autocratic regime in Russia "intolerable...
...Just because the crimes and injustices of the period from the 1920s to the 1950s were greater than those of earlier centuries and decades, that does .not make a virtue of the injustice of former times, nor do those who fought injustice cease to be heroes in the grateful memory of humanity...
...In his polemical ardor he has frequently resorted to flagrant distortion, juggling of the facts, deliberate omission or hushing things up, and the use of smear techniques against people he does not agree with...
...What was the status of his case...
...Solzhenitsyn sometimes angers his audience by flinging out spurious slogans or provocative assertions, plainly contrary to the truth...
...hence the term Narodnik, or "populist...
...The Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, one of the top Soviet staff and command colleges, is named in his honor...
...Solzhenitsyn is wrong in thinking that collaborationism was a phenomenon peculiar to the U.S.S.R...
...Just as it had buried its teeth in the body of a Russia weakened by the First World War so the thing was to smash Bolshevism in a similar situation in the Second World War...
...But they did deserve the derisive term "German bedstraw" with which their former friends and fellow villagers labeled them in the years of occupation...
...Romain Rolland (1866-1944...
...third volume is the postwar history of the Gulag Archipelago: the revival of the hard labor of Czarist times (katorga), even as a juridical category, and the establishment on the basis of the former "corrective-labor camps," of the system of Special Camps (Osoblagy), where most often the inmates consisted exclusively of politicals from the various "waves...
...Slaves would not strain themselves to bring Father Stalin's head within reach of a saber....These were people who had borne twenty-four years of Communist happiness on the skin of their backs, who knew as far back as 1941, when no one else in the world knew, that nowhere on the planet and never in history was there such a cruel, bloody, and at the same time sly and tricky regime as that of Bolshevism, ...that no other regime in the world would compare with it, not even the raw and immature Hitler regime, which at that time had blinded every eye in the West...
...he writes...
...Are we so quick with anger at the work of our own hands...
...A friend of Solzhenitsyn since the early I960s, he helped hide the manuscript of Gulag Archipelago for several years...
...However, only a small minority of those who suffered turned to collaboration with the enemy, and that element was not the best but precisely the worst among those who had been victimized...
...When the authorities discovered this, in the latter half of 1973, at the time when Solzhenitsyn was forced to publish the hook, they brought pressure against Etkind...
...RokossovskvNina Kosterina (1921-41)— daughter of veteran Bolsheviks who had fought in the Civil War, she remained a Communist activist despite the arrest of her father and uncles in the purges...
...that was also true of the women who died of hunger without selling themselves for a bar of chocolate or a pair of stockings...
...The chapter headings speak for themselves: "The Wind of Revolution," "When the Earth Is Ablaze in the Compounds," "We Break the Chains Barehanded," and "The Forty Days of Kengir...
...I lived and judged everything in terms of myself,' he wrote...
...similar to the more recent and better-known outbreaks among Polish workers, in 1970-71 and again in 1976...
...and the countries of Eastern Europe they conquered...
...They kept looking over their shoulder— What will public opinion say...
...For Solzhenitsyn has been speaking out in the West less and less as an artist and writer and has more and more involved himself directly in politics, taking positions thai at times are shocking even to the most right-wing political figures in the Western world...
...Can you write this way about a person who in all likelihood died a hero's death—especially when you have no evidence for your suspicions...
...Most of the defendants had not previously known one another, but had taken part, in the early 1870s, in a spontaneous movement "to the people" (to the "Narod...
...Does Solzhenitsyn Tell the Truth...
...One of Stalin's top generals until July 1942, when he was captured by the Germans...
...After all, what kind of "loyalists" would they be if they couldn't forgive and forget, and go back to the way they had been...
...Frunze and Frunze Academy.— Mikhail V. Frunze (1885-1925), Bolshevik activist who rose to prominence as a Red Army commander in the Civil War...
...When I was studying at Leningrad University in the first years after the war, our department was a "sponsor" for one of these hospitals for "chronic cases," as the war invalids were called...
...The workers' delegation was allowed to speak to the crowd from the party-building balcony...
...But for today's Solzhenitsyn this is no argument—to him these people are either "calves" or "Orthodox loyalists...
...Trio/of the 193.— Public trial staged by the Czarist authorities from October 1878 to March 1879 with the aim of showing there was a widespread radical conspiracy...
...and direct negotiations with members of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party...
...increased pay...
...Only the rank and file of peasants, soldiers, and Cossacks raised their fists and struck a blow...
...Solzhenitsyn takes satisfaction in reporting that the majority of informers uncovered by the zeks in the Special Camps were secretly killed...
...Did he take the leadership of the movement because he was caught up in its spirit...
...Here too, however, Solzhenitsyn holds to a unique point of view...
...And Rokossovsky (1896-1968) became famous as one of Stalin's top generals in the war, being made a Marshal in 1944...
...And though the entire finished work of Solzhenitsyn now stands before the reader—a work that I am convinced will remain the chief work of his life— there is less being said and written, and there is much less controversy, about it than there was when only the first volume had appeared...
...But that effort failed...
...Despite casualties that were ten times greater than in the First World War, despite battles that were incomparably more terrible than the Samsonov disaster of 1914, 10 despite the loss of almost half of Russia, our people did not fall for the false promises of Hitler's fascists...
...They claimed that the events had been provoked by "enemies...
...At least nine male defendants were sentenced to be shot and two women to IS-year prison terms...
...Some of these young women had been stirred up by our constant screeching for fifteen years that there is no such thing as one's homeland, that the idea of the fatherland is just a reactionary invention...
...Just think of it—Solzhenitsyn indignantly tells us—the fascists, in their fear, disbanded the "people's militia" in Byelorussia, and when 730 people in one of the prisoner-of-war camps for officers expressed their desire to join Vlasov's army, the Germans released only eight for military duty...
...A number of accounts of the Novocherkassk events have been published in several Western countries, including some by writers sympathetic to the Soviet system, but Solzhenitsyn's account seems to be the first detailed description compiled by Soviet dissidents...
...for example, there was a 5-day hunger strike in the Vakhrushevo camp on Sakhalin...
...The portraits with the big whiskers had to be taken out of the schools and, perhaps, portraits with the little mustache brought in...
...These reproaches most often flow from a failure to understand that the West itself, since the turn of the century, has been torn by numerous internal and external contradictions and never had the strength or resources to carry out the program Solzhenitsyn now outlines for it after the fact...
...And if this movement had been given its head when it surged up in the first days of the war, it would have become a new Pugachov rebellion 9—in the breadth and depth of the social layers involved, in the popular support it had, in the part played by the Cossacks, in its aim of "settling the score with the high and mighty criminals," in its elemental driving force, despite weak leadership...
...87.] Elsewhere, in telling of the persecution and trials of Baptists in the 1960s, Solzhenitsyn cannot help exclaiming: "The trial of the 193 Narodniks, 16 by the way, was a hundred years ago...
...While he uses the term "foolish calves" (telyata) for the Soviet young people (including himself) who rushed eagerly to the front lines to defend their homeland, he regards those who went over to the enemy side as heroes rising up in an epic struggle against the Stalinist tyranny, people whose noble impulses, unfortunately, were neither understood nor made use of by Hitler and the German General Staff, owing to German obtuseness...
...413.] Indeed it is hard to forgive such an attitude...
...Solzhenitsyn lived through difficult and terrible times, when even very strong people were crippled or broken...
...The only problem was that this other fiend for some reason was in no hurry to buy up their souls and regarded their intentions with suspicion...
...I have already had occasion to state in print that the savagery of Stalin's terror cannot be compared with that of the Russian Czars, with the exception of Ivan the Terrible...
...Samsonov shooting himself on the field of battle...
...Toward the end of the war, in all the major cities of the country, a network of special hospitals was organized for chronic invalids and helpless disabled veterans who had no families or did not wish to live with their families...
...In the third volume Solzhenitsyn tells about a former brigade commander, I. S. Karpunich-Braven, who during the Civil War 152 had signed quite a few death sentences without even reading the lists handed to him by the Special Section, After 20 years in Kolyma, 19 this brigade commander settled down in a remote village and refused to submit the necessary forms for rehabilitation...
...They elected their own governing body and presented the following demands: punishment of the guards guilty of killing and beating prisoners...
...Vlasovites" (those who fought under him) who fell into Soviet hands were sent off to the camps of Gulag, if not executed for war crimes...
...and China after the outbreak of the Korean War and for not using its monopoly of atomic weapons to wage such a war...
...16.] And this is written by the author of "Do Not Live by the Lie...
...13-14.] It is strange to think that all this was written by a Russian, an officer who went through the war, who in 1943-45 must have seen clearly, as he passed through the liberated Russian towns and villages, what the "politeness and gallantry" of the German officers and soldiers amounted to then...
...It is all the more incomprehensible, then, that he should write so inspiredly about treason, not only by individual soldiers, but by entire Red Army units in the first weeks of the war, portraying this treachery as heroism and even as the salvation of Russia's national honor...
...Solzhenitsyn's biased and ungracious attitude does him no honor...
...But the West, too, has in many respects begun to look at Solzhenitsyn differently in recent years, and this is especially true of the students and intellectuals, not to mention the politically active elements of the working class...
...But those he considers most to blame are "all of us, their contemporaries and fellow countrymen...
...1900-46...
...The prisoners tried to communicate the truth about their revolt to the free workers in Kengir and to get support from prisoners in the nearby camps of the Dzhezkazgan copper mines...
...in many Western countries the press took only brief notice of the event...
...and Nicholas II, 1894-1917...
...Solzhenitsyn's confidence that repression tenfold or a hundredfold stronger would have saved Russian Czarism leads one to ask, Why would he want that so much...
...Released from the hospitals, they did not know where their families were or often did not want to return to their wives or sweethearts as cripples...
...I have had occasion to meet hundreds of former inmates of the Special Camps, people of the most varied political views, but I have never heard any of them say they had longed for a third world war...
...According to this account, which agrees in most respects with those published earlier, workers at a large electric-locomotive plant outside Novocherkassk, whose pay rates were cut the same day the price rises were announced, began a spontaneous strike that lasted all day and through the night...
...What kind of crippled life must have been built in order to make thousands and thousands in the cells, in the Black Marias, and in the railroad cars pray for a war of atomic annihilation as their only way out...
...But here a difficult figure confronts Solzhenitsyn—Kapiton Kuznetsov, leader of the camp uprising, head of the 40-day government, president of the committee elected by the prisoners...
...But these *Roy Medvedev's review of the second volume appeared in the Spring 1976 issue of Dissent, also in George Saunders's translation...
...One section of the emigre community, headed by General Denikin and the Cadet leader Milyukov, 1 favored the victory of the U.S.S.R...
...For example, here is what Solzhenitsyn writes about the members of the police and punitive forces that served the Germans: "Where did they come from...
...It's even in the schoolbooks...
...One of the important subjects treated in the The Translator's Notes appear on pp...
...he asks...
...Here, going back into history again, he tells of the deportation of the wealthy peasants and the "kulak supporters" in the years of collectivization, and the deportation to the East of the many nationalities Stalin found "inconvenient...
...Of course one had to pay a certain price...
...His short novel The Dead Feel No Pain, for example, depicts Stalinist officers who shot their own soldiers rather than let them be taken prisoner...
...It would seem that this is one of the chief reasons for the decline in Solzhenitsyn's popularity and in that of Gulag Archipelago...
...He was a victim of those times, which taught the author of Gulag Archipelago not only firmness and courage, not only extraordinary persistence and stubbornness...
...Solzhenitsyn apparently senses that his words may shock his readers and in a temper he exclaims: Are people astounded at such a cynical, such a desperate state of mind...
...Once More on the Communists in the Camps THROUGHOUT Solzhenitsyn's book, and the third volume is no exception, we find revulsion and hatred not only toward Communists in general but toward party members who spent up to 10 years, or as many as 18, in Stalin's camps and who suffered torments incomparably greater than those Solzhenitsyn himself underwent...
...There are, to be sure, a number of inaccuracies in the third volume, cases where something is presented as a fact that was actually just one of the camp myths...
...When this younger brother of the executed "regicide" became involved in radical activities, he was banned from attendance at universities and later imprisoned and exiled to Siberia...
...he still knows it today...
...And they knew as little about the crimes of the Stalin clique as Solzhenitsyn did, with all his intelligence and the doubts he had even then about Stalin and the "public" political trials organized in 1936-38...
...they tired warning shots in the air...
...That is what makes the central chapters of the third volume the most satisfying artistically and the most powerful...
...3. Prison-camp revolts...
...50.] Solzhenitsyn is wrong, of course, in maintaining that those who were free never thought about those in the camps...
...let the body fall lifeless wherever it might" (p...
...in the 1960s and 1970s...
...6. Vlasov...
...But they had to give speeches before in praise of the wonderful life when that too had been pretty bad.[P...
...I Many books and memoirs were written about the Stalin camps even before Solzhenitsyn's study: more than 30 have been published in the West alone...
...But that was written in 1967...
...On the morning of June 2, the strike spread to other plants in the city: a demonstration of workers, with portraits of Lenin and posters with peaceful demands, marched to the party headquarters in the central square...
...He is delighted at every instance of resistance to arbitrary rule...
...328.] The trial of the ringleaders [Solzhenitsyn writes twenty pages later] was held in the fall of 1955: naturally, it was a closed trial and we do not know anything definite about it...
...And what necklace should we weave this into...
...Andrei A. Vlasov (c...
...He does not conceal his feeling of triumph in recounting the story of the Kengir uprising and regrets only that not all the barracks and not all categories of prisoners took part...
...What did going back mean to them...
...Rolland apologized for the purge trials...
...But is Balzacjudged by his antirepublican and legitimist articles...
...We do not refer to the isolated cases of "forgetful people," who are found in all the categories and "waves" of former zeks...
...He agreed to collaborate with the Nazis and formed a "Free Russia Committee" whose anti-Stalin propaganda was used by the Nazis for psychological warfare...
...That's what they drove us to...
...Aleksandr V. Samsonov (1859-1914) in the first big battle between Russian and German forces in World War I. Samsonov's army invaded East Prussia, but the offensive was poorly prepared...
...Solzhenitsyn himself has declared more than once that he imagined the West quite differently than he now finds it, at first hand...
...Finally the authorities stormed the camp with tanks and submachine guns...
...Now after all the prison transports, transit prisons, logging details, and camp rubbish heaps, perhaps the reader has become more inclined to agree...
...Kengir was, in 1954, a settlement, with an adjacent labor camp...
...Petersburg workers, killing more than a hundred, a massacre that helped set off the mass strikes and disturbances of the unsuccessful 1905 revolution...
...Certainly none of the women who "met the enemy not in battle but in bed" deserved the long terms in hard-labor camps many of them received...
...All of Solzhenitsyn's sympathy is now on the side of the last group, and he regrets only that there were too few of them and that they did not have the full confidence of the German occupationists...
...And though the majority of them had not betrayed their convictions, their attitudes toward the reality of our life was quite different...
...later that year he left the Soviet Union...
...R.M...
...Above all they were people whose families, or who themselves, had been run over by the tank treads of the 1920s and I930s...
...They reported that the Central Committee members promised an investigation and punishment of the guilty...
...To be sure, life was not easy for our people in the 1920s and 1930s and the terrible crimes of the Stalin regime inflicted wounds upon millions of Soviet people that have never healed...
...It gives rise to an involuntary feeling—at least for most Soviet readers, even Solzhenitsyn's admirers—of protest and mistrust toward the author...
...Nevertheless, in this very book one can find more than a few pages with apologies for treason that are surprising to hear from a Russian writer...
...Vlasov's "Russian Liberation Army" existed largely on paper until late in 1944, when the Nazis allowed anti-Soviet Russians to form units with their own officers under Vlasov, two and a half divisions strong...
...And it seems they are living there to this day" (p...
...As far as Solzhenitsyn is concerned, if a Communist is involved, you can...
...They were sent to some northern island— they were sent off because, for the glory of the fatherland, they had let themselves be disfigured in the war, and the aim of sending them off was to contribute to the health of the nation, which was putting on such a winning performance in all types of athletics and ball games...
...After the war most of these men were sent to the Archipelago...
...But the author was right when he said in the Preface to his second volume that even with the help of hundreds of former zeks who had provided him with their letters, memoirs, stories, and statements he had been able to open only "a peephole into the Archipelago, not the view from the tower...
...Who had lost parents, relatives, loved ones in the murky waves that washed down our sewage disposal system...
...Children as well as teachers knew about them...
...Likewise, the partisan movement might have been smaller if the fascists had not followed a policy of such total terror and pillage in the parts of the U.S.S.R...
...Instead of punishing those who committed the massacre, the authorities arrested and deported to Siberia many of the participants and the families of those killed or wounded...
...until his death...
...After his defeat, he was taken to Moscow and publicly executed...
...Workers addressed the crowd from the second-story balcony of the abandoned party building...
...It wasshe site of a labor-camp complex, mainly for mining gold, that was the largest in the area and most notorious for its murderous conditions...
...you must be able to tolerate people...
...One might have thought the first two volumes would have exhausted the basic theme of Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation...
...Solzhenitsyn also gives a detailed description of the various types of penal exile (ssylka...
...in the negotiations with the "important generals" who flew to the camp, Kuznetsov's command "Off with your headgear...
...Kabanikha.— Character in Ostrovsky's play The Thunderstorm...
...What category of exile should we assign this to—the exile of disabled veterans of the Patriotic War...
...And they came flooding hack in 1956, as though from a musty old trunk, bringing with them the air of the 1930s, wishing to take up where they had left off the day of their arrest.[P...
...Send Khrushchev for Sausages...
...However, none of them starved because they did not "warrant a lavish ration...
...But what is absolutely astounding is that Solzhenitsyn takes the West to task (above all the United States) for not starting a new world war against the U.S.S.R...
...28...
...even the old White Guard emigres split in their attitude toward the war...
...Didn't we create a worse Kabanikha for them by accusing them of antipatriotic and criminal behavior for freely disposing of their bodies and selves...
...The West, in Solzhenitsyn's opinion, did not help Russia as it should have back in the First World War or in the fatal year 1917...
...347.] But what of Kuznetsov, who was tried by the same court...
...And Nicholas II was in general a "weakling...
...Rokossovskv— all active Communists from the Civil War days, all arrested in 1937 and "rehabilitated" after the 18th Congress (March 1939), 154 which brought a letup in the purges on the eve of World War II...
...A number of disturbances and protests occurred as a result in many parts of the U.S.S.R...
...And it would of course he unfair to Solzhenitsyn to do more than comment that in this case (departing from the theories he expounded in the second volume) he himself defends the right of the oppressed to rise up against their oppressors, meeting violence with violence, the right of slaves to make a revolution in the name of freedom and justice...
...The West took no note of the starvation of millions of peasants in 1932-33, nor of the dreadful sweep of the Stalin terror...
...For it is based, to a much greater extent than the earlier volumes, on the personal experience of the author, and this gives it more the quality of an artistically crafted memoir than a "literary investigation...
...Just as the generation of Romain Rolland was weighed down in its youth by the constant expectation of war,II so our convict generation [Solzhenitsyn writes] was burdened by the absence of such an expectation...
...It is true the war left many disabled veterans...
...His purpose is to keep democratic and humanist (Tolstoyan) ideas alive in the minds of the peasant children, previously uneducated under Polish rule, and to shield them from the brutal teachings of the Nazis...
...Around noon, troops took over the party building, removing the workers...
...If you march into the compound with your weapons,' he warned, `don't forget that half the people who took Berlin are here...
...When a group of his favorite students is arrested for sabotage, Moroz shares their fate of execution rather than abandon them...
...8. Kosterina...
...Only around midnight, after the crowd lead slowly dwindled, was it finally broken up by pressure from tanks and troops firing in the air...
...A series of trials was held, both secret and "open" (to officials only...
...Fierce repression followed...
...The revolt was provoked by the unwarranted killing of a prisoner by guards...
...Although he had about a dozen members of the People's Will executed, he 150 didn't go after the relatives and friends of the executed, or he punished them too lightly, "in a fatherly way," as may be seen especially in the fate of young Vladimir Ulyanov...
...Of course, they arrested them now and then and jailed them, but "just long enough to give them a taste of prison and put a halo around their heads" (p...
...He calls the majority of party members nothing less than "the Orthodox" and contends that after the 20th Congress these "Orthodox" Communists returned to freedom no different than they had been before they went into the camps...
...And only that is the full truth about the atmosphere in the Special Political Camps...
...4. "Do Not Live hr the Lie...
...Stalin's death in March 1953 intensified the movement, especially when it was followed by an amnesty for prisoners 153 (criminals only) and then the fall of Beria in July 1953...
...Solzhenitsyn does not overlook the fate of the young women who became the mistresses of German soldiers and officers...
...He refused release from prison, his term having come to an end during the uprising...
...14 In reply to the threats of these generals, according to Solzhenitsyn's own testimony, "Kuznetsov rose...
...Solzhenitsyn himself, in his Afterword, apologizes to the reader for the unwieldy size of this work and for certain artistic failings...
...Word spread that top party leaders had flown in from Moscow, including Frol Kozlov and Anastas Mikoyan, and a delegation of workers had gone to tell them about the massacre...
...I reject this idea...
...Are these Whites who were never completely beaten...
...Solzhenitsyn's own fate is evidence of that...
...Unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn has not yet learned to tolerate people and continues to live and judge in terms of himself alone...
...What reproach, one wonders, could be brought against this man...
...Solzhenitsyn paints a grim picture of the Stalinist concentration camps, and it is sometimes hard to believe...
...He writes: In the first part of this book the reader had not yet been prepared to receive the full truth...
...In his numerous political articles, press conferences, letters, television and other appearances, and 142 speeches during the past two years Solzhenitsyn, as everyone knows, has voiced many reactionary and utopian ideas and advanced some obviously absurd theories, revealing his lack of knowledge of the elementary facts of both Russian and world history...
...The West allowed the Bolsheviks to come out on top in the Civil War and then greeted the millions of Russian emigres with hostility...
...Kabanikha" is the disparaging nickname (literally "female wild pig") by which the wealthy widow Marfa Ignatyevna Kabanova, upholder of morals, is known in her small Volga town...
...I. Vasil Bvkov (born 1924)— a Byelorussian writer who fought in the Soviet army against the Nazi occupation of his homeland...
...freedom to correspond with relatives...
...Pp...
...We know next to nothing about this, and those who know are very few...
...P...
...The "obelisk" of the title is a modest village monument commemorating the youths...
...A third group was overcome by politeness and gallantry, by the little things in a man's personal appearance, the outward show of courtship, which no one had taught our lads during the five-year plans or under the commanders of our army, cast in the Frunze mold...
...What were we like," he writes, "if our women were attracted to the occupation troops...
...But the reality was precisely as he shows it...
...581...
...His books on French poetry, German drama (Brecht), Russian stylistics, and problems of translation were published in the U.S.S.R...
...Samsonov disaster.— Defeat of Russian army under Gen...
...18, 22.] All this is quite enough, in Solzhenitsyn's eyes, to drive good, sometimes even noble, people into collaborating with the occupation regime, serving as "burgomasters" and punitive troops, and to cause them to prefer the devout worship of another Leader, the Fuehrer, and another song, "Deutschland ueber alles...
...In the uncertain post-Stalin atmosphere, the authorities hesitated and negotiated, cajoled and promised, for a long time...
...For example, Solzhenitsyn apologizes totally for the principals and teachers who continued to run the schools in the occupied towns and villages according to the program dictated by the fascists...
...This brought the weakened Romanov monarchy, and after it the Provisional Government, to disaster...
...He cultivated his garden and in his spare time copied various aphorisms 'out of books, for example, "It is not enough to love humanity...
...I'll be good...
...3, on the day of its publication in France...
...Is the author of Gulag Archipelago a reactionary...
...Then, at the end of the war in 1945, the West gave in to virtually every demand Stalin made...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
