Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' a bomb

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33427, 8 January 1974, Page 9

Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' a bomb

(By

WILLIAM L. RYAN,

of the Associated Press, through N.Z.P.A.)

• NEW’ YORK. January 7. [i Alexander Solzhenit- . syn, symbol of stubborn l protest against the ! Soviet system. has , placed himself in serious j danger. His latest book, “Gulag Archipelago: •j 1918-56,” recently published in Paris, is a ( bomb aimed at the very i props of the Communist ■ Party’s mythology and authority.

, If the Kremlin was already annoyed with the Nobelist

writer, it must now be engaged as is indicated by the angry' reaction to the book I in the controlled press. 1 However, if the Kremlin lis anxious to put an end to I Solzhenitzyn’s defiance, it may be inhibited by its present policy of wooing the West, which has had the i effect of changing the Iron (Curtain to glass, through which the West is studying ; official Soviet behaviour. For the Soviet authorities ( “Gulag Archipelago” — “Gulag” is a Russian acronym for the main administration of prison camps — is a bomb not because it details .incredible cruelties, and examines Joseph Stalin’s bloody purges and methods lof persecution: much of that was known. The explosive element lies in the fact that Solzhenitsyn’s potent pen gouges great chunks from the pedestal.

whereon rests the icon of, Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism, the man the present regime defies as the creator of all Communist virtue. The book is being broad-; cast from the West to a; Soviet public trained — especially under the regime of Leonid Brezhnev — to regard Lenin as holy. Lenin’s works are reverently quoted by Communists as a Christian would quote the Bible, (bracketing chapter and verse • after each citation. The party goes invariably to Lenin for (sanction for ail it does. Brezhnev’s own claim (to a niche in history rests on 'his “works,” which bear the title, “On Lenin’s Course.”

After reading “Gulag” in the original Russian, one has the impression that Solzhenitsyn considered Lenin in many ways the progenitor of a system Stalin brought to a terrifying maturity. “Gulag” is a painstaking documentary history of the period of Communist power between 1918 and 1956, the latter being the year Nikita Khrushchev destroyed the Stalin image in a secret “deStalinisation” speech. Solzhenitsyn arranged for publication now because the Soviet authorities seized a copv of the manuscript last summer. After merciless interrogation, the woman to whom the author had entrusted a manuscript broke down, revealed its hiding place to the secret police, and then committed suicide. In a foreword. Solzhenit(syn says that he had until (then been hesitant to approve i

publication abroad while | persons still living might suffer as a result. Basisally, the book is not so much about the Gulag Archipelago, a chain of awesome prison camps in the Russian Far North, as it is about how the system operated, what it did to’ individuals, and the senseless terror of it. Part 2, much shorter than the first part, of this 250,000word document, concentrates on life in the camps as Solzhenitsyn himself saw it, and as it was described to him by others.

Perhaps it was Solzhenitsyn’s intention to make his work his principal legacy to a young Russian generation which, he notes at the end, has come to regard its elders, with their medals and talk of battle glories, as so many clods.

Of all Soviet leaders of the last 55 years, Khrushchev chev emerges least evil in this narrative. That is not surprising, since under Khrushchev the author obtained his freedom and could even publish legally “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” his own story of prison camp life. Since Khrushchev, however, he has been on the black list. Other celebrated works, like the novels “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle,” were, like the present one, smuggled out for publication in the ’ West. Time and gain, Solzhenit-i (syn refers back to Lenin,; I establishing a solid link be-; I tween the founder and whati

followed him. It was Lenin, he notes, who demanded “ruthless” suppression of all opposition, who complained that not enough use was made of the death penalty, who extolled the uses of terror for a new revolutionary regime. It was Lenin who, soon after the birth of the regime, announced his aim of ridding Russia of those he called “insects.” “He included in that term, ‘insects,’ not only all class enemies, but also workers ‘malingering at their work’ such as the typesetters .at the Petrograd party printing plants,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Especially important were (the railroads, because many (insects were hidden under I railway uniforms and they

had to be yanked out, and some of them slapped down. Telegraph operators, too, en masse, for some reason, were incorrigible insects. “We may note that by the spring of 1918 there had already begun an incessant torrent, lasting for many years, of ‘socialist traitors.’ All these parties, the social revolutionaries, Mansheviks. anarchists, and Popular Socialists, had for decades only pretended to be revolutionaries, had only worn socialism as a mask. For this, many went into hard labour.” If Lenin, borrowing from Tsarist methods, launched the Soviet terror system, Stalin perfected it. Under the tyrant — Solzhenitsyn calls him variously “his omnipo-

tence,” “father and teacher,” and “chief murderer” — the Soviet Union presented a vast panorama of persecution, terror, and suffering. Successive vast streams of people into Gulag Archipelago testified to that, the testimony in this case coming from Solzhenitsyn himself and 227 others with whom he talked or corresponded to document this indictment. The victims included, at the height of the terror, people taken for the most trivial of offences: the semiliterate worker whose doodling on a newspaper came to official attention because its scrawls touched the photograph of the leader; 10 years; the peasant who asked a party leader why his farm did not receive its regular grain allotment; 10 years. These, and many more offences like them were lumped into the general category of (“anti-Soviet agitation.” Being a foreigner was no (insurance: Solzhenitsyn re- ; lates the story he elicited from “A.D.” — later identified as a United States Embassy employee named lAlexander Dolgun, now work, (ing for the Government in (Washington. He experienced (torture, terror, and eight (years confinement without ever being told why. Dolgun’s arrest was never announced, although the (United States Embassy susipected the truth, and protesm'l vigorously. Soon after his "’-rest in December, 1948, i Dolgun was beaten so badly, J says Solzhenitsyn, that he

had to be taken to hospital, “and, for the time being, attempts to force him into committing a foul deed were interrupted.” That was the beginning of] a period of exceptionally; ( virulent anti-west, anti-spy | 'campaigns, signs that Stalin! (was planning yet another wave of purges. ( “In the last year of Stalin's . (life,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “a stream of Jews showed up in the camps, from 1950 on, dragged in as ‘cosmopoli-’ tans.’ For that purpose, the ‘Doctors Plot’ was invented. It appeared that Stalin planned to mount a huge .massacre of Jews, However,’ ( this was the first time in his (life that one of his plans became unhinged. God ordered (him ... to leave his rib cage.”) In a footnote, Solzhenitsyn i ! takes note of rumours he said (were circulating then, that (Stalin intended to hang Jewish doctors in Red Square in ; the style of Ivan the (Terrible, as a lesson to (“enemies.” The Jewish doctors were supposed to have plotted to murder Soviet officials; but when Stalin died, they were freed, j “Gulag Archipelago” is so (grimly fascinating a picture lof endless official bloodletting (and unrelenting cruelty that (it is difficult to put it down. Solzhenitsyn turns the knife (in the present regime’s wound by suggesting that such i cruelty was spawned by the (Communist ideology itself, i “Thanks to ideology,” he notes, “a system that had ipromised equality, brother-

hood, and happiness for future generations brought them, instead, an era of sheer villainy.”