(4 of 10)
The Soviet leaders' decision to deprive Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and fling him out of Russia was a shrewdly calculated maneuver to rid themselves of their most eloquent critic while defusing the explosion of protest in the West. Although many European leaders expressed shock last week at Solzhenitsyn's summary banishment, the world wide response was largely one of relief. The Kremlin's solution was made to appear very nearly humane, in contrast with the worst that had been feared.
Clumsy Tactics. The reaction with in the Soviet Union of course was quite different. Prior to his arrest and deportation, Soviet papers were full of letters from citizens insisting that the authorities do just that. After his banishment, the letter-writing campaign continued with a new twist. Demands for his punishment were replaced by expressions of gratitude that Kremlin leaders had up rooted "the traitor." Only twelve hours after Solzhenitsyn's deportation had been announced on Moscow Radio, Izvestia was able to print a letter purportedly from a reader in Baku, although mail usually takes ten days to reach Moscow from there. Other minor miracles were performed by letter writers from Minsk and Kiev: their messages of approval were also received several days ahead of schedule. Such transparently clumsy tactics were added evidence that the Kremlin had long prepared the action against Solzhenitsyn.
Soviet leaders have reason to fear him: no man alive today has more au thority than Solzhenitsyn to draw world attention to the Kremlin's long record of inhumanity. In an era of detente, many would prefer to have that record forgot ten. Yet Solzhenitsyn — martyr, survivor and great writer — demands a hearing.
He spent eleven years in Stalin's prisons, camps, and in exile, preparing himself to bear witness to what he had observed.
His superb earlier novels (The First Cir cle, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Cancer Ward) were fiction alized reflections of that experience. In the first two parts of Gulag, however, he set out to document the entire range of horrors inflicted upon the Soviet people from 1918 to 1956. A 260,000-word mosaic, composed of personal reminiscences, interviews with survivors, and documents, Gulag lays out the intricate patterns of terror.
True, that terror subsided after 1956, when, by Khrushchev's decree, millions were freed from the giant "archipelago" of prisons and camps run by "Gulag," the Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. But the significance of Gulag lies in its thrust into the present—and future—of the U.S.S.R.
Solzhenitsyn perceives that an entire nation has been debased by four decades of totalitarianism far more oppressive than Czarist authoritarianism. Ordinary people have been rendered indifferent to injustice and pitiless toward the suffering of others. Among bureaucrats, the absolute exercise of power in the past continues to corrupt absolutely in the present. "Thus," he mourns, "have we been driven to become savages."
By Accident. Solzhenitsyn argues that Stalin's rule by terror was no mere aberration in the development of Communism. Instead, he writes, it is inherent in the system established by Lenin, consolidated by Stalin and preserved, in essence, by the present Kremlin leaders.