Word: lubyanka
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...first time. In February 1945, as the Red Army rumbled inexorably through Germany to Berlin, the battle-worn captain was suddenly seized near Konigsberg, on the East Prussian front. He was stripped of his rank, his medals and his gun, and escorted by armed guards back to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. It was then that the writer was born. Passing through a Moscow subway station en route to Lubyanka on that bitter winter day, Solzhenitsyn paused and surveyed the scene...
Bitter Paradox. Gifted with near-total recall, Solzhenitsyn set out to develop his powers of observation while in captivity. In the monotonous daily routine of his first weeks in Lubyanka, he noted that "the events are tiny, but for the first time in your life you learn to examine them under a magnifying glass." For the first time, too, he encountered the victims of Soviet terror whom he would meticulously interview for the next 23 years. He was struck by a bitter paradox: prison offered the possibility of discussing freely what was unthinkable "outside." Meetings with prisoners...
Scope of Evil. After a few weeks in Lubyanka, the seeds of doubt had been planted in the mind of the fervent young Marxist. But it was only after he was transferred from Lubyanka to another Moscow prison, Butyrki, that Solzhenitsyn began to perceive the scope of the evil that had befallen his country. In Butyrki, he met the first contingent of Russian soldiers and civilians who had been captured by the Germans during the war. These people were now being repatriated?straight into Stalin's prisons and camps. Nearly 2 million of the 5.7 million prisoners...
...book shop. No sign or flag indicates that it is the bastion of the Soviet secret police. In front of it stands the giant statue of the first Soviet secret policeman, Feliks E. Dzerzhinsky, who ran the police until his death in 1926. In the same building is dank Lubyanka prison, where political prisoners undergo their initial conditioning; in his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote how its warders clicked their tongues to warn each other whenever they were escorting a prisoner: "One prisoner must never be allowed to encounter another, never be allowed to draw comfort or support...
...courteously invited by the KGB to write a general account of the mood of the intelligentsia, and I equally courteously refused, upon which the matter ended. In 1963, I was taken by night to the Lubyanka prison and ordered to write a report against an American diplomat to the effect that he had subjected me, and other Soviet citizens, to malicious ideological brainwashing. I again refused, although they then threatened me with criminal proceedings. In 1965, I refused outright to talk with them, which cost me exile in Siberia. That is why I think I have the personal right...