Word: stalinism
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...Moscow's ruthless attempt to suborn, subdue and subordinate this tiny, independent democracy is reminiscent of Stalin's times. The assault on Georgia is similar to what Stalin's Soviet Union did to Finland in 1939: in both cases, Moscow engaged in an arbitrary, brutal and irresponsible use of force to impose domination over a weaker, democratic neighbor. The question now is whether the global community can demonstrate to the Kremlin that there are costs for the blatant use of force on behalf of anachronistic imperialist goals...
...year after Solzhenitsyn had returned from exile. By then I had read Gulag, and every time I walked through the Byelorusskaya metro station, I thought of the first chapter, in which he describes his arrival in Moscow in 1945, 11 days after he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter. He is escorted by three intelligence officers, but "not one of the three knew the city," he writes, "and it was up to me to pick the shortest route to the prison...
...writer. He read War and Peace in its entirety when he was only 10. But as a young man he couldn't get his work published, and he wound up studying mathematics in college. Then he was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. If it weren't for Stalin, his ambition might have gone unfulfilled...
...hunting accident while his mother was pregnant. His mother was a typist. A zealous communist, Solzhenitsyn served with distinction in World War II, but in 1945, in the teeth of the Red Army's march on Berlin, he was arrested for a personal letter that contained passages critical of Stalin and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. His life as a free man was over, but his life as a writer and a thinker had just begun...
...time, the Soviet government tolerated Solzhenitsyn. Khrushchev was eager to discredit Stalin and consolidate his own power, and Solzhenitsyn's work served his political aims. He became a global literary celebrity. But he quickly outlived his political usefulness, and his next two books, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, had to be published abroad. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature, but he wasn't permitted to leave the country to accept it. In 1973 he completed the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, a thundering, encyclopedic indictment of the Soviet labor camp system and the government...