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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008
From a 2007 essay Solzhenitsyn’s Refusal by Pierre Tristam
The Gulag Archipelago is a study in power’s perversions at every level of a society unwilling to dilute it, from the very top (Stalin) to its bottom-feeding power-trippers: the secret police, the interrogators, the privileged prisoners, the prison guards (every one of which is analyzed in chapter-length details). Those hierarchies shouldn’t sound unfamiliar to anyone who’s known the hierarchies of a school, of a corporation, of any organization built on the pyramidal notion of power. Nor would Solzhenitsyn’s endless tales of policing, suspicion, torture, subtle or grand repressions sound unfamiliar to those of us pawned and pawed by the convenient terrors of “homeland security” and the “global war on terror.” If “The Gulag Archipelago” isn’t read much nowadays, it’s from ignorance, not irrelevance.