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BBC NEWS | Monitoring | Media reports | European Press
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
Most Russian newspapers sing the praises of the Nobel Prize-winning writer
Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the 40th anniversary of his book, One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich, which depicts the life of an innocent inmate in a
Soviet labour camp, a subject forbidden at the time.
Surprisingly, the book was approved by Soviet censors and acclaimed by
Soviet critics. A literary debut for the dissident author and a precursor of
his famous Gulag Archipelago novel, the work was a "breakthrough" and
"turnaround in public mind" in a totalitarian society, "the scope of which
could only be fully comprehended in the years to come," Trud writes.
The government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta believes that the book "ushered
in the gradual demise of the Gulag archipelago" - a network of Soviet labour
camps where thousands of political prisoners died during Stalin's rule.
SOLZHENITSYN'S BOOK WAS A TIME-BOMB
Izvestiya
The paper carries an interview with Mr Solzhenitsyn's wife Natalya, who says
the book told the West "the horrible truth" about the Gulag, starting to
dispel any remaining "sympathy for Communism in Europe and the rest of the
world".
Izvestiya regards the book as a "time-bomb", which brought about the
destruction of the Soviet totalitarian system from within and without which
"no perestroika or the controversial but dynamic reforms of the 1990s would
have been possible".
It is ironic, the paper notes, that the Soviet authorities were so
"far-sighted" and "so obsessed with a bright Communist future", that they
failed to grasp the powerful anti-Communist message the book carried thanks
to Mr Solzhenitsyn's "cunning of a prisoner" and "tactical expertise".
BBC--European Press Review, November 19, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/not_in_website/syndication/monitoring/media_repor
ts/2490551.stm, for personal and academic use only
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