SOLZHENITSYN places, names the beaters and killers, and refuses to allow their victims to be expunged from the historical record, to disappear without a trace or care down an Orwellian memory hole. He shows, above all, that the Gulag Archipelago was not a mere « aberration » caused by Stalin's paranoia. The brutalities of Stalin have often been described as « departures '> or « deviations » from the true principies of Leninlsm. For a time, indeed, Solzhenitsyn himself adhered to this view. In The Gulag Archipelago he describes how, as he passed through the prison system, he found himself debating with old Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Anarchists, and defending the policies of Lenin. But during a decade of confinement he revised his picture of the early Soviet regime, indeed of the Revolution itself. What he had come to understand was that the Archipelago had begun to take shape at the very outset, that since the October Revolution Soviet Russia had been ruled not by justice and morality but by power, brutality, and corruption. He quotes Lenin's demand in 1918 « to purge the Russian land of all harmful insects, i> as well as his order in 1922 « to extend the firing squad against all activities of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others, » who were to be linked in every possible way with « the international bourgeoisie. '> That 1974 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Lenin's death goes far to explain the unparalleled attacks on Solzhenitsyn which culminated in his sudden cteportation. For to indict Leninism is to question the whole Bolshevik system on which the present regime stands and from which it derives its claim to legitlmacy. When Lenin died in 1924 the active remnants of political opposition had been eliminated or driven underground. He had left behind a centralized and disciplined party which in the name of the noblest ideals of humanity had launched one the greatest tyrannies in history. All the elements existed for the nightmare regime of Stalin, who pushed the system of terror and methods of repression to their ultimate limits. Under Stalin not thousands but tens of millions, like Lara in Doctor Zhivago, « died or vanished somewhere, forgotten, as a nameless number on a list which was later lost. » It was a world, wrote Yevgenia Ginzburg, « in which either the spirit was broken and degraded, or true courage born. '> As the poet Anna Akhmatova put it, Russia was « writhing, guiltless, under steel-shod boots and the tires of Black Marias. » The victims, of course, included Solzhenitsyn himself. Though twice -107
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