EXILES: Islands of Slavery

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has resumed his unrelenting chronicle of Soviet terror, which provoked the Kremlin into deporting him four months ago. From his home in exile in Zurich, the Russian writer gave the signal for the publication of the oft-postponed second volume of his trilogy, The Gulag Archipelago, by the Russian-language Y.M.C.A. Press in Paris.* An exhaustive, harrowing 657-page account of the forced-labor system under Lenin and Stalin, Gulag II may well be Solzhenitsyn's most stunning achievement to date.

Composed with the novelist's superb literary skill and his eye for compelling human detail, Gulag II is based on a wealth of solid documentation. This includes official Soviet records and the testimony of hundreds of victims, including that of Solzhenitsyn himself, a prisoner for eight years in the gigantic "archipelago" of Stalinist labor camps run by "Gulag," the Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. Between 1918 and 1959, Solzhenitsyn believes, 66 million men, women and children were shuttled to these islands of slavery under the pious official slogan "Correction through labor." In fact, Solzhenitsyn charges, it amounted to "extermination through labor."

As in Gulag I, Solzhenitsyn puts the blame for the introduction of systematic terror squarely on Lenin. He notes that Lenin was the first Soviet leader to use the designation "concentration camps," thus "launching one of the most important terms of the 20th century." Indeed, he adds, "The Archipelago was born with the first gun salvos of Aurora" —the battle cruiser that signaled Lenin's seizure of power in October 1918. The "alma mater," as Solzhenitsyn calls it, of all subsequent forced-labor camps was established under Lenin in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the Arctic. Later, Stalin made slave labor a dominant factor in the Soviet economy.

Solzhenitsyn's list of major construction projects carried out by prisoners is incomplete but nonetheless staggering: at least nine entire cities (including Magadan and Vorkuta), three sea-to-sea and river-to-river canals, twelve railway lines, two highways, three huge hydroelectric stations and six centers of heavy industry.

No Demands. Among all these projects, Solzhenitsyn singles out the Stalin Canal, built in 1931-33 between the White and Baltic seas, for close examination. It was here, on a 140-mile expanse of frozen wasteland, that Stalin first tested out his grandiose program to industrialize the Soviet Union by using a cheap, mobile and inexhaustible labor force. As Solzhenitsyn explains it: "Slave labor made no demands, could be transferred anywhere at any moment, was free of family ties, had no need for housing, schools or hospitals, and sometimes not even for kitchens or lavatories. The state could obtain such manpower only by swallowing up its sons."