The Sources of Political Terror  

It is very difficult to address an audience after a film like the one we have just seen in this large theater, especially since this screening was attended by the few surviving former prisoners of Solovki, who have spoken to …



Ethnic Conflict & Gorbachev’s Reforms  

The disturbances in Kazakhstan in December 1986, the demonstrations by the Crimean Tartars in Moscow and those in the Baltic states in 1987-88, the incidents in Yakutia and Uzbekistan, the increased activity of the Russian “patriotic” association, Pamyat (“Memory”), the …







Andropov and the Dissidents  

The changes in the Soviet leadership have been of great interest not only because they represent shifts of emphasis in the U.S.S.R.’s foreign and domestic policies. Considerable attention has also been focused on the relations between the authorities and the …



Brezhnev: A Bureaucrat’s Profile  

In the U.S.S.R. the death of the leader of the party and state is a political event of extraordinary significance, usually marking the end of an era. Protracted tenure in office permits Soviet leaders to conclude a fair number of …



Khrushchev in Retirement  

On October 2, 1964, shortly after his meeting with Sukarno, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev flew south for a holiday, which he spent in his newly built dacha not far from Sochi. The dacha was a real palace: its indoor swimming pools …



Solzhenitsyn: Truth and Politics  

Two and a half years after the publication in the West of the first volume of Gulag Archipelago, with the sensation that produced and the subsequent expulsion of the author from the U.S.S.R., the third volume of this monumental work …



Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: Part Two  

The second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago has now appeared. Where the first volume consisted in a detailed investigation of everything that preceded the arrival of millions of Soviet people in Stalin’s concentration camps—the system of arrests, the various forms …