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By Root 5696 0

when Khruschev permitted the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), the first story by one of those millions of zeks or prisoners who had been released from Soviet labour camps in the post-Stalin `thaw'. On the face of it, Solzhenitysn's novella was a slight tale, merely describing a single day in the life of an anonymous zek. The hero wakes up in his bunk early in the morning, freezing, ill and utterly miserable. We follow him into a hellish day, being bullied by guards, as he works at laying bricks for a wall. Gradually his mood changes. He finds himself taking pleasure in the neatness with which he is laying his bricks. He forgets his illness. In the evening a fellow zek gives him a fragment of sausage. By the time he is ready for sleep, he is surprisingly content. He has been through a kind of Rebirth. Inwardly, in his own tiny way, he has triumphed over the system.

So powerfully did the waves which flowed from the publication of this story establish Solzhenitsyn as everything the Soviet system did not want him to be, as his own man, implacably tough and devoutly religious, that over the next few years, through further books smuggled out to the West, including in 1974 The Gulag Archipelago, he established himself as the central inspiration for Russia's burgeoning `dissident' movement. He and other brave individuals, such as the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, were now ready to challenge the system and all its lies head on.

What was happening in the Communist empire in the 1960s and 1970s offered a curious parallel to what had happened to Britain in 1940. After decades when the force of the Soviet totalitarian system had succeeded in crushing its subjects into submission, the very fact that it constituted such an extreme psychological pole was now provoking an equal and opposite reaction. Here and there individuals were now appearing for whom its very power was concentrating their human and spiritual energies into its opposite. Confronted by this collectivised outward projection of the `dark Self; they were discovering the power of the `light Self' within themselves. It became one of the paradoxes of this period of history that it was those societies governed by a system dedicated to eradicating human individuality which ended up by producing some of the outstanding individuals of the age. Not least among them was the Polish bishop, Karol Woityla, whose faith and character had been forged in opposition to both Nazi and Communist regimes; and whose elevation to the Papacy in 1978 and first triumphant return to his homeland the following year did much to inspire that heroic resistance to Poland's Communist government in 1980 which would eventually play a key symbolic part in bringing about the downfall of the entire Soviet system.

One of the most remarkable books written in the twilight years of Communism was the autobiography of Eugenia Ginsburg, smuggled out to the West to be published in two volumes in the 1960s and 1970s as Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. Although her book was based on fact, Ginsburg's story reads with all the imaginative power of a novel. She described how, in the 1930s, she had been the wife of a leading Party official in a provincial Soviet capital, enjoying a privileged life `above the line'. In 1937, like so many others, she and her husband were arrested by the secret police in the first of Stalin's great purges. She found herself disappearing through the floor of Soviet society into the foetid, violent underworld of its vast prison system. Much of her book described the horrendous sufferings she endured in this twilight world, subjected to Kafkaesque interrogations by the NKVD and spells of solitary confinement, ending eventually in a hellish succession of slave camps in the icy wastes of the Soviet Far East.

What makes her book exceptional is the way we see her experience turning into an inner journey, as she develops the kind of understanding which enables her immediately to capture the human essence of each person she meets. Just as in a fictional