Miss Cellania's Comments

I saw the headlines and immediately thought of Solzhenitsyn.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began The Gulag Archipelago with one of the most searing passages in literature:
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream — and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.
Few readers of that science journal, Solzhenitsyn observed, would have understood what sort of people rush to eat prehistoric creatures. But he and his friends had understood immediately, for they, too, had been zeks, the half-starved prisoners of the network of hundreds of forced labor camps spread across the world’s largest country like a string of islands. Each of those islands had been governed by the Soviet Union’s “Main Camp Administration,” whose Russian acronym was GULAG.
But the linked article is paywalled, and I can't even read it.
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  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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