GEOGRAPHY OF EVIL
FROM UNDER THE RUBBLE.
By Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Et al.
Little,
Brown and Company. $8.95.
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO III , IV.
By Alexander
I.
Solzhenit–
syn. Harper and Row. $15.00.
ON SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY.
By Roy Medvedev. Knopf. $10.00.
All a ttempts a t a rtistic o r documentary description of crimes
committed on a na tionwide scale are doomed
to
failure becau se a
person can comprehend only the amount of evil of whi ch he himself is
capabl e. Each of us has a sphere of activity that is limited
to
twenty or
thirty people, and an ythin g that exceeds this fi gure is reduced to an
abstraction. This is wha t assures the impunity of regimes tha t carry out
mass repression s.
T heoreti call y, the crimes of one sta te can be adequately analyzed
and condemned onl y by another state. But in practice it turns out tha t
th e Nuremberg trial had a world war as its prerequisite. Had there not
been a world wa r, to this day we would still be hearkening
to
nightin ga les singing of " interna tion al law," "na tional sovereignty,"
and " the policy o f noninterference in the internal affairs" of the Third
Reich .
Fo rtunately, the idea of "n ation al sovereignty," though it may
paralyze the ethics o f a sta te, is incapa ble of paralyzing the ethics of the
individua l. An individual, though he may be risking his life, can allow
himself the luxury o f ga thering the testimony of witnesses and making
hi s own Nuremberg tri al. And thi s is precisely wha t Al eksandr 501-
zhenitsyn has done in hi s
Gulag Archipelago,
which presents both the
incrimina tory evidence and the indictment itself. The reader is invited
to take part in the trial as an observer. An unquestionable advantage o f
p arti cipating in thi s investiga tion is that no preliminary shedding of
blood is required : it has already been done- long ago and far away.
Wh ether we want
to
take part is ano ther matter.
T he first obj ection is bound
to
be tha t the book is too lon g. In our
day we are accustomed to dealing with focu sed ma terial. Photographs
and films are mo re fortuna te than books in this respect precise ly
becau se o f their instantaneous na ture. And the psychological conse-
