On November 15 Frank Allaun questioned the Home Secretary about Civil Defence in the Cuba crisis. In his reply Henry Brooke said, "* It is certainly the case that for the benefit of the proper working of the Civil Defence organisation there will be protected regional HQ's for key personnel."This is the first time the Government have made such an admission, this means Civil Defence is only for tho select few.
WHove, oF LABOUR CAMP LIF. ee é For many years the Stalinists denied the existence of the slave labour camps in Siberia. When Trotskyists and the other left-wing critics referred to the camps, the Staninists accused them of spreading slander and repeating capitalist anti- Soviet propaganda. Even after the 20th. Congress it was difficult to get a clear picture, sometimes the existence of camps was obliquely admitted at other times their existence was again denied. However in the latest intensification of the process of "destalinisation" there is no argument at all about their existence as the following report in the Daily Worker of 21/11/62 shows, Jd. note. "The life of political prisoners in the Stalin period is the subject of an out standing new novel published today in the journal Novy Mir. Its appearance is the current most talked of literary event. The author, hailed by Konstantin Simonov as a “powerful talent} is a 43-year-old mathematics teacher, A . Solzhenitsyn, who spent many years in a labour camp from 1945.
" Central character in the novel "4 Day in the life of Ivan Denisonvich" is a Red Army soldier, Shukhov, arrested after escaping from encirclement back to the Soviet lines. At the labour camp in Sibsria he joins a cross-section of Soviet people torn from their jobs, their families, from the anti-faScist struggle, by violations of Socialist law.
"The Human—and inhuman—relations at the camp, the battle of will and wits to survive , the spirituality of each prisoner which the most rigorous regime cannot kill, the monstrous fact of detention, make the drama Of the novol. A foreword by Soviet poet Alexander Tvardovsky recalls li. Khrushchov's words at the 22nd Congress: "It is our duty to investigate thoroughly and in every way the cases connected with abuses of power. While we work we can and must clear up many things and tell the truth to the Party and the people. This must be done so that such things never recur,"