What I like about Sartre is his tremendous life journey from 'hell is
other people' to a belief that solidarity and engagement with others
is the only proper path.
Although.. yeah it would be hard for Saint Al to depict Lucey as being as cooperative as the LDS (as you do.., but you didn't have to make the tradeoff for publication)
Project at Marfino (under "auspices" of KPSS), or project (in conjunction with ER) to cleanse the бессмертная русская душа?
(swimming in ice water and jumping over fires are said to be good for the soul, at least when properly timed, but I can't think of any equivalent atmospheric or chthonic rituals, and of course the chinese have a fifth element, so maybe we ought to be craving the strength and certainty of steel?)
[EDIT re publication: A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists. — TWA]
Given that that project was entered as evidence in his trial, it may even be available somewhere in full (in Moscow, if not on runet)?
[Aside: as an officer, S was, in 1984 terms, "outer party"; had he merely been a 1984-prole, would he also have wound up Grazhdanin S., a zek?]
As to S-partition: I was taken when reading about the Voodoo Iwa that its practitioners are said to state that there must be thousands of them, but humans are only aware of a hundred or so (and power laws being what they are, the common pantheon of these "saints" is much smaller); this seemed to me to be a much more reasonable prior than universal knowledge of the specifics of other partitions, especially when we have the finite minds and they the infinite.
There was a 60's joke in which the Pope has good news and bad news for his Cardinals: the good news — he had a 1:1 with God the other day; the bad news — she's Black. Given the relative distribution of life on this planet, I can easily imagine our religious leaders being contacted by a beetle-saint, who apologises that the Big Deity is of course a protist (having made all the rest of them in Its own image), but everyone up above (or would beetles put their Heaven away from birds, down in the safety of the earth?) figured humanity, being animals and all, would find it more comprehensible to be contacted by Coleoptera, so it agreed to intercede.
(there is a bard song which should go here, about a gang of zeks who spot a cigarette butt which, judging by the lipstick, had been smoked by an actual woman... but everything past Б escapes me, and I am not too sure of even that)
[EDIT: oops, with Б I had been thinking of Okudzhava, who's the wrong bard]
So, comparing with the US UCMJ[0], what would Captain Solzhenitsyn have faced if he had been subject to the US DoD[1] instead of the tender mercies of SMERSH[2] and the NKVD?
Conspiracy to commit sedition (Arts. 81 & 94 UCMJ) would seem to be the equivalent charge.
Under the principle that conspiracy conviction invites maximum sentencing, it looks to me[3] as though Art.94(b) calls for the death penalty.
He (or his coconspirator) would, of course, have had to commit an overt act for the purpose of bringing about the object of the conspiracy. However, for the purposes of the UCMJ this act need not be illegal in itself, and considering that the NKVD based their sentence of 8 years labour camp on his having founded a hostile organisation (SFSR Penal Code Art.58-11), I'd guess the charge would've also gone through had he been a US Officer making arguably concrete plans for revolution?
[0] not adopted until 1951, but that's a minor quibble in our counterfactuality
[1] again, I believe this was still named the War Department at the time
[2] military personnel in the US are aware that their correspondence is subject to censorship; surely their Red Army counterparts would also have known that censorship implies reading — even if some (at least 2) were too arrogant to foresee the consequences?
