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They were right. Starting at the moment of his famous address at Harvard in 1978 (see http://snipurl.com/harvardspeech), Solzhenitsyn became, in effect, mute. Why? Because the cultural elite of the West is just as unhappy to hear itself criticized as the political elite of the Soviet Nomenklatura. How dare Solzehenitsyn fail to recognize that the American intellectual establishment was not in possession of Truth! How dare he point out that in our arrogance, we of the West were as blind to our own doom as the Communists? Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may...

There's been a ton of buzz on the web for the last day or so -- beginning with this Daily Kos diary -- suggesting that John McCain patterned his story about a Vietamese captor drawing a cross in the dirt before him on a similar episode from Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's time in the Soviet gulags. But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing. Columbia University professor Michael Scammell, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, says the episode "never happened," and...

Solzhenitsyn's Warning The faculty of Harvard University admired Alexandr Solzhenitsyn for his literary achievements, so they were thrilled that he agreed to deliver the university’s 1978 commencement address. But almost as soon as he began to speak, the professors changed their minds: too late. As I wrote this month in Christianity Today, they realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West’s surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and of all the moral horrors that followed. For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of...

In a tribute I wrote earlier, posted at National Review, I noted that it is impossible to capture in one column what Solzhenitsyn meant, experienced, and how he went about translating it to the West.--snip--Reagan, in turn, thanked God for Solzhenitsyn. The great dissident did far more than simply write a great book or two. Solzehnitsyn played a significant role in the American effort to place a stake in the heart of militant, atheistic Soviet communism. And for that and much more, Alexander Solzhenitsyn can now rest in peace, receiving some long overdue rewards, eternally free from the Siberian hell...

Great Lives: News of the death of Russian literary genius Alexander Solzhenitsyn recalls a life that proved truth triumphs over totalitarianism. And it renews focus on why extreme ideology and personality cults fail.Unlike the Parisian cafe intellectuals of postwar Europe endlessly mulling repression of the mind and questioning whether truth existed, the great Russian writer knew there was a such thing as truth and that it was worth fighting for. It's what enabled this survivor of eight years in the USSR's Gulag to destroy the moral force of communism as an idea, as the writer Tom Wolfe noted. "Marxism was...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's anti-Sovietism was heroic and influential, but its other side became clearer upon the Union's collapse. The death of the literary colossus and anti-Soviet dissident has, quite rightly, been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime. His literary achievements, closely connected with his dissident activities, have also justifiably received much attention. But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn – one which most obituaries have mentioned only in passing, if at all. Solzhenitsyn's analysis of Soviet communism was based on the notion that the Bolsheviks imposed a totalitarian...

Solzhenitsyn Laid to Rest at Monastery 07 August 2008 By Matt Siegel / Staff Writer It was as though someone had suddenly removed the stopper from an overturned bottle. As the great man's body, hoisted high by a military procession, made its final turn on the path toward the cemetery, a sea of mourners poured down the church steps like water down a rocky crag. The crowds had to be held back as a salute was fired. They had to be held back as the choir, chanting a hymn about eternal life, hovered over the freshly dug grave. They had...

MILLVILLE - It was something she felt was remarkable at the time, as she and the rest of the congregation filed in behind him in the small church and left the general public standing on the lawn waiting for him to emerge again. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn visited Millville and the St. Nicholas Old Russian Orthodox Church in 1976, his message, delivered in Russian to a crowd of between 50 and 70 congregants, was about culture, pride in religion and maintaining the existence of that which was threatened by the Western world. The Nobel Prize-winning author who provided firsthand accounts of...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying with them. Over the weekend, Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Rodman, the American foreign-policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Rodman and liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Rodman was one of the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign-policy establishment. Calm, elegant, dryly funny, brilliant, but most of all gentlemanly. He died too young, at 64, of leukemia. Solzhenitsyn...

Despite penning 38 paragraphs for his obituary, the closest AP's Douglas Birch came to mentioning the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith was by remarking how the bearded author and Soviet dissident looked like a religious icon: In a 1978 speech at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn - who with his beard and dour demeanor resembled a figure from an Orthodox icon - denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph in non-Western civilizations, which he called "worlds" unto themselves. Yet it was in that speech -- "A World Split Apart" -- Baptist theologian Albert Mohler argues, that Solzhenitsyn famously...

In 1949 a publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences carried an item about a bizarre incident that occurred during excavations near the Kolyma River in the gold-mining region of northeastern Siberia. A subterranean stream was discovered, frozen long ago, containing fish and salamanders tens of thousands of years old. They were so well preserved that the men who discovered the stream broke open the ice and ate them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, managed somehow to read that piece.

..the closest AP's Douglas Birch came to mentioning the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith was by remarking how the bearded author and Soviet dissident looked like a religious icon: In a 1978 speech at Harvard ** Solzhenitsyn denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph in non-Western civilizations, which he called "worlds" unto themselves. ..in that speech-"A World Split Apart"-Baptist theologian Albert Mohler argues, that Solzhenitsyn famously diagnosed secularism as a disease corrupting the West and, what's more, he did so thoroughly anchored in his Orthodox Christian faith (emphasis mine): *** Solzhenitsyn railed against the secularism and...

Having thrown away the United Nations and trampled its Charter under foot, NATO has proclaimed before the world for the coming century an old law, that of the jungle: the strongest is always right. If your high technology permits it, surpass a hundred times in violence the adversary you condemn. And it is in this world that you invite us to live henceforth. Under the eyes of humanity they are destroying a magnificent European country, and the civilized governments applaud it. When the people [of Serbia] in despair leave their shelters and make human chains, at the risk of their...

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsynat Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,Thursday, June 8, 1978I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and...

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89. The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure..... Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to the writer's family, a Kremlin spokesperson said. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th Century Russia." "His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook...

'Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize winner for literature who was exiled from the Soviet Union and graphically portrayed life in Soviet labour camps, was dead at age 89, the news agency Interfax reported early Monday. The agency quoted literary circles in the Russian capital. The world famous writer and historian had not been seen in public for months. He died from the aftermath of a stroke, according to unconfirmed information.'

Russia's greatest living novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is working feverishly to complete his collected works and is writing every day despite failing health, a missing vertebra and being unable to walk, his wife, Natalia, revealed yesterday.

In an interview with German Der Spiegel magazine, famous Russian writer and the Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has accused the West of trying to ignore and sideline Russia. He said that quite often western criticism is unfair. Russia is only starting to build democracy and it's all too easy to take it to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes. Mr. Solzhenitsyn has reproached U.S for its inability to demonstrate goodwill for Mr. Putin`s friendly steps. In his opinion, only a psychological inadequacy or a disastrous shortsightedness can explain such approach. Alexander Solzhenitsyn praises Vladimir Putin for...

'I Am Not Afraid of Death' In an interview with SPIEGEL, prominent Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn discusses Russia's turbulent history, Putin's version of democracy and his attitude to life and death. SPIEGEL: Alexander Isayevich, when we came in we found you at work. It seems that even at the age of 88 you still feel this need to work, even though your health doesn't allow you to walk around your home. What do you derive your strength from? Solzhenitsyn: I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to...

Poster's note: this is a long read, but well worth it. Solzhenitsyn describes succinctly what many of us feel, but cannot express.Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978 I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we...

...At the time of her visit she was a very high-level operative for the CIA; in my eyes a highly credible person. As we listened to Walter Cronkite report on the war, my Aunt suddenly BURST OUT in laughter!! I was shocked at her spontaneous response to what I thought was very serious business. I asked her to quiet the laughter so I could hear, but also asked what was so funny? She said she also wanted to hear, but would explain at the next commercial break. When the next ad came over the air she said, “It’s been so...

Solzhenitsyn accuses the West of plotting to surround and undermine Russia By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow (Filed: 29/04/2006) Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accused the United States of launching a military campaign to encircle Russia and turn it into a Nato chattel. The Nobel laureate also delivered his strongest endorsement yet of President Vladimir Putin, surprising Kremlin critics who argue that the country is growing more authoritarian. Replying in writing to questions from the weekly Moscow News, the 87-year-old former Soviet dissident said military action by the United States in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan underlined the menace to Russian sovereignty. "Though...

MOSCOW - Nobel laureate and former Soviet dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn accused the United States and NATO of seeking to encircle Russia, and praised President Vladimir Putin for working to restore a strong state. The reclusive 87-year-old author told the Moscow News that NATO's ultimate aim was deprive Russia of its sovereignty, according to a full text of the interview posted Thursday on the Web site edition of the liberal weekly. "Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no threat to it, NATO is methodically and persistently building up its military machine — into the east of Europe and surrounding...

<p>MOSCOW - A grandfatherly figure, his bearded face wrinkled into a smile, peers down from billboards around town.</p> <p>It is surprise enough that the man is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the once-exiled writer, Nobel Prize winner and, of late, octogenarian scold. It is even more so that the billboards advertise his adaptation — broadcast on state television, no less — of one of his fiercely anti-Soviet novels, The First Circle.</p>

Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsynat Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,Thursday, June 8, 1978I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and...

Ah, but not simply to report as usual to the authorities for the daily assignment. Shukhov remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance: they wanted to shift the 104th from the building shops to a new site, the "Socialist Way of Life" settlement. It lay in open country covered with snowdrifts, and before anything else could be done there they would have to dig holes and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them. Wire themselves in, so that they wouldn't run away. Only then would they start building.There wouldn't be a warm corner for a...

The Karlag headquarters is put up for sale This decaying three-story building in Dolinka was built during the 1930s, and still reflects its its past glory. Seventy years ago the administrative offices of the Karlag (Karaganda GULAG) were located here. On June 27th this historical building was put up for sale. One could buy it for three and one-half million tenge (about $25,000), but there were no takers. "THERE WON'T BE ANYTHING LEFT IN ITS PLACE BUT RUINS" Dolinka village head Igor Lenev gave us a tour of the former Karlag administrative building. The three-story building is hidden behind overgrown...

Russia may face a Ukraine-style revolution By Andrew Osborn Age Correspondent Moscow June 10, 2005 Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn has emerged from his jealously guarded obscurity to decry the state of Russian politics and to warn that the country may be on the brink of a Ukraine-style revolution. Now 86 and in frail health, the former dissident rarely makes public appearances, let alone public statements, so this latest outburst has generated considerable interest. The fiercely private author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his semi-autobiographical account of his 10-year stint in the Soviet gulag system, did...

Russia may face a Ukraine-style revolution By Andrew Osborn Age Correspondent Moscow June 10, 2005 Solzhenitsyn emerges to deliver a warning on the state of Russia. Photo: Ap Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn has emerged from his jealously guarded obscurity to decry the state of Russian politics and to warn that the country may be on the brink of a Ukraine-style revolution. Now 86 and in frail health, the former dissident rarely makes public appearances, let alone public statements, so this latest outburst has generated considerable interest. The fiercely private author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,...

MOSCOW - Nobel laureate Aleksander Solzhenitsyn lamented the state of Russian politics and government in a rare televised interview Sunday, saying it will take many years before the country has anything resembling democracy. The 86-year-old author, who rose to prominence for his accounts of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's repression and labor camps, criticized the parties that dominate Russian politics. Speaking on the Vesti Nedelyi program on state-run Rossiya television, he repeated his mantra that democracy must come from the bottom up and said that was not happening in Russia today. "If they are going to take away our democracy, they...

Oleg V Khlevniuk Yale University Press, 418pp, £25 ISBN 0300092849 Nothing better symbolises the brutality and arbitrariness of the Soviet system than the network of concentration camps and forced labour settlements that sprang up under Stalin in the 1930s and which lingered, in some cases, until the very end of communism. The body responsible for administering the camps was called the GULAG, which became the name by which these fearful prisons were known. Between 1930 and the outbreak of war with Germany in 1941, roughly 3.7 million Soviet citizens spent time in the camps. The story of their creation and...

EDITOR’S NOTE: June 8 [2003] marks the 25th anniversary of “A World Split Apart,” the commencement address delivered by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University. Last month, Harvard staged a conference commemorating this event, at which Jay Nordlinger, among many others, spoke. In the below remarks, you will see references to “Stephan” and “Ignat.” These are two of Solzhenitsyn’s sons (and they both attended, and addressed, the conference).It’s a pleasure to be here, among so many I admire. It’s a further pleasure to be a representative of National Review. This is a magazine that was pro-Solzhenitsyn before pro-Solzhenitsyn was cool....

All manner of essays from the Left and Right, presented for your reading (and quoting) pleasure.. All EssaysQuotations Links to Related Topics

A Decline in Courage [. . .] may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats...

A Cold Morning in Vermont By JOHN TIERNEY Published: June 13, 2004 IGNAT SOLZHENITSYN understands why so many people have warm thoughts of Ronald Reagan, but one of his earliest memories is on the frigid side. In 1980, Ignat was an 8-year-old transplanted to Vermont by his father, the famous chronicler of Siberia's gulags. As Ignat tells the story, on the morning after the presidential election he got a taste of American political re-education at the progressive private school he and his brothers attended. In response to the Reagan victory, the school's flag was lowered to half-staff, and the morning...

PBS, 8:00 P.M. Wednesday, November 19, 2003 – Following the visual of the Rebel Flag, a youngish, very short haired woman appeared on the screen. My reception is fuzzy here, so while I can hear the audio perfectly, I cannot always see the picture clearly. As near as I could tell, she was in a setting which spoke of academics. It may also have been an office conference room. She had the large round glasses of the modern female “scholar.” The first time she opened her mouth, she testified to the total bias, the total Orwellian historical rewrite, that one...

Discussion thread for The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.... This book represented a personal look at the special Soviet prisons for scientists. I assume that Solzhenitsyn himself was once in such a prison. Even though the conditions in such prisons were harsh, they weren't nearly as brutal as the Siberian labor camps. From what I understand such scientific prisons, "sharaskas," were also used to develop the A-Bomb for the Soviets in the 1940s. Does anybody know if there was really a big attempt by the Soviets back then to develop a phone to scramble and unscramble voices? It is a...

WASHINGTON – A leading scholar of the First Amendment says if he were Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, he would "rather go to jail" than allow the Ten Commandments to be removed from his court building. In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, Dr. David Lowenthal, emeritus professor of political Science at Boston College, said the Founding Fathers would be appalled at the federal court order for the removal of the Ten Commandments monument. "I would not want to go to jail," he said, "but if I had to, I wouldn’t give up on the principle" that Justice Moore is defending...

June 6, 2003, 9:45 a.m.A Long Way from ’78And yet “more relevant than ever.” EDITOR’S NOTE: June 8 marks the 25th anniversary of “A World Split Apart,” the commencement address delivered by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University. Last month, Harvard staged a conference commemorating this event, at which Jay Nordlinger, among many others, spoke. In the below remarks, you will see references to “Stephan” and “Ignat.” These are two of Solzhenitsyn’s sons (and they both attended, and addressed, the conference).t’s a pleasure to be here, among so many I admire. It’s a further pleasure to be a representative...

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today’s graduates. Harvard’s motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth...

ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, whose famous novel The Gulag Archipelago exposed the horrors of the Soviet prison camp system, has been accused of being a KGB informer who betrayed friends to the hated spy agency. The popular newspaper website, pravda.ru, accuses Russia’s Nobel laureate of informing on several acquaintances who were then condemned to the very death camps he described in his book. Solzhenitsyn’s son yesterday issued a furious denial of the story, claiming his 84-year-old father was the victim of a "smear campaign". The newspaper alleged that after serving as an artillery officer in the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn confessed to...

A discredited decades-long KGB smear campaign alleging that Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an informer against his fellow gulag prisoners has resurfaced in Pravda.ru and drawn the wrath of the author's son, Stephan. Solzhenitsyn wrote his classic 1974 expose of the vast ring of Soviet slave labor camps he called the "Gulag Archipelago." The book, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West, created an international sensation. It revealed for all the world to see the horrors visited upon dissidents imprisoned within the gulag and earned the author the undying hatred of his former Soviet slave masters....

Alexander Ginsburg, who has died aged 65, was one of the architects of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.A constant irritant to the KGB and its political masters, Ginsburg served three terms of imprisonment for his activities. From 1960 to 1962 he was incarcerated in a labour camp. He was again arrested in 1967, and sentenced to five years.Then, in February 1977, the authorities finally lost patience, interrogating him for 17 months before he was tried and convicted of “anti-Soviet agitation”, and sentenced to eight years. In the event, however, he and four fellow-dissidents...

Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in ExileBy Joseph Pearce. Baker Books. 328 pages. $19.99. I rented a video recently called Unbreakable starring Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson. The movie posed this question: “Do comic book heroes actually walk the earth?” The question hovered in my mind as I read Joseph Pearce’s biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. After reading it, I knew that the answer is “yes”. We live among so much mediocrity. The quality of things is generally low, particularly the quality of our heroes. These days, if you’re famous enough, or crude enough, or rich enough, you’re going to be considered a...