Word: solzhenitsyn
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Right after New Year 1974, Solzhenitsyn's 13-year-old stepson visited our apartment, disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a book that had been concealed under his clothing: The Gulag Archipelago. The book was a shattering experience, evoking a somber world of gray camps surrounded by barbed wire, investigators' offices and torture chambers, icy mines in Kolyma and Norilsk...
...Solzhenitsyn was taken from his home and placed under arrest. The next day a group gathered in our apartment and drafted the "Moscow Appeal" demanding Solzhenitsyn's release and an investigation of the crimes described in The Gulag Archipelago. But Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country and flown to West Germany...
Before discussing the issues that divide us, I wish to emphasize my profound respect for him, for his talent as a writer and for his historic achievement in uncovering the state's crimes. I agree with a great deal of what he says. But even where I share Solzhenitsyn's general thesis, I often find troubling the peremptory nature of his judgments, the absence of nuance and his lack of tolerance for the opinions of others. He displays a marked anti-Western and isolationist bias, at times lapsing into an exaggerated Russian nationalism...
...Solzhenitsyn's view, the West is losing its battle against totalitarianism, which is on the offensive everywhere. Inconsistent, disunited, lacking firm religious or moral guidelines, it is wallowing in the pleasures of the consumer society, in permissiveness. It is heedlessly destroying itself in the smoke and fumes of its cities and the din of hysterical music...
Certainly there is much bitter truth in Solzhenitsyn's complaints. I too have called attention to the West's lack of concerted action, its dangerous illusions, the factional gamesmanship, shortsightedness, selfishness and cowardice displayed by some of its politicians. Yet I believe that Western society is fundamentally healthy and dynamic, capable of meeting the challenges life continually brings...