Word: solzhenitsyn
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Evidently unhappy about the criticism of his refusal to meet with Russian Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn last July, President Ford recently moved to make amends. In an enthusiastic telegram to the Freedom Foundation of Valley Forge, Pa., Ford said he was "delighted" at the award of the foundation's American Friendship Medal to the Nobel prizewinner. The President's pleasure might well have been diminished had he anticipated Solzhenitsyn's bitter attack on U.S. foreign policy, aired last week on William F. Buckley's public television show Firing Line...
...this hour-long rebroadcast of a BBC show that created a furor in England earlier this month, an interpreter translated Solzhenitsyn's declaration that in the past two years "terrible things have happened." The West, he claimed, "has given up not only four, five or six countries, it has given up all its world positions." He cited the "loss of freedom" in Angola and the Communist victory in Indochina as examples of the West's loss of nerve and spiritual strength. Moral considerations, he charged, have no bearing on politics in the West. "One should not consider that...
Eyes blazing, Solzhenitsyn brandished his unsheathed ballpoint pen like a rapier as he derided all Western efforts to come to an agreement with the Soviets, even over nuclear weapons. The West has made so many concessions recently, he said, that the "Soviet Union does not even need nuclear arms; you can be taken with bare hands...
...Solzhenitsyn's doom-struck message created a stir. The Christian Science Monitor called the program a "time bomb" while the Wall Street Journal rated it "one of the most important pieces of TV journalism ever, and spellbinding besides." Still, most sober observers of world affairs are not likely to fall under his spell. Example: Sovietologist Richard Lowenthal has sorrowfully expressed his amazement at Solzhenitsyn's "utter disaccord with the facts of recent international history." Lowenthal points out that not all defeats for the West, as for instance in Indochina, are caused by surrender to the Soviet Union...
...support of intellectual dissidents put him in constant trouble with the Soviet government. He was barred from travel abroad for three years. His refusal to sign letters denouncing Andrei Sakharov led to the onset of what the cellist calls "silent torture." When he gave refuge to his friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent four years in Rostropovich's home, the cellist's musical life in the Soviet Union was squelched. Radio announcers were not permitted to mention his name. At one point all his concerts were cancelled. Once, in a small town, Rostropovich saw men obscuring posters for his concert...