Word: solzhenitsyn
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no supporter of the Chechen struggle, writes in 1973's The Gulag Archipelago that of all the people in the Soviet camps and in exile, the Chechens were from the "one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission." The Chechens have lived up to that description. Unlike President Bush with Iraq, Putin can make sure Russians are not reminded of the Chechnya quagmire on a daily basis on TV. But silence is no solution. "I am here because it's the only job I know how to do," says Mikhail...
...Lenin Hills, a beauty spot overlooking the capital, building parts of Moscow State University and other academic institutions. Elsewhere in the city, prisoners built ports, airfields, homes and even dachas in the élite villages of Barvikha and Zhukovka, now the preserve of Russia's new rich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn served part of his time in a prison laboratory, a sharashka, in northern Moscow. It is still there, just around the corner from the studios of Russia's main TV networks. No plaques record its history, or the work of other zeks (prisoners) here. Few Muscovites know of their contribution...
DIED. NATALYA RESHETOVSKAYA, 84, Russian pianist and scientist better known for her tumultuous two marriages to dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; in Moscow. In a 1974 memoir of their life together, she questioned some of the descriptions of Stalin's prison camps in Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, calling them "camp folklore." She split from her husband in 1970 but as recently as last year said, "I love him right up to this moment...
...Russians have more cause for alarm, of course. Freedom and democracy were supposed to improve the lives of communism's huddled masses; instead most Russians today are considerably worse off than they had been under the red flag. No individual more memorably personified Russian antipathy to communism than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who turned his horrific experiences inside Stalin's gulag into the defining novel of the Soviet era. And if Solzhenitsyn was a moral compass for Russian anti-communism, then his views on post-Soviet Russia offer pause for thought: "One might have imagined that things could not have...
...Solzhenitsyn excoriated the West for supporting and guiding Moscow's first post-Soviet leader through an economic reform program that devastated Russia, and for lauding him as a champion of democracy even as he shelled his own parliament building and created an autocratic regime. For Solzhenitsyn, as for hundreds of millions of his countrymen, the post-Soviet years have been a mostly unmitigated disaster. Forty percent of Russians live in poverty today, ten times more than in 1991; the daily average calorie consumption has fallen by almost half since the mid-1980s, to a level below the World Health Organization...