Word: solzhenitsyns
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...SOVIET UNION never produced a decent stereo, and even if it survived another 1000 years, it never would have. Its cars sucked. It had awful food and not enough of it. Its architecture was hideous. Its books and movies were boring propaganda. Its great artists were either emigres (e.g. Solzhenitsyn) or escapologists (e.g. Kabakov). It polluted like sulphur dioxide was going out of style. Its rulers were, almost without exception, bloodthirsty swine. Its record on human rights was laughable, its concern for individual freedoms nonexistent. All this and much worse is true...
Historically, speakers have used Commencement's principal address to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. Some have made weighty proclamations, like Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who announced the decline of Western culture. Former U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall disclosed a plan, later named after him, which was to shape the post-World...
Marshall spoke in 1947, and Solzhenitsyn spoke in 1978. Are these the only two memorable characters? Hardly. As evidenced by the past 10 Commencement speakers, Harvard can still draw a celebrity...
Sakharov realized that as the two icons of Soviet opposition, he and Solzhenitsyn felt a deep responsibility to the Soviet people. His constant work for freedom, even against those who purported to be refashioning Soviet society, showed him to be one of the real leaders of perestroika. Because of Gorbachev's caution, the U.S.S.R. is now even more of a shambles than when perestoika began. Would that Gorbachev had listened to this physicist-prophet before his chances faded...
Before last week's announcement, one Nobel selection that warmed the Kremlin's heart was that of Mikhail Sholokhov, the court novelist who received the Literature Prize in 1965. He was allowed to go to Stockholm and deposit his check in a bank there. But in 1974 the exiled Solzhenitsyn accused Sholokhov of plagiarism. He claimed Sholokhov had based portions of his epic of the Russian Revolution and civil war, The Quiet Don, on a manuscript written just after World War I by a Cossack, Fyodor Kryukov...