Word: solzhenitsyns
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Risking Arrest. As if to echo Solzhenitsyn's appeal for a resumption of dialogue among Russian dissidents, an unauthorized press conference was called in Moscow to announce the book. Igor Shafarevich, a world-famous algebraist, told Western newsmen that the aim of the essays was to bring about fundamental changes in the U.S.S.R. Risking arrest, three other dissidents who contributed to the book were willing to be identified: Scientist Mikhail Agursky, Art Historian Yevgeni Barabanov and Historian Vadim Borisov...
...Solzhenitsyn and his circle of friends take off from the Vekhi premises. They urge Russians to resist "the mercenary pursuit of more wages, titles, positions, apartments, dachas, cars and the chance to buy gaudy rags." Instead, they should seek an internal freedom of conscience, and redemption through penitence. Solzhenitsyn believes that millions in the Soviet Union were accomplices in Stalin's crimes. He calls upon the entire nation to confess to the guilt of the past. "Only through the repentance of a multitude of people can the air and the soil of Russia be cleansed, so that...
...West, the essays may buttress the conviction of Solzhenitsyn's critics that he is a mystical reactionary who places too much faith in the values of the Orthodox Church and Old Russia. Among Soviet dissidents, however, his arguments are certain to enliven a debate about the nation's future. Solzhenitsyn and his circle reject the argument that truly significant change can come only from within the Communist system. Solzhenitsyn personally takes issue with a second line of thought, propounded by Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who believes that Russia's ultimate hope for freedom lies in a convergence with...
...Solzhenitsyn questions whether democracy would bring real freedom to Russia. "The multiparty parliamentary system is impracticable in Russia," he writes. "It has never been necessary to the prosperity and high achievements of mankind. Authoritarian regimes are not terrible in themselves-only those which are not answerable to God or their own conscience. Russia will most probably move from one authoritarian form of government to another. This will be the most natural and least painful path of development. Our present system is terrible not because it is undemocratic and based on force-a man can still live without harm...
Here are excerpts from two of Solzhenitsyn's essays...