Word: solzhenitzyn
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...legacy both as an advocate and as a human being. There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s novels played a dramatic role in disabusing the left of its residual romanticism for the Bolsheviks. But as Theodore Dalrymple observed in a recent article for City Journal, the information Solzhenitzyn spotlighted was already widely available to the public. Leftist intellectuals and Stalin apologists simply refused to believe it. Solzhenitsyn’s real accomplishment was “to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid...
...which we know little" was how Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia at Munich. Forty years later, do we really know (or care) that much more about what is happening in Eastern Europe today? Granted this has been a "Human Rights" year; the Harvard community this summer sat reverentially through Solzhenitzyn's Commencement speech condemning the West's lack of resistance to the Soviet Union--and of course we all condemned the show trials of the Helsinki monitoring group. But blandly cheering on courageous dissidents like Ginzburg and Scharansky as they take part in some goodies vs. baddies soap opera...
Crackdown on Dissent. If the Soviet leaders do win some respite from international tensions, they will still have their hands full at home. An upsurge of intellectual dissent, of which Novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn has become the symbol, has prompted a crackdown that is increasingly reminiscent of Stalin's day (see box). The economy is doing well, but not well enough. Last week, as the Supreme Soviet, Russia's parliament, met in the Great Kremlin Palace Congress Hall to consider the 1969 budget, the country's chief planner rattled off an impressive list of economic achievements (1968 income...
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