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lucius
08-03-2008, 09:53 PM
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26000555?GT1=43001

RIP


"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether the would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. . .The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!" Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

amy31416
08-04-2008, 01:33 AM
Fantastic writer. I didn't realize he was still alive until I read that he died.

Truth Warrior
08-04-2008, 05:27 AM
R.I.P. Alexander, you've more than earned it.

Thanks!

Zolah
08-04-2008, 11:12 AM
RIP - I actually wasn't aware of him until the very day before he died - I hope to read some of his work at some time.

lucius
08-04-2008, 06:03 PM
It was at about this time that Alexander Solzhenitsyn miraculously succeeded in breaking through the blanket of silence in the West and in denouncing the Empire of the Gulag. After that, other survivors of the death camps, such as the Russian Vladimir Bukovski, drove the point home by pointing out that the East-West détente, so desired by the globalists, was built upon a hundred million corpses. When challenged about his motives for saying this, Vladimir Bukovski replied, with wonderful, Russian wit and succinctness:

“I am neither from the revolutionary camp, nor from the reactionary camp - I am from the concentration camp.”

The feminist Simone de Beauvoir, self-proclaimed defender of the weak and the oppressed, once said to Bukovski:

"You do not have the right, Sir, to destroy the illusions of the young people who expect so much from socialism!".

We may wonder how she dared to bid him keep silence about the horrors he had witnessed; but such is the fervour of the utopian elite that truth and justice – let alone sovereignty and democracy – mean nothing to them at all. I would love to know what Bukovski said in reply.

From a speech by William Wolf, publisher of Facts and Chronicles denied to the Public, by Pierre de Villemarest.

SeanEdwards
08-04-2008, 06:13 PM
Too much thinking will make your brain explode. You've been warned.

Edit: Ok, I'm confused was it heart failure or a stroke that got him?

Agent Chameleon
08-04-2008, 08:01 PM
God bless his soul.

New York For Paul
08-04-2008, 11:11 PM
It was at about this time that Alexander Solzhenitsyn miraculously succeeded in breaking through the blanket of silence in the West and in denouncing the Empire of the Gulag. After that, other survivors of the death camps, such as the Russian Vladimir Bukovski, drove the point home by pointing out that the East-West détente, so desired by the globalists, was built upon a hundred million corpses. When challenged about his motives for saying this, Vladimir Bukovski replied, with wonderful, Russian wit and succinctness:

“I am neither from the revolutionary camp, nor from the reactionary camp - I am from the concentration camp.”

The feminist Simone de Beauvoir, self-proclaimed defender of the weak and the oppressed, once said to Bukovski:

"You do not have the right, Sir, to destroy the illusions of the young people who expect so much from socialism!".

We may wonder how she dared to bid him keep silence about the horrors he had witnessed; but such is the fervour of the utopian elite that truth and justice – let alone sovereignty and democracy – mean nothing to them at all. I would love to know what Bukovski said in reply.

From a speech by William Wolf, publisher of Facts and Chronicles denied to the Public, by Pierre de Villemarest.

He lived a very quiet life in America for a while.

Truth Warrior
08-07-2008, 05:53 PM
Farewell to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Daily Article by Yuri N. Maltsev (http://mises.org/articles.aspx?AuthorId=467) | Posted on 8/6/2008


http://mises.org/images4/Solzhenitsyn.jpg

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, writer, Nobel Prize winner, and the most famous Soviet dissident died at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008 in his home near Moscow. He lived a long and hard life, but he died the way that he wanted to: "He wanted to die in the summer — and he died in the summer," his wife Natalya said. "He wanted to die at home — and he died at home. In general I should say that Aleksandr Isayevich lived a difficult but happy life."
His entire life was a victory over the most improbable. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in Southern Russia, half a year after his father died in a hunting accident. He managed to get a Soviet university education despite the fact that his mother Taisiya came from one of the richest families of Southern Russia and his father Isaakiy was an officer in the tsar's army.

Aleksandr was raised by his mother in abject poverty as his earliest years coincided with war communism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism) and its abolition of private property (making economic calculation impossible); what followed was mass starvation and destruction. His family was no exception — their property was confiscated and later destroyed by central planners.

Solzhenitsyn stated in his autobiographical series of novels The Red Wheel (http://books.google.com/books?id=MOWLAAAACAAJ) that his mother was fighting for survival and they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. Taisiya was well educated and openly encouraged her son's literary and scientific interests, while also secretly raising him in the Christian faith. He studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.

He was commissioned as a Soviet artillery officer during the Second World War despite the fact that he had previously been rejected due to poor health. A successful artillery captain, he was arrested by the secret police in 1945 for disrespectful remarks about Stalin in a letter to a friend.

Despite his eight-year sentence for hard labor (which was nearly a death sentence in Stalin's dreadful Gulag (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag) system), he managed to stay near Moscow in the government research facility for imprisoned scientists. Eventually he was transferred to the special Ekibastuz camp in Kazakhstan. In the Tashkent medical ward a malignant tumor was removed from his stomach in 1954, and he survived the tumor and the surgery against all odds.

After release from the Gulag in 1956, Solzhenitsyn returned to Central Russia, worked as a math teacher and began to write his powerful prose. "During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known," he said in his autobiography. "Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down."

He published his first works, two novellas: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich) and "Matryona's House" in a literary journal Novyi Mir (New World) in 1962 with explicit approval by Nikita Khrushchev. These were the only publications of Solzhenitsyn in his own country until 1990.

In 1970, after publishing several works in the West, including the novel Cancer Ward (http://books.google.com/books?id=I7LeAAAACAAJ) — a fictional piece based on Solzhenitsyn's own treatment at the Tashkent cancer ward — he was awarded, while in exile, the Nobel Prize in literature (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html). Solzhenitsyn didn't attend the ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden for fear that he would not be allowed to re-enter the USSR.

http://mises.org/images4/SolzhenitsynGulag1953.jpg Solzhenitsyn on his release from the Gulag in 1953

Three years later, his Gulag Archipelago (http://books.google.com/books?id=OW0poTnuCiIC) was published in France. Immediately after this publication he was accused of treason, stripped of his citizenship, and deported to Germany. He wrote sarcastically: "For a country to have a great writer … is like having another government. That's why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."

He accepted an invitation to teach at Stanford University, and then moved to Cavendish, Vermont, where he lived with his family for years.

In 1990, his citizenship was restored by Gorbachev, and he returned to Russia in 1994 and actively participated in the reform process. He crossed the country that had already ceased to be the Soviet Union, from the East to the West, acquiring "a collection of cries and tears."

"It is history's sorrow," Solzhenitsyn wrote afterwards, "the grief of our era, which I carry about me like an anathema."

We will remember Solzhenitsyn as an unyielding champion of freedom who dedicated himself to revealing the horrors of socialism and exposing the ultimate evil of Lenin, Stalin, and their cohort of mass murderers. Once a prisoner of brutal labor camps himself, Solzhenitsyn chronicled the horrors of the Soviet Gulag system and emerged as a one of Russia's greatest writers. He became a moral and spiritual leader who exposed and condemned the nefarious nature of the socialist ideology that served as the basis for the monstrous communist slave camps established from Siberia to Ethiopia, Cuba to Vietnam, China, and Yugoslavia. He riveted socialists of all countries whose secret ghastly history he exposed.

"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion", wrote Solzhenitsyn while in his exile in the West.
In the West, he liked the Swiss model of local government and spoke highly of his experiences living in Vermont. Before leaving for Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke to his neighbors in a Cavendish town meeting and thanked the town for its hospitality and for respecting his privacy. He thought of the town-meeting type of self-government as the most suitable for Russia. He did not, however, make a god of democracy (http://www.mises.org/store/Democracy-The-God-That-Failed-P240.aspx); he admired great Russian reformer Pyotr Stolypin with his strong promarket and antisocialist stand as the prime minister of the Russian Empire (1906-1911).

Solzhenitsyn believed in the individual rather than the group, party, or state. He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but through all human hearts."

Solzhenitsyn had enough courage to equate socialism and Nazism as equally evil and morally reprehensible. He condemned both Nazi and Soviet atrocities during the Second World War and he accused his fellow countrymen of masterminding their own shipwreck.

According to Solzhenitsyn, 61,000,000 people were slaughtered in the USSR in the quest for equality. Under Stalin alone, 43,000,000 were murdered. Lenin and Khrushchev are responsible for the other 18,000,000. Most of these deaths (39,000,000) were due to forced labor in gulags and during deportations.

His writings earned him over 20 years of prison, exile, and world-wide renown, making him the most prominent dissident of the Soviet era and a symbol of intellectual resistance to communist rule. But he is also one of the most maligned and defamed writers of the 20th century. He has been the victim of character assassination and willful distortions from almost every quarter.

He published his final original work in June 2001 with "200 Years Together: 1775-1995," about the history of Jews in Russia. Solzhenitsyn spent his last years in failing health and seclusion at his rural home in Troitse-Lykovo near Moscow, editing his 30-volume collected works. He predicted that he would not be able to complete the work, which will "continue after my death."


Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow (http://mises.org/fellow.aspx?Id=11) of the Mises Institute, worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before emigrating to the United States. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx (http://www.mises.org/store/Requiem-for-Marx-P522.aspx). He teaches economics at Carthage College. Send him mail (ymaltsev@carthage.edu).

http://mises.org/story/3065

Truth Warrior
08-09-2008, 03:14 PM
Russia’s ignorant still hate Solzhenitsyn
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/880626/russias-ignorant-still-hate-solzhenitsyn.thtml

The_Orlonater
08-09-2008, 05:45 PM
RIP. I hope to read some of his work later.

Truth Warrior
08-11-2008, 10:56 AM
A Giant Is Lost


by (http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese-contact.html)Charley Reese (http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese-contact.html)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead, and the world is a far poorer place. He was a giant of the 20th century. He stood up unarmed but fearless and defied the mighty Soviet Union until it had no choice but to spit him out into exile.

Amidst all of the well-deserved eulogies he has received, the greatest compliments were paid to him by the communists. They hate him still and vomited vitriol when they heard the news of his death. The communists, at least, recognize the man who did more than any other one man to kill their empire and expose their philosophy for the poison that it is.

After Solzhenitsyn's exposure of the gulags, not even the most cynical American Marxist could get away with the same old lies that there were benevolent things in the communist system and that Josef Stalin was anything but a paranoid killer with more blood on his hands than Adolf Hitler.

Solzhenitsyn can be best appreciated in context. He was born in 1918. His father died before he was born, and his mother raised him in Rostov-on-Don, an industrial city in southwest Russia. He graduated with a degree in mathematics and went into the Army when the Germans invaded in 1941. He was a captain in the artillery. Stalin's secret police snatched him out of the front lines and arrested him for having written some unflattering things about the dictator in a private letter to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the labor camps.

He developed cancer, and before his sentence was complete he was sentenced further to permanent exile. After Stalin's death, he was able to teach and continue his writing, which he had done secretly in the camps. A brave Russian publisher got his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (http://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043/lewrockwell/)in print, but the communists immediately clamped down. He was a leading dissident and resorted to private printings and to slipping his manuscripts out of the country. In 1973, The Gulag Archipelago (http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Abridged-Investigation/dp/0061253804/lewrockwell/), his graphic description of the prisons and Soviet tyranny, was published. The following year, he was arrested for treason and exiled.

He lived in Cavendish, Vt., from 1975 to 1994, when he ended his exile. While in the U.S., he made several stinging criticisms of the West's weaknesses and what he saw as capitulation to tyranny.

This did not endear him to the American Establishment, and, of course, American communists were busy spreading their poisonous lies.


Solzhenitsyn's great mind and his complex thoughts can't be summarized easily, but he is certainly worth reading. His criticisms of our Western culture were valid. He never criticized the American people, but aimed at the elite who, at that time, were compromising with tyrants all over the place and spouting a materialistic philosophy. Jimmy Carter practically dismantled America's defenses, pardoned draft dodgers, betrayed American allies and seemed to embrace leftist guerrillas. One part of history Americans need to know is how much material aid was given to the Soviet Union by America. The largest truck factory in the world, located in Russia, was financed by Western banks. All kinds of aid, financial and political, helped to prop up Stalin's regime.

The key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is that he was a devout Christian. That never got much play in the American press, but he never played the part of a professional Christian. Nevertheless, his Christian beliefs were deep and are at the root of his thinking.

He was an admirer of Vladimir Putin, as I am, because he recognized that Putin was saving Russia from disintegration.

Solzhenitsyn believed in a moral and spiritual regeneration. Read some of his books, and I think you will see that he well deserved the Nobel Prize that he received.



August 11, 2008

Charley Reese [send him mail (http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese-contact.html)] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc


http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese486.html

AutoDas
08-17-2008, 10:35 PM
Are there any other Russian like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Ayn Rand?

lucius
08-24-2008, 03:54 PM
Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution

Nobel laureate under fire for new book on the role of Jews in Soviet-era repression: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.

In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995, Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume history of the world-changing interactions of Russians and Jews. The first volume, released in Russia in 2001, was published in a French translation in France in February 2002, and the second volume a year later. Yet these two books by the world’s most famous author just can’t seem to get published in an English translation here in the land of the free and the home of the brave..."

LibertyEagle
08-24-2008, 04:23 PM
I never knew about that book, Lucius. Do you happen to know if it was ever transcribed in English?

lucius
08-24-2008, 05:04 PM
I never knew about that book, Lucius. Do you happen to know if it was ever transcribed in English?

Actually a two volume set, less than 25% of it was published in English in: 'The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings', 1947-2005 by Jr. Edward E. Ericson (ISBN: 1933859008)

AZJoe
12-28-2018, 09:14 PM
Putin Unveils Solzhenitsyn Monument On Russian Writer’s 100th Birthday: "He Was A True Patriot!"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=mRdXC2q0FBc

Putin: "Today we are unveiling a monument to Alexander Solzhenitsyn – our outstanding compatriot, writer, thinker, a war veteran, who participated in the Great Patriotic War and was a true patriot of Russia.

December 11 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For us, it is not only a day of remembrance and respect, but above all an occasion to revisit his literary, social as well as philosophical heritage … I remember well all the meetings with Alexander Solzhenitsyn – his wisdom, his prudence and a deep understanding of history. … He clearly delineated the true, genuine, people’s Russia from the totalitarian system, which brought suffering and severe trials to millions of people. …

A man of integrity, an exceptionally principled person … he openly and consistently defended his views and convictions, and argued the unconditional value of the morals that provide for a healthy society. … so that the hardest and most dramatic trials that befell our country would never happen again, so that our multiethnic people would live in dignity and justice. …

Friends, the centenary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a landmark occasion for the whole country. Many events have been timed to this date to perpetuate the memory of our great compatriot. … the most important thing is that Solzhenitsyn’s voice is still being heard. His thoughts and ideas resonate in people’s minds and hearts. Popularizing his work, encouraging and introducing new young readers to it is the best thing we can and must do to honor his memory. …"

AZJoe
12-28-2018, 09:18 PM
Wisdom bits from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:


A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit.
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because the lie is more comfortable.
At what exact point, then should one resist the communists? . . . How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. . . . The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers . . . and notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.”

r3volution 3.0
12-28-2018, 11:02 PM
Very few people remember bolshevism.

Even fewer remember what existed before, i.e civilization.