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Mahatma Gandhi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1/21/2019

1 Comment

 

The Two Giants Who Blessed the 20th Century.
Will Vladimir Putin, Other World Leaders Listen?
By Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow)
 
This essay honors the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
which fell on
January 21, 2019

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On October 2, 2018, the world honored Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th Birthday Anniversary.[1] Few weeks later, on December 11, there was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first Centenary.[2] At about the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s martyrdom[3] by a bullet of an overzealous Hindu nationalist in January 1948, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn[4]  had just begun his Via Dolorosa going through all the circles of Soviet Hell. He started with the First Circle at a sharashka-style research lab for prisoners,[5] and then went down to hard labor at lower circles. After he had graduated from the GULAG to internal exile in Kazakhstan, he also survived a bout with cancer. Only after his exile was cut short in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev’s rehabilitation program[6] for the unjustly sentenced, was he able to dedicate himself to healing Russia, from its own political cancer, by truthfully describing the affliction of totalitarian society.
​
[1] In 2007, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, the 2nd of October, was declared by the United Nations as the International Day of Non-Violence, now celebrated all over the globe. His was a life of austerity, tolerance, courage and struggle. https://www.gandhi.gov.in/gandhi-celebration.html

[2] SOLZHENITSYN CENTENNIAL. DECEMBER 11, 2018 MARKS THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN’S BIRTHDAY https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/celebrating-100-years/

[3] Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948 in the Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti). His assassin was Nathuram Godse, an Indian nationalist who in 1940  formed an armed organization. Godse and his accomplice were hanged on 15 November 1949. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahatma_Gandhi

[4] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist and philosopher of history. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he was obliged to publish in the West, most notably The First Circle, Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." Expelled from the USSR in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994 after the state's dissolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn Edited by VK

[5] The Sharashka Phenomenon. Posted on March 10, 2011 by Asif Siddiqi
 http://russianhistoryblog.org/2011/03/the-sharashka-phenomenon/

[6] In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, denounced Stalinism in his speech On the Cult of Personality. Then the government began to “rehabilitate” political prisoners, allowing them to return home and reclaim their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(Soviet)
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He won. In 1991 the USSR collapsed, and in 1994 he was able to return—now from an external exile in the USA—to his beloved Russia where he then began to describe what has gone wrong since 1991. He died on August 3, 2008. Dmitry Medvedev, then president, and his predecessor and successor, Vladimir Putin, were among the mourners who joined the Nobel laureate's family and friends for a funeral service held at Moscow's historic Donskoi monastery.[1] Thus one might say that Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn dominated the 20th century as two mighty spiritual powers for truth, justice, harmony, and Non-Violence in domestic and foreign affairs.

The name of Gandhi in Russia before the Bolshevik RevolutionThe name of Mohandas Gandhi[2] has been known in Russia since the time he had an exchange of letters[3] with Leo Tolstoy,[4] the world-famous novelist and the founder of “Non-Resistance to Evil by evil means” movement. Reading their correspondence one gets the definite impression that the two kindred souls found each other in 1909. However, the promising interchange was soon cut short by Tolstoy’s death in 1910. The Bolshevik Revolution and the bloody Civil war followed (1917-1921).

The Soviet Union lost no time in cancelling the very idea of Non-Violence, be it in a Tolstoyan or Gandhian form. To add injury to the insult, many of Tolstoy’s followers found themselves behind bars and in the far away regions of the GULAG. While Soviet school programs included the study of Tolstoy the writer, the wisdom of his later years was dismissed as “counter-revolutionary” and his writings untoward were not published. Thus, in my school years, I was able to read some, but only via the risky samizdat distribution.

Khazrat Inayat KhanAnother great line of Indian-Russian spiritual synergy that was cut off by the Bolshevik Revolution was embodied in Khazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927).[5] A Muslim-Sufi philosopher and musician, he came to Russia 1913 and stayed for several months. Inayat Khan gave several concerts in both Moscow and the Imperial capital Sankt-Petersburg. He also befriended such important cultural figures as the composer Alexander Scriabin,[6] the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov,[7] the composer Vladimir Pohl,[8] and Leo Tolstoy’s son Sergei.[9] As a result, Russian culture was enriched not just with Indian music, but also with the  first translations of Inayat Khan’s Sufi writings into Russian.[10]

Apparently, Gandhi and Inayat Khan were acquainted; at least, they knew and respected each other. Below is a short exchange between the two wise  men.[11]

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:
Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behaviors. Keep your behaviors positive because your behaviors become your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

Our success or failure depends upon the harmony or disharmony of our individual will with the divine will.

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

What is just as important is that Inayat’s daughter Noor Inayat Khan,[12] the future heroine of World War Two, was born in Moscow.

Both Noor and Inayat’s son Hidayat Inayat Khan[13] were Gandhi’s followers.  The latter, the founder of Sufi movement in Canada and a composer, composed the Gandhi Symphony which has been performed world-wide.[14]

[1] On Solzhenitsyn’s funeral see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/06/russia
 
[2] Mohandas Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, he led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: "high-souled", "venerable") applied to him first in 1914 in South Africa– is now used worldwide. In India, he is also called the Father of the Nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
 
[3] Their correspondence during 1909-1910 is available both in English and Russian translation: Сергеенко А. П. ПЕРЕПИСКА Л.Н.ТОЛСТОГО С М.К.ГАНДИ http://antimilitary.narod.ru/antology/gandi/ghandi_tolstoj.htm
 
[4] Count Lev Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. In the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a moral crisis, followed by a spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy
 
[5] Inayat Khan Rehmat Khan (Urdu: عنایت خان‎; 1882 – 1927) was the teacher of Universal Sufism. He initially came to the West as a Northern Indian classical musician, but he soon turned to the transmission of Sufi thought and practice. In 1923 the Sufi Order of London was enlarged, under Swiss law, into the "International Sufi Movement". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inayat_Khan
 
[6] Alexander Scriabin (6 January 1872 – 27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist. Influenced by the works of Frederic Chopin, he composed works that are in a highly tonal idiom. Independently of Arnold Schoenberg, he created an atonal and dissonant musical system agreeing with his brand of mysticism. He also associated colors with the harmonic tones of his atonal scale. He is regarded as the Russian Symbolist composer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Scriabin
 
[7] Vyacheslav Ivanov (28 February 1866 – 16 July 1949) was a Russian poet and playwright associated with the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic. He died in exile in Rome, Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Ivanov_(poet)
 
[8] Владимир Иванович Поль (1875- 1962, Париж) — русский композитор, пианист, педагог, музыкально-общественный деятель, художник.https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Поль,_Владимир_Иванович
 

[9] Count Sergei Lvovich Tolstoy (10 July 1863, Yasnaya Polyana – 23 December 1947, Moscow) was a composer and ethnomusicologist who was among the first Europeans to make an in-depth study of the music of India. He was also an associate of the Sufi mystic, Inayat Khan, and participated in helping the Doukhobors move to Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tolstoy
 
[10] Хазрат Инайят Хан (англ. Inayat Khan; 1882 —1927) — индийский музыкант и философ, суфий, проповедовавший суфизм в западных странах и России, известен своими многочисленными книгами о суфизме, переведёнными на многие языки. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хан,_Инайят
 
[11] Salaam and Greetings of Peace: https://darvish.wordpress.com/tag/hazrat-inayat-khan/.  I am not sure whether it was an actual letter exchange or a juxtaposition of similar philosophical attitudes. VK
 
[12] Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914 –1944), aka Nora Inayat-Khan, was a British heroine of World War II renowned for her service in the Special Operations Executive. Under the name of Nora Baker she was a published author. Captured by the Germans, she died in the Dachau concentration camp, and posthumously awarded the George Cross for her service, the highest civilian decoration in the UK. She became the first female wireless operator to be sent from Britain into occupied France to aid the French Resistance during World War II, and was Britain's first Muslim war heroine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan 
More in Russian https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Нур_Инайят_Хан
 
[13] Hidayat Inayat Khan (1917 –2016) was a British-French classical composer, conductor and Representative-General of the International Sufi Movement. Hidayat was born in London to Sufi Master Inayat Khan and Pirani Ameena Begum; brother of Noor Inayat Khan. His musical education began in Paris in 1932 at the Ecole Normale de Musique, in the violin class of Bernard Sinsheimer; the composition class of Nadia Boulanger. He attended chamber music courses by the Lener Quartet in Budapest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidayat_Inayat_Khan
 
[14] At the centenary for Mahatma Gandhi, on November 21st, 1969, Gandhi Symphony (opus 25) was performed in a special concert organized by UNESCO in Holland. It was broadcast in 1971 by The Voice of America and the UN Radio and later recorded in a worldwide broadcast.. http://www.sufimovementincanada.ca/ABOUT/Inayat-Khan-Family-Sufis/hidayat/
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Inayat Khan
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and his heroic daughter Noor
​As for Russia, after 1921, all contacts with Inayat Khan were broken, and his name vanished until the collapse of the USSR. However, since 1991 Inayat Kyan’s books on Sufism have re-emerged to become a favorite reading of cosmopolitan Russians. Some of his music is also now available in Russia.[1]
 
Gandhi in the USSR
​

The name of Gandhi reappeared in Russia when the USSR and India under Jawaharlal Nehru[2] were forging mutual ties via the Non-Allied countries movement[3] to counter both Communist China and “Imperialist” America. Those ties were further strengthened under Nehru’s daughter and India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.[4] She was not related to Mahatma Gandhi, but his heritage was fundamental to India, both domestically and in foreign affairs. To be sure, Soviet respect was officially paid to the founder of India’s independence from the British rule. Still, in spite of the official proclamations of Indian-Russian brotherhood—the slogan of “Hindi –Russi bhai bhai” was ubiquitous in the USSR-- Soviet propaganda made it clear that Gandhi’s non-violent tactics were not just inferior but contrary to the Marxist-Leninist theory of violent world revolution of which the USSR was the first champion.

[1] Inayat Khan: Sakuntala before Shiva (Musical illustrations) Video #1 of 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6JPmGd9uUU
 
[2] Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 – 1964) was a central figure in Indian politics before and after independence. He emerged as a leader of the Indian independence movement under the tutelage of Gandhi. He was India’s Prime Minister from 1947 until his death in 1964. He is the architect of the modern Indian nation-state: a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru
 
[3] The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a group of states that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. As of 2012, the movement has 120 members. It was established in 1961 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. An initiative of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru led to the first Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries.  Its  purpose has been to ensure the sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries to resist imperialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
 
[4] Indira Gandhi (née Nehru; 1917 – 1984), was an Indian stateswoman and a central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the first and only female Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. She served as Prime Minister from January 1966 to March 1977 and again from January 1980 until her assassination in October 1984, making her the second longest-serving Indian Prime Minister after her father. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Gandhi
​

PictureHelena Blavatsky
Helena Blavatsky, Nicolas Roerich, and Rabindranath Tagore
​

Of course, the range of Russian-Indian cultural interface was considerably wider than that of Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Inayat Khan. Helena Blavatsky (1831 –1891),[1] thanks to her inroads into India, emerged a very significant conduit of cultural interchange with India and on a global scale.

Her creation of the Theosophical Society[2] affected not just India and Russia, but also the United States, United Kingdom and other Western countries. According to Wikipedia, “in November 1889 she was visited by the Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi”. Having become an associate member of Blavatsky's Lodge in March 1891, Mahatma Gandhi emphasized “the close connection between Theosophy and Hinduism throughout his life”. However, her dabbling with theosophy, ancient religions, and esoteric science virtually excluded her from the attention of Soviet-born generations of Russia.
 
Nicholas Roerich (1874 –1947),[3] the famed Russian painter and cosmopolitan philosopher, was more fortunate in the USSR, in spite of his early opposition to the Communist revolution. Later, he was partially “rehabilitated” due to his staying close to the Indira Gandhi family which promoted better Soviet-Indian relations. A lover of peace, Roerich was thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He worked for the creation of the Pax Cultura, a sort of "Red Cross" for art and culture.  On April 15, 1935 the United States and twenty other nations of the Pan-American Union signed the Roerich Pact at the White House. It was an early international instrument protecting cultural property for the benefit of mankind. There is the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York,[4] as well as in a number of Russian towns.

[1] Helena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891) was a Russian occultist, philosopher, and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy, the esoteric religion that the society promoted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky
 
[2] The Theosophical Society in America encourages open-minded inquiry into world religions, philosophy, science, and the arts in order to understand the wisdom of the ages, respect the unity of all life, and help people explore spiritual self-transformation. For more information visit us at theosophical.org
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheosophicalSociety
 
[3] Nicholas Roerich (1874 –1947) was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure, who in his youth was drawn to a movement in Russian society toward the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression. A world traveler, he lived in India for long periods, as well as in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Roerich
 
[4] Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York http://www.roerich.org/museum-about.php


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Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York
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Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)[1], a poet, musician and artist, has also become not just an Indian cultural hero, but a pillar of universal culture. His opposition to racism, chauvinism and narrow nationalism made him friends with many world figures, including Albert Einstein[2] (1879 – 1955), who was also a great admirer of Gandhi’s Non-Violence. (Einstein called Gandhi "a role model for the generations to come.")  In the USSR Tagore was regarded as a friend, and his works were published, however, selectively. Einstein, on the other hand, was proscribed because Communists viewed Marx’s “science” so absolute that it could not stand any “relativism.” However, for the purpose of this essay, I have to leave these three personalities aside precisely because their great achievements require more space than what I can now offer.

[1] Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) was a Bengali poet, musician and artist. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.

[2] Albert Einstein (1879 –1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics alongside quantum mechanics. His work is known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". Не received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein


​Back to Russia’s National Identity

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it became necessary to find a new ideational, ethical and spiritual framework for Russia’s domestic as well as foreign policy. A general feeling was that the New Russia, in order to buttress its claim to sovereignty, had to fall back on its pre-Communist national past for inspiration, if not for the framework.[1] It was not an easy task, for the early Lenin government and its successors left no stone unturned in their efforts to erase Russia’s national identity, especially its Eastern Orthodox Christian heritage, as well as its ancient customs, art, and literature, both in Russian language and the languages of national minorities who identified themselves with Russian civilization.
​
After the collapse of the USSR, the triumphant USA was not interested in the New Russia’s sovereignty, much less in the revival of Russian civilizational identity. As convincingly argued by professor Janine Wedel among other authors, during the 1990s the USA spared no efforts to establish in Russia an economic system fully compatible with and subordinated to the neoliberal brand of economics that garnered then currency in the West.[2] Along with the shock therapy economic reforms the American cultural influence flooded Russia with mass advertisement, consumerism, “political correctness” in gender politics, drugs, cheap and sexy Hollywood products, etc.

Solzhenitsyn warned of trouble from the West

But the one man who had in advance warned the Russians against surrendering to Western cultural imperialism was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the foremost champion against Soviet totalitarianism, whom Soviet leaders kicked out of Russia. Of all countries, he chose the United States as a place of refuge from which he was best able to restore Russia’s true history from the sources unavailable in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn appreciated American liberties, but was also aware of the shallowness of its mass culture and the lack of commitment to spiritual values. Above all, he knew that one cannot simply export a form of government, no matter how “good,” from one country to another as a kind of commodity. That’s why, before he returned to Russia in 1994, he had warned fellow Russians “not to lift the Iron Curtain in a hurry, for as soon as you do, you will get flooded by a flow of sewage”.
​
[1] For background and more detailed discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s work please read my book: Vladislav Krasnov, “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth,” (1991) https://www.abebooks.com/9780813383613/Russia-Beyond-Communism-Chronicle-National-0813383617/plp
and a recent  article “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today” International “Reading Solzhenitsyn” Conference in Lyndon, Vermont, September 7-8, 2018 . VLADISLAV KRASNOV • DECEMBER 17, 2018
http://www.unz.com/article/aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-relevance-today/
 
[2] Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989-1998. Janine R. Wedel. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. http://janinewedel.info/collisionreview_ForgnServ.html


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Repentance and Self-limitation in the Life of Nations

Solzhenitsyn was more prescient than that. In 1973 he wrote REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS, an essay in the collection of several Soviet dissident authors. Titled “From Under the Rubble” the collection was circulated in clandestine samizdat as it was aimed to explore how Russia could exit from what they felt was the dead-end of Communism.  It was published by Russian émigré press in the West in 1974 and then translated into English.[1]

“The gift of repentance, which perhaps more than anything else distinguishes man from the animal world is particularly difficult for modern man to recover. We have, every last one of us, grown ashamed of this feeling; and its effect on social life anywhere on earth is less and less easy to discern. The habit of repentance is lost to our whole callous and chaotic age,” started the essay. Solzhenitsyn clearly aimed at Soviet citizens who knew about the need to confess political mistakes to Party officials, but not about the need to clear one’s conscience for trespassing on a fellow next door.

Expanding his message beyond the USSR, Solzhenitsyn predicted, like Gandhi, that “true repentance and self-limitation will shortly reappear in the personal and the social sphere, that a hollow place in modern man is ready to receive them,” because it is a psychological need for healthy human relationships. Addressing his clandestine readers he argued that “…the time has come to consider this as a path for whole nations to follow.”

Alarmed by the escalation of the Cold War he warned:  “Add to this the white-hot tension between nations and races and we can say without suspicion of over-statement that without repentance it is in any case doubtful if we can survive”.

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn’s concern was not only with the survival of his homeland but mankind as a whole.

“It is by now only too obvious how dearly mankind has paid for the fact that we have all throughout the ages preferred to censure, denounce and hate others, instead of censuring, denouncing and hating ourselves. But obvious though it may be, we are even now, with the twentieth century on its way out, reluctant to recognize that the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations … it cuts across nations and parties … It divides the heart of every man, and there too it is not a ditch dug once and for all, but fluctuates with the passage of time and according to a man’s behavior.”

Reading the above lines, one is bound to think that they could have been uttered by Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Non-Violent philosophy. Though he did not mention Gandhi in this instance, Solzhenitsyn’s essay reveals an uncanny affinity with Gandhi’s philosophy of Non-Violence.  After all, do not great minds run in the same channels?

As much as Solzhenitsyn was concerned with Russia, he knew that the virus of Marxist-Leninist violence[2] had already affected a third of mankind and targeted the rest. He was intently looking for the antidotes and, ultimately, for the cure for this dangerous universal affliction.

Also remarkable is the fact that Solzhenitsyn was the initiator of this collection. It had been hand-copied and circulated in “samizdat” before it was published in the West. As early as the 1970s Solzhenitsyn was planning a peaceful evolutionary exit from the dead-end of Communism across the rubble left of pre-1917 Russia.

Letter to the Soviet Leaders

Not only did Solzhenitsyn initiate the dissident authors’ collection in 1973, but he also wrote his famous “Letter to the Soviet Leaders”.[3] To make it difficult for “the leaders” to plead ignorance and thus avoid personal responsibility, he mailed copies to each of a dozen Party Politburo members. Thus, he followed one of the principles of Gandhi’s non-violence philosophy: to appeal to the conscience and good reason of your opponent in order to make a friend out of a perceived enemy.

Indeed, he did not offend the Soviet leaders by asking them to resign. He did not insist on an open national election. He did not insist on disbanding the ruling Communist party. He just asked them to be more pragmatic and less dogmatic rulers. Just stay in power, he told them, but allow patriotic Russians of non-Communist persuasion, especially Orthodox Christians, into the governing bodies. Stop insisting on the purity of your ideology. Or, even better, since Mao Zedong[4] was then accusing Soviet leaders of revisionism, Solzhenitsyn advised giving away the whole ideological business to Communist China. As to the border republics, allow them to hold referenda to decide if they want to stay part of our country.  Clearly, all of Solzhenitsyn’s suggestions were conciliatory in a Gandhian sense as they aimed at a gradual and peaceful evolution of Soviet system away from its totalitarian dogmatism and inflexibility.

Alas, the Soviet leaders proved to be back-sitting bureaucrats. Even worse: soon they voted with Leonid Brezhnev[5] and his Politburo to deprive Russia’s brave and wise son of his native land. A real chance for a gradual and peaceful evolution of the USSR into a Russian nation-state was missed.

Solzhenitsyn invokes Gandhi in his Commandment: Live Not by Lies

Solzhenitsyn knew that his immediate task was to free his fellow Soviet citizens from Fear: the fear to be deprived of social privileges, to lose job, even to be imprisoned. For, as soon as one expressed doubt about the Marxist-Leninist ideology, the official faith of all Soviet people and the guiding star for the “liberation” of mankind, one became a pariah. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn penned a short Manifesto titled “Live Not by Lies”[6] in the hope to have it circulated among Moscow's intellectuals.

It is dated the same day when secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany. The essay is a call to moral courage. It serves as light to all who value truth. “Live Not by Lies” is the only text, as far as I know, where Solzhenitsyn invokes the name of Gandhi.

Painfully aware that the means to resist the totalitarian state for Soviet citizens were extremely limited, he could not ask them to participate in non-violent Gandhi-style protests and acts of disobedience. He knew that all attempts to organize or participate in such protest would immediately end in arrests. He could not even ask journalists, professors or teachers to truthfully describe what they saw in the country. No such acts were tolerated. So, “Let the (official) lie cover and possess the whole country. But the least one can do is not to repeat it. Let the lie rule, but not via my mouth. And this would be a real break-through out of our habitual inaction. Such a decision is the easiest one can take, and yet the most effective in destroying lie. For when people step away from a lie, the lie loses its nourishment. For, like any virus, the lie uses people as its carriers”.

Solzhenitsyn states the dilemma of Soviet citizens: “When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me—I will crush you.” But violence quickly grows old. It has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally—since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies—all loyalty lies in lies”.

Western sovietologists, as the profession was then called, failed to understand everyday Soviet reality because they judged the USSR by the standards of an authoritarian Tsarist Russia and could not imagine that Marxist-Leninist ideology, imported as it was from the “progressive” West, could degenerate into a much more brutal and efficient totalitarian police state.

It was to explain the difference that Solzhenitsyn had to invoke Gandhi’s name: “No, we are not called yet to city squares to proclaim the truth or just say aloud what we think. We are not mature enough to do so because it is scary. Therefore, let us just resist the compulsion to say something that our mind refuses to accept. This is OUR WAY, the easiest and most accessible in view of our ingrained cowardice. In any case, it is much easier than—do I dare to say--Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience. All we can do under the circumstances is not to consciously support the lie”.[7]

Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals

Failing to respond to a growing pressure of dissident groups in the USSR, ignoring what Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents had published in the samizdat and abroad, Soviet leaders continued to waste time until finally Mikhail Gorbachev[8] initiated perestroika and glasnost in an effort to start the country moving again. Alas, Gorbachev still held onto Communist ideology. But Solzhenitsyn proved steadfast. When the USSR was about to collapse, in 1990 he wrote the essay, “Rebuilding Russia : Reflections and Tentative proposals.”[9]

Let me repeat what I wrote about Solzhenitsyn’s essay shortly after[10] it had appeared: “Solzhenitsyn’s central idea is that the particular form of government and economy is secondary to a nation’s spiritual foundations. ‘If the spiritual resources of a nation have dried up’, he says, ‘then not even the best form of government, nor any sort of industrial development, can save it from death.’ One of the chief sources of the present malady is precisely the fact that the Communists reversed the order of priority by putting the ‘cart’ of economic and political power before the ‘horse’ of spirituality of human relations. As a result, not only the country’s political institutions, economy, and ecology but also ‘the souls’ of the people were destroyed in the name of the Marxist Utopia”.[11]

As he did in the early 1970s, Solzhenitsyn again eschewed Western emphases on democracy in his suggested alternatives to the Soviet regime. He rather favored a benevolent authoritarian government morally bound by Russia’s remaining traditional Christian values. This does not mean that he was “against democracy.” No. He rather defended the right of Russia--or any country for this matter-- to sovereignty, that is, the ability to work out a social and political system that suits best its geography, geopolitical situation, historical and cultural traditions, and, yes, democratic aspirations of its people that are best implemented when the country is free from foreign meddling.

[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, From Under The Rubble.
https://archive.org/details/SolzhenitsynAleksandrIsaevichFromUnderTheRubble/page/n3https://archive.org/details/SolzhenitsynAleksandrIsaevichFromUnderTheRubble/page/n3
 
[2] Manifesto of the Communist Party. By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. February 1848
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can
be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes
tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win”. p. 34. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
 
[3] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, LETTER TO THE SOVIET LEADERS, 1973
http://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Solzhenitsyn-LettersSovietLeaders.pdf.
See its discussion in Krasnov, “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth,” and “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today” https://www.unz.com/article/aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-relevance-today/
 
[4] Mao Zedong  was a Chinese communist revolutionary and the founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he ruled from 1949 until his death in 1976. Wikipedia

[5] Leonid  Brezhnev was a Soviet politician of Ukrainian ethnicity, who led the USSR from 1964 until his death in 1982 as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Wikipedia

[6] Live Not By Lies. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php
 
[7] Translated by Vladislav Krasnov from the Russian original posted on the site http://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/proizvedeniya/publizistika/stati_i_rechi/v_sovetskom_soyuze/jzit_ne_po_ljzi.pdf

[8] Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) was the last leader of the USSR, having been General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 until 1991. He was the country's head of state from 1988 until 1991, and President of the USSR from 1990 to 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev (edited by VK)

[9] “Rebuilding Russia : reflections and tentative proposals https://archive.org/details/rebuildingrussia00solz

[10]  Vladislav Krasnov, “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth,” p. 53, and my recent article “Solzhenitsin’s Relevance Today” https://www.unz.com/article/aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-relevance-today/
​
​Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Ever since I founded in 1992 the Russia & America Good Will Association (RAGA.org), I have argued it is in both countries’ national interests to have friendly, at least, normal relation. More than once I urged US presidents, most recently in exchange of letters with President Barak Obama, to respect Russia’s sovereignty as the foundation for good relations.[1]  In a 2016 interview with Veterans Today I called attention to President Putin’s favorable attitude toward Solzhenitsyn, in particular, to his vision of Russia’s path of development.[2]

[1] OFFICIAL REPLY FROM PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: To An Open Letter - From Vladislav Krasnov Ph.D.
http://www.raga.org/news/an-open-letter-to-barack-obama
TO:  Mr. Barack Obama, POTUS. http://www.raga.org/news/to-mr-barack-obama-potus
 
[2] Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Truth Can and Will Destroy the New World Order and Satanism. By Jonas E. Alexis/ Interview with Vladislav Krasnov -July 14, 2016
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/07/14/alexander-solzhenitsyn-truth-can-and-will-destroy-the-new-world-order-and-satanism/ Also on http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4040

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Putin defined patriotism by quoting Solzhenitsyn, that it is not any sort of state ideology but a feeling of attachment to Mother Russia. Putin invoked Solzhenitsyn again when he recently spoke in favor of “nationalism in a good sense,” that is, not any sort of xenophobia toward other nations, but the need to affirm one’s national identity, nurture the roots of one’s national traditions, including religious beliefs of non-Russians, while affirming the secular foundations of its Constitution.

Also, to celebrate Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary on December 11, 1918, the Putin government supported scholarly conferences in a number of Russian towns. Russkiy Mir Foundation worked jointly with Northern Vermont University to sponsor Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary in Lyndon, Vermont, in September 2018.[1]  On December 11, 2018 Putin was present during the unveiling of a statue of Solzhenitsyn in Moscow.

But let me quote Joseph Pearce, the author of a brilliant 2001 book “Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile,”[2] about his observations on the fate of Solzhenitsyn in Putin’s Russia-- and the USA: “In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the greatest classic of anti-communist literature is now compulsory reading in all high schools. If the same could be said of the high schools of the United States, we would not have the endemic historical and political ignorance that has led to the widespread sympathy for communism among young Americans. In light of this, and in light of Mr. Putin’s evident admiration for Solzhenitsyn, let’s not try to pretend that Russia is a communist nation. We don’t need to like Vladimir Putin. We don’t need to admire him. But we do need to acknowledge that Russia has moved on from the evils of socialism, even as we are in danger of embracing those very same evils”.[3]

As I have lived long in both countries, I can confirm that Pearce’s observations largely coincide with my own. I certainly witnessed “the widespread sympathy for communism among young Americans” when I taught Russian and Soviet studies in the States from 1966 to 1991. Now those sympathies seem to have grown in the USA and other Western countries, albeit in different forms, such as the Neo-Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and so-called “Cultural Marxism”.[4]

The only disagreement I have with Pearce is about “the evils of socialism” that he seems to equate with Communism. I think the ideals and practices of socialism need not be evil per se. However, in the reality of the USSR, they became “evil” because socialism was imposed by violence. Solzhenitsyn did express his criticism of socialism for being imposed by force in the USSR, most eloquently in his polemic with Andrei Sakharov. [5]  But this does not mean that he rejected it in principle. In fact, both Russia and the USA have elements of socialism in healthcare (mostly in Russia), progressive taxation (more so in the USA) and US social security system. Moreover, the ESOP (Employee stock ownership plan)[6] enterprises seem to be a form of socialism that is more widely spread in the USA and UK than in Russia.

Putin recently said he did not think that socialism could be restored in Russia. But at the same time he defended some socialist practices in Russia today.[7] I think those practices are more needed to restrain oligarchic crony capitalism that perpetuates social injustice as it hampers economic vitality in both the USA and Russia.
​
However, I am much in sympathy with both Pearce and The Imaginative Conservative when they proclaim “the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility.” This agrees with Solzhenitsyn’s philosophy of polyphony and respectful dialogue that he proclaimed both as an artist and as a social healer.[8]

[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today. International “Reading Solzhenitsyn” Conference in Lyndon, Vermont, September 7-8, 2018. By VLADISLAV KRASNOV
https://www.unz.com/article/aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-relevance-today/
 
[2] Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Soul-Exile-Joseph-Pearce/dp/1586174967

[3] Joseph Pearce, "Vladimir Putin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn". The Imaginative Conservative. Aug 20, 2018
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/08/vladimir-putin-alexander-solzhenitsyn-joseph-pearce.html

[4] Cultural Marxism Is the Main Source of Modern Confusion. Having largely disappeared from the workers' movement, Marxism flourishes today in the academic world and in the mass media. October 18, 2018
https://fee.org/articles/cultural-marxism-is-the-main-source-of-modern-confusion-and-its-spreading/

[5] Александр Солженицын. На возврате дыхания и сознания. (По поводу трактата А. Д. Сахарова "Размышления о прогрессе, мирном сосуществовании и интеллектуальной свободе") http://www.lib.ru/PROZA/SOLZHENICYN/s_revial.txt
 
[6] The ESOP, Employee stock ownership plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_stock_ownership_plan
 
[7] МОСКВА, 20 декабря, 2018. /ТАСС/. Президент России Владимир Путин считает невозможной реставрацию социализма в стране. https://tass.ru/politika/5935598
 
[8] Vladislav Krasnov, “Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel” (1980, Athens: Georgia)
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Dostoevsky-Study-Polyphonic-Novel/dp/0820304727
and Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth (a 1991 book) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today. https://www.unz.com/article/aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-relevance-today/


​Putin on Gandhi, Mandela, and Solzhenitsyn​

Once, during an international press-conference at the G8 Summit in 2007, when asked whether he was a true democrat, Vladimir Putin, answered in the affirmative. But then, pointing out the wave of violence across the USA and Europe, he made Western infatuation with democracy sound hollow. Then he made the impromptu remark that “There is no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died”.[1] A few years later on December 8, 2016, he admitted that his oft quoted remark was made in a jovial mode. Yet, there is no doubt that Putin admires Gandhi as a prophet of Non-Violence just as he admires Solzhenitsyn as a man who challenged the mighty Soviet state with truth and courage—and won!

Western mainstream media failed to report on Putin’s courtesy visit to the South African Embassy in Moscow when Nelson Mandela,[2] once an ardent Marxist-Leninist guerilla fighter, passed away on December of 2013.  But The Economic Times of India did. That’s what it said on December 10, 2013 under the heading: Mandela's magnitude compares to Gandhi, Solzhenitsyn: Putin. [3]

<<Russian President Vladimir Putin today paid rich tribute to Nelson Mandela, comparing the colossus of 20th century politics to Mahatma Gandhi and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Mandela "is undoubtedly one of the outstanding world figures in the 20th and 21st centuries, and his magnitude compares to that of Mahatma Gandhi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn…" Putin hailed Mandela as a "great humanist of the 21st century" and said his policy should become an example to follow…(He) compared Mandela to both Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn. "Courageous and wise, Nelson Mandela always fought consistently for his convictions but remained a great humanist and peacemaker. This approach is needed in today's world: the search for compromises is the best basis for consensus and cooperation," the Russian President wrote in the condolence book at the South African embassy here >>. 

Reading these lines, especially, when Putin compared Mandela with both Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn, one has to hope that the three sages have served as guiding stars for Putin’s domestic and foreign policy. To be sure, wishing to follow somebody’s example, sincere as it might be, does not necessarily lead to adequate implementation of the goal. However, in the very least, Putin’s statement “the search for compromises is the best basis for consensus and cooperation” can serve as a bench-mark by which he and other world leaders will be judged. It is all the more remarkable because in the USSR where Putin was educated the very word “kompromis” was disdained as a bourgeois trick.

Recently, Rudolf Siebert, professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University,[4] my friend and associate, wrote an article in honor of Gandhi for the Global Harmony Association.[5] He convincingly argued that Martin Luther King, Jr.,[6] the American champion of human rights and peaceful resistance, who died a martyr’s death, was also inspired by Gandhi’s teaching of Non-Violence.

Siebert knows that Jesus preached the Christian commandment:  “You have learned how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you; offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well; if a man takes you to law and would have your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him. Give to anyone who asks, and if anyone wants to borrow, do not turn away”.  (Exodus 21: 24-25; Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12).

Siebert concedes, however, that Christian countries have largely ignored this commandment through centuries of history. Then Siebert resolutely credits Gandhi for reviving this Christian commandment in modern world: “The Christian Martin Luther King came to the Christian commandment of non-violent resistance through the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, and both practiced it, and both died for it a violent martyr's death of freedom, like the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount in the first place”.

Among all world leaders, Siebert singles out for praise Vladimir Putin for following the precept of Non-Violence in Russia’s foreign policy: thus Russia “did not retaliate, when in recent years its plane was shot down over Turkey, and its ambassador there was assassinated, and last Christmas its diplomats were sent back home from Washington D. C. to Moscow. That non-retaliation is moral progress in world history!”

It is hardly surprising then that the Gandhi theme has been central for the latest exchange of visits between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi [7] and President Putin. In December 2015, during Modi’s visit to the Kremlin,[8] Putin presented him a page of Mahatma’s handwritten note. Putin’s second gift to Modi was an 18th century Bengali sword, alluding, perhaps, that the two countries, committed as they are to peaceful co-existence, do not forget about the need of military cooperation in defense. Three years later, when Putin arrived to New Delhi, Modi honored him by the presentation of Gandhi’s favorite bhajan ‘Vaishnava Jana To’ [9] performed by a Russian artist Sati Kazanova on a mobile phone – a gesture that reflected the close friendship between the two leaders.[10]

[1] President Putin’s Interview with G8 Newspaper Journalists. 06/09/07 "ICH" - 06/06/07  Mathaba News Network http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17855.htm
 
[2] Nelson Mandela (1918 –2013) was a South African anti-apartheid political leader, who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in a democratic election. He dismantled the legacy of apartheid by fostering racial reconciliation. An African nationalist and socialist, he presided over the African National Congress (ANC) party from 1991 to 1997. Alongside Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. he was one of the 20th century's exemplary anti-racist and anti-colonial leaders, promoting toleration, liberal democracy and social justice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela
 
[3] Mandela's magnitude compares to Gandhi, Solzhenitsyn: Putin. //economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/27182771.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
 
[4] Rudolf Siebert, Western Michigan University https://wmich.edu/religion/directory/siebert See also https://www.rudolfjsiebert.org/  http://www.peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=51
 
[5] Global Harmony Association front page http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=home
 
[6] Martin Luther King Jr (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister who became the leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his assassination in 1968. Born in Atlanta, he advanced civil rights through Non-Violence and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi helped inspire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
 
[7] Narendra Modi is the current Prime Minister of India since 2014. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014.  Modi is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Modi
 
[8] Putin presented the items to Modi while they discussed issues of mutual interest for both countries.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/mahatma-gandhi-s-notes-and-an-indian-sword-putin-s-gift-to-modi/story-zOZWp6cAvL0xTfHrTyWC3N.html
 
[9] Vaishnava Jana To is a Hindu bhajan, written in the 15th century by the poet Narsinh Mehta. The poem speaks about the life, ideals and mentality of a follower of Vishnu.This song became popular during the life time of M.K.Gandhi and was rendered as bhajan in his Sabarmati Ashram. It was popular among freedom fighters throughout India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaishnava_Jana_To
 
[10] PM Narendra Modi shows Russia President Vladimir Putin rendition of Gandhi’s favorite bhajan
written by PTI October 6, 2018 https://www.freepressjournal.in/headlines/pm-narendra-modi-shows-russia-president-vladimir-putin-rendition-of-gandhis-favourite-bhajan/1369629
 
Sharon Tennison’s New Year Greeting
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​After talking about a whole roster of outstanding wise men who dedicated themselves to the ideals of peace, justice, and harmony in domestic and foreign affairs—Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Solzhenitsyn, it would only be fair to conclude with a New 2019 Year Greeting I got from an American woman who has been just as dedicated to the same ideals. Sharon Tennison, the founder and work-horse of the Center for Citizen Initiatives of San Francisco (CCISF.org), has been an energetic promoter of peace since the old Cold War.[1]

Best Wishes to You for a Wonderful Creative Year in 2019 upon which we are now embarking!
    I wonder if you are deeply grateful as I am that our planet has survived this past tumultuous year? Given the numbers of surrogate war-making threats and incursions in numerous areas of the world, i.e. Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, the Baltic states and others … we are lucky that none have ignited an all-consuming conflagration. Perhaps parity of nuclear weapons and instant delivery systems maintained the tenuous peace between the two nuclear giants of the world––our nation and Russia.  For whatever the reasons, I’m deeply grateful that we have a bit more time ahead to develop beyond the warring mentalities among us.

Sharon’s letter was not personal and did not need to be. I just happen to be on her list as she is on my RAGA.org list. Sharon knows Russia, as she has been taking American group to Russia every year. It still helps to send such letters to hundreds of kindred souls to alert them that we live in a world that is more dangerous now than it ever was during the Cold War of the 20th century. Our Planet, abused, injured, neglected and defamed as it has been, is still Our Beautiful Mother Earth. Its Beauty is in the eyes of the beholders who are now urged to hurry to her rescue. First of all, we should call for an extra-ordinary UN General Assembly session with one item on its agenda, Arms Control and Nuclear Disarmament, starting with the reductions of nuclear stockpiles and delivery systems. I am sure that all of the great men I mentioned above would support the agenda. But they need help! So I say “Planetarians of the World, Unite!”--before it is too late.

Author: Dr. Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow), former professor and head of the Russian Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, currently runs the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org ). He is the author of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel and Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth

Email: President@raga.org

January 21, 2019, Moscow             
 © W.G. Krasnow, 2019 


[1] CCI Vision and Mission: Our world has never faced a more challenging era than today. Massive nuclear arsenals are once again pointed between the United States and Russia. Misunderstandings, fallacious accusations, false flags and demonizing propaganda dominate our print media and television screens.  At CCI, we experienced one other such dangerous period in 1980. We flew in between the two enemy nations and dared to try to understand the challenges on both sides…. our citizen-to-citizen programs began to soften the environment between the two Superpowers of that era. Other American groups also got involved. War was averted and good relations began to grow in the 1990s.  https://ccisf.org/
 
[2]New 2019 Year Greeting from Sharon Tennison  https://ccisf.org/happy-new-years-2019/#more-3676


​
All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today

1/1/2019

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​Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow) ponders on the International “Reading Solzhenitsyn” Conference in Lyndon, Vermont, September 7-8, 2018

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Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today
Dear friends and colleagues, the topic of my presentation, “If an artist imagines himself as a god…,” alludes to Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture delivered in Stockholm in 1974. There is no better way to celebrate the writer’s approaching Centenary (on December 11, 2018) than by reviewing what he had to say about his art at this festive occasion at half-way of his career. In writing my book “Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel”, I was guided by his vision of art, expressed in the Nobel Lecture and elsewhere.

The Nobel Lecture
No, Solzhenitsyn did not imagine himself as a god. He is another kind of artist, the one, he says, who “recognizes above himself a higher power and joyfully works as a humble apprentice under God’s heaven, though graver and more demanding still is his responsibility for all he writes or paints—and for the souls which apprehend it. However, it was not he who created this world, nor does he control it; there can be no doubts about its foundations. It is merely given to the artist to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and ugliness of man’s role in it—and to vividly communicate this to mankind….”

Those who listened to his Lecture knew very well that he himself had gone through “the lower depths of existence—in poverty, in prison, and in illness” which nonetheless failed to extinguish his “sense of enduring harmony.” They knew that the man in front of them had challenged the mightiest police state in the world. Soviet leaders figured that by kicking him out of the USSR, they will cut him off from his Motherland and deprive his art of its nourishing roots. They miscalculated. Their ruthlessness backfired. Fifteen years later, at the time of perestroika and glasnost, they were mired in a confusion desperately trying to save their System and themselves.

I doubt that by 1991 there were many of them who still believed in the Marxist-Leninist ideology their predecessors had imposed on Russia in 1917 via the October Revolution and bloody Civil War. But in 1974 their professed ideology held sway not just in the USSR but over a third of mankind.

In the Nobel Lecture Solzhenitsyn mentioned neither Marx nor Lenin, but implicitly its main thrust was against both; and against the so called cultural Marxism that dominated Western elites then and is still viral today.

But in 1974 -- how many armored divisions and nuclear missiles silos could Solzhenitsyn marshal against the mightiest military power marching then across the globe under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, the teaching that was thought “all-powerful because it was corrects” (as Soviet propaganda proclaimed)?

Solzhenitsyn counted all potential “troops” on his side. “So perhaps the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the decorous and antiquated formula it seemed to us at the time of our self-confident materialistic youth,” he said alluding to his own training in dialectical materialism as part of Marxist-Leninist indoctrination mandatory for all schools and colleges.

Then he reminded Western elites about the everyday reality of the USSR:  “If the tops of these three trees do converge, as thinkers used to claim, and if the all too obvious and the overly straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow, then perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, and ever surprising shoots of Beauty will force their way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three”.

The Harvard Commencement Address
On June 8, 1978, Solzhenitsyn delivered the Harvard University Commencement address.  The chosen topic was: “A World Split Apart”.  He defined it thus: “This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand”. This split was caused by the Cold War between the USSR, PRC and their allies who espoused the need for a violent world revolution and the rest of the world that remained unsure whether Marxist “doctors” practicing vivisection offered the right cure. Soviet professions of “peaceful co-existence” abroad sounded hollow when Soviet leaders refused to “peacefully co-exist” with their own citizens.

Then Solzhenitsyn focused on the West’s failure to understand Russian civilization’s dire predicament under Soviet ideological rule. According to him, “Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its (Russia’s) autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity.”

Some of his predictions sound even more prophetic today: “if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores”, such as “those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”

To be sure, some Americans were disappointed by the seeming lack of praise for the USA. But then Solzhenitsyn’s purpose was not to flatter the country that gave him refuge but help it lead the world in resistance to Communist violence.

James Herold, a prominent New England architect and our Forum’s participant, was in the Harvard crowd of some twenty thousand who came to listen to the Russian in driving rain. He remembers he heard people saying: “Who is this guy who teaches us how to live!” But James felt “this guy” was right about America then and even more now. ​
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One Day
It all started on one day in November 1962 when Solzhenitsyn’s first tale, “One Day of Ivan Denisovich,” was published in Novyi Mir, a leading Soviet magazine, after the party boss Nikita Khrushchev gave the permission. The story of its publication was indeed as “whimsical, unpredictable, and surprising” as was its great appeal to Soviet readers. It bordered on the miraculous. It was then that the USSR began a decisive slide from “Soviet” to “Russian”, from Marxist “materialism,” “class struggle” and “world revolution” to such idealist notions as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. This slide toward Russian spiritual identity was sometimes brutally interrupted but never stopped until the collapse of USSR in 1991.

As it turned out, Solzhenitsyn’s writing was deeply grounded in Russia’s soil. “And then no slip of the tongue but a prophecy would be contained in Dostoyevsky’s words: “Beauty will save the world.” For it was given to him to see many things; he had astonishing flashes of insight,” the writer said in Stockholm.

Dostoevsky proscribed
The few roots of Russianness surviving in the USSR by the 1960s had been trampled upon, ignored and abused—in favor of Marxism, a Western chimera, imposed on Russia. For many years Dostoevsky himself was excluded from Soviet school programs as a “conservative counter-revolutionary” and – Marx Forbid! – Christian “fanatic” peddling the “opium to the people”. And he was not the only Russian classic ignored and abused in the USSR. In the GULAG Solzhenitsyn met a number of followers of Lev Tolstoy’s non-violence. Ever since Lenin wrote that in Tsarist Russia TWO CULTURES were in a mortal combat, the one of “progressive revolutionary and democratic” Westernizers, and the other of “reactionary conservative” land-owners and Slavophiles, Soviet censors knew where to apply their scissors.  
In addition to the “Slavophiles,” they removed from school-rooms, libraries and even archives, all deviant authors, including those of proletarian origin, if they failed to follow the “party-line” (Wonder where does the current “political correctness” come from?).

They certainly removed from book shelves the works of over 200 non-revolutionary Russian philosophers (Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, Ivan Ilyin, Abram Kagan, Pitirim Sorokin etc.), thinkers, and scholars whom Lenin ordered shipped to the West in 1922. The fate was no kinder to millions of “White Russians” who had to flee Russia for life. Inevitably, some “Old Regime” scholars stayed on and even tried to absorb the “scientific wisdom” of Marxism out of curiosity or just to survive.

Mikhail Bakhtin denounces the monological principle
One of them was Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975),  a literary scholar educated in old “tsarist” Russia. In 1929, after exposing himself to certain Marxist tenets, he published a book in honor of the officially disapproved Dostoevsky. He praised the novelist for his ability to hear a whole POLYPHONY of diverse ideological voices and stay fair even to those with whom he disagreed. Prompted by Solzhenitsyn’s 1967 interview with Pavel Licko in which the writer declared his allegiance to a polyphonic approach in his novels, I began to explore Bakhtin for my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Soon I learned that, after being exiled for several years to Central Asia, Bakhtin, just like Solzhenitsyn, was rehabilitated. However, finding a teaching position at a provincial university, he did not renounce his scholarly thesis but – 34 years later! - came up with a new expanded edition of his book. Now Bakhtin boldly asserted that Dostoevsky’s polyphony was not an isolated matter of novelistic style, but “concerns prime principles of European aesthetics.”

In fact, he called Dostoevsky the creator of “new artistic model of the world” in opposition to “the monologic principle as the trademark of modern times.” Bakhtin asserted that “In modern times, European rationalism with its cult of unified and solitary reason, and particularly the Enlightenment, during which the basic genres of European prose were formed, contributed to the strengthening of the monologic principle and its penetration into all spheres of ideological life.”

Bakhtin clearly alluded to the official Marxist ideology when he said that “All European utopianism is also founded on this monologic principle. And so is Utopian socialism with its belief in the omnipotence of persuasion.” One could add that the latter belief had to be re-enforced by the GULAG and other corrective tools that came to the fore when persuasion failed. That’s what I said in my Ph.D. dissertation which in 1979 was published as a book, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel.
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“Russian literature vs. Marxist maculature”
Now we come to the alternative title of my presentation: “Russian literature vs. Marxist maculature”. I first used this juxtaposition in my next book “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth” published in the USA just before the fall of the USSR. This juxtaposition had a double entendre. First, it alluded to Marshall McLuhan’s notion that the medium is the message. Marx’s teaching was touted as a “science” of economics which dictated the need for a violent world revolution to conform to allegedly objective law of social development. Thus, the appeal was seemingly to reason.

Russian literature, on the other hand, like any other literature,  only more so, appealed to the heart and soul of the reader, that is to the whole, holistic, human being. It appealed to his ethical and esthetic sense, indeed to Truth, Goodness and Beauty. To be sure, it also appealed to his rational mind and imagination, the latter being an important source of scientific discoveries, as Albert Einstein testifies. Such holistic view of life has animated Russian literature. That view of life may appear less “rational,” “clever,” and more “idealist” than Marxism, but it is still much wiser because it is true to life.

Second, the “maculature” (makulatura in Russian) alludes to an overload of Soviet propaganda materials, especially the works of Marxist-Leninist “classics” (Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin), which Soviet readers simply could no longer absorb. So they turned them into a second-use, blotted paper – makulatura in Russian - to be dumped in garbage cans. However, in the waning years of the USSR, there were organized campaigns to collect the unused works of the “classics.”  They were sorted out by weight in kilograms and exchanged for a volume or two of “old-fashioned” Russian or foreign classics.

The point here is not to denigrate Marx’s economic theory or the “law of added value”. The main issue is an excessive, almost demonic obsession of Marx that he had discovered a fail-proof key to the happiness of mankind, if only the proletariat would obey the iron-clad “scientific” laws of history that dictate violent world revolution.

Dostoevsky, Bakhtin and Solzhenitsyn were familiar with both sides of the issue. Dostoevsky faced an execution squad for his sympathy for the “poor and downtrodden” and for his alleged participation in revolutionary circles. Bakhtin was active in Marxist study groups. Solzhenitsyn, during his university years regarded himself a Marxist and Communist. But all three, like thousands of their readers, came to the conclusion that the world revolution, after shedding rivers of blood, sweat and tears, failed to get rid of exploitation and injustice – and then covered up its failure by mandatory falsehoods.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, the first dystopia
One of the first Russian writers to notice that the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution went astray was Yevgeny Zamiatin (1884-1937), whom Solzhenitsyn mentioned in his Nobel Lecture as an example of Russian visionaries. Zamyatin was a prominent author before 1917 and was also active in, and imprisoned for, Bolshevik revolutionary activities. This did not prevent him from writing in1920 the novel “WE,” a vision of a sterile and inhumane totalitarian society where all individual life was suppressed. Published in Germany in 1921, “WE” became the first dystopian novel in history of Europe. Soon it was followed by such Western classics as Aldous Huxley, Brave New World;  Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, and George Orwell’s Animal farm and Nineteen Eighty Four. Zamyatin’s novel was banned in the USSR and he barely succeeded in leaving the country.

Were Zamyarin’s novel timely published in Soviet Russia, would it not have saved millions lives in Russia allowing it evolve as a normal country where heterodoxy is tolerated? Would not the whole the 20th century have been less bloody?

Zamyatin’s favorite notion in the novel “WE” was entropy as a measure of energy that is needlessly dispersed in any given endeavor. It appears that mankind learned nothing from the bitter fate of the “rationalist” French Revolution which degenerated into revolutionary self-terror and Napoleonic wars of conquest. Alas, Lenin enjoyed his Bolsheviks to follow the French extremists, just do it “more decisively”.  The entropy of the Bolshevik dystopia in Russia was countless times higher.

Let me say a few words about my essays that Solzhenitsyn liked. One was on Marx’s poetry debut. Two others are about the role of national character in a country’s history.

Karl Marx as a romantic poet
After I chose a voluntary exile from the USSR in 1962, I tried to read as much as I could the authors who were suppressed. But what I discovered was that censored were not just the works of anti-Communists, but even “classics” of Marxism-Leninism, including Marx himself. Certainly, his Jewish origin was barely mentioned and deemed irrelevant. His article “On the Jewish question” was not known at all. Then I discovered that at youth he was an ardent Christian, more so than his newly converted parents. Later, he came to see himself as a romantic poet. That’s what Oulanem, the young Karl’s romantic hero and alter ego, proudly proclaims in his poem of the same name:

The world which bulks between me and the Abyss
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses!
I will throw my arms around its harsh reality.
Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away
And then sink down to utter nothingness.
Perished, with no existence - that would be really living.

As you now see, in terms of my presentation, it was Marx, not Solzhenitsyn, who imagined himself as a god, not just in youth, but also when he wrote “Manifesto of the Communist Party”.

Karl Marx as Dr. Frankenstein
I quoted these lines in my 1977 essay “Karl Marx as Frankenstein: Toward a Genealogy of Communism”.  It was based on Mary Shelly’s 1818 horror story “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus”. My intentions was not to put the young Marx down but rather to investigate how a prima facie Romantic poet transforms himself to a modern Promethean economist and ruthless political leader ready to endow the oppressed proletarians with the “gift” of world revolution fire.

The most intriguing aspect of Shelly’s work was that she let the well-meaning German scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, create an artificial human being. Successfully! To be sure, Shelly’s artistic vision was spurred by the rapid advancement of science in Europe.  However, as soon after the talented Victor celebrated his scientific victory, his creature started to misbehave turning doctor’s scientific Victory into a crushing defeat. His creature became The Monster so lavishly serialized in numerous Hollywood productions.

To be fair to Miss Shelly, she portrayed Frankenstein as a responsible man who tried to restrain his Creature. That failing, he tried to remove the Monster from densely populated centers of Europe. But where to? He found no better place than “the wilderness of Russia and Tataria” as it was known in Europe since Napoleon’s attempt to conquer it.

Russia as a Dumping ground for Western “science”
Something similar happened to Marx’s “creature”. He designed his world revolution for the most advanced countries, but no country in Europe wanted to serve as a lab. Finally, in 1917, a small group of international Bolsheviks of various ethnic backgrounds forced Russia to volunteer, in spite of the fact that the proletariat there was a small minority. Whether by a conspiracy or bad luck, Russia became the first lab for the Marxist experiment in building what was paraded as the first ever equitable and happy society since the Noah’s Ark. Thus Russia took upon itself the “Promethean”, God-fighting, theomachic, or Luciferan, if you will, task of re-making the world in defiance of any hitherto established religions, be it Christian, Judaic, Moslem or whatever.

I wrote this essay in 1976-1977, when the United States were swamped with thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing from the USSR after a special deal between Brezhnev and Kissinger was made to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate “for family re-unification.”  I saw this as a further irony of the Marxist dystopia transplanted in Russia. Because of his own Jewish background, was it not likely that Marx himself, had he lived in the country of his dream, would seek an exit visa? To Israel?  Or the United States? In any case, Mary Shelly’s 1818 horror fiction turned into reality exactly one-hundred years later.

Max Weber undermines Karl Marx
Two other essays that Solzhenitsyn liked dealt with the role of national character in history. Of course, since I was trained as ethnologist and anthropologist in the USSR, I knew that any attention to national character was pretty much under a taboo lest it undermines the international solidarity of working people. But as soon as I defected, I hurried to read the forbidden books, including Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . I readily agreed with much what he had to say. Indeed, national character fostered as it has been by a belief system (religion, customs, habits, geography, history etc.) of a nation had considerable bearing on its economic standing in the world. It certainly had more influence on the disparity of income levels of different groups of population than the Marxist notion of exploitation of all working people.

Even though Weber’s thesis seemed to favor Protestant nations, he did not imply any racial or religious favoritism. He was good enough to point out, for instance, that Russian Christian Old Believers on the eve of Revolution had considerably better working habits than the rest of the population. Ironically, this was due to the thrift and communal spirit they had fostered thru centuries of official persecution. As it happens, the majority of most successful Russian entrepreneurs – and arts benefactors - before 1917 were from the families of Old Believers. Had the Russians read Weber’s works on a scale of one to a thousand Marxist makulatura volumes, would they not have been better prepared to the challenges of neoliberal economics imposed on them since 1991?

Whose fault: The Russian Mind or Western Cultural Marxism?
Soon I challenged Ronald Hingley (1920 – 2010),  a prominent British historian and specialist on Russia, for suggesting in his book, The Russian Mind that Communist Totalitarianism was due to the disorderly national character of ethnic Russians whom he had observed both in the USSR and among Russian immigrants in UK.

Rather than objecting to his observations, I argued that the expansion of Totalitarian rule in Europe and elsewhere was mostly due to the defeatist state of mind of Western intellectual and media establishment who were either tacitly or openly pro-Marxist. They protected their Idol by blaming the brutishness of Communist takeovers on innate boorishness of ethnic Russian apparatchiks rather than the inherent inhumanity of Marxist ideology they followed. Did Marx not enjoined his followers to reject all existing morality, especially Christian, as rooted in “bourgeois” mentality?

Richard Pipes’s Russophobia
One of Marx’s protectors was Harvard professor of Russian history Richard Pipes (1923 – 2018). He had the reputation of anti-Communist hard-liner, but argued that Soviet leaders cannot be trusted not due to their different ideological precepts but because they were usually descendants of Russian peasants who were cheats because their ancestors were serves who could survive only by cheating. It was an ethnic slur, I thought, and challenged him in my article “Richard Pipes's Foreign Strategy: Anti-Soviet or Anti-Russian?”  

In case the link fails to download, here is its summary in my 1991 book “Russia Beyond Communism”. “A respectable historian, (Pipes) has exerted considerable influence on U. S. foreign since he was National Security adviser in the Reagan White House.  He has also been one of the chief purveyors on an essentially russophobic conception of Russian history... he blames, for instance, the brutality of Soviet regime chiefly on Russian national character as embodied in Russian peasants. Pipes is an avowed Solzhenitsyn opponent. Not only did he allege that the writer was “anti-Semitic” but ruled out any positive role for Solzhenitsyn in Russian future” (p. 281).

Earlier, on November 13, 1985, in a paper I read at the World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies in Washington, DC, I publicly defended Solzhenitsyn from the charges of “anti-Semitism” coming from Pipes and his ilk. This was duly reported by The New York Times. As the reporter Richard Grenier noted, I was not alone. “Prof. Adam Ulam of Harvard, another Soviet specialist, said Professor Pipes's characterization of Mr. Solzhenitsyn was ''very unfair.'' Grenier went on: “Conquest, author of ''The Great Terror,'' called the charge of anti-Semitism ''ludicrous.''

Grenier also pointed out that Solzhenitsyn got support also from a number of prominent people, including Jews, from the USSR and abroad: Mstislav Rostropovich, Mikhail Agursky (Soviet dissident, then professor at Hebrew Universty) and Elie Wiesel. Finally, Grenier said, “Willing to go further in his defense than Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself was his wife, Natalia, who is herself half-Jewish. The charge of anti-Semitism is ''nonsensical'' and ''absolutely absurd,'' Mrs. Solzhenitsyn wrote in a letter. Her husband was surrounded by Jewish friends in Russia, she said, both in and out of the Gulag”.
​

In 1989 I was able to arrange for an interview with Solzhenitsyn by David Aikman for Time magazine. David was my friend and colleague in the Department of Slavic and Far Eastern Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. The interview was introduced by the publisher: "One Word of Truth: A Portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn… a courageous man devoted to the battle for truth in the context of the distinctive disorders of modern, post-Christian culture”. ​
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Polyphony in the Period of Glasnost (1986-1991)
At about 1986 when I set out to write a book about Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, I decided to apply polyphonic principle in my selection of dozens Soviet and expatriate “voices of glasnost” of various political and ideological leanings. All of them argued that the USSR had no Communist future and therefore Russia, as well as other ethnic entities of the Soviet Union, have to go back to their past in order to find an inspiration for their future. In short, I made my selection in favor of authors who were not destined to Marxist makulatura dust bins. In 1991, when the USSR was still intact, my study was published as a book, “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth.”

As a prototype for reforms I suggested Solzhenitsyn’s “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” (1973). It offered a program of gradual “Russification” of the USSR. No, Solzhenitsyn did not ask Soviet leaders to relinquish their hold on centralized state power. He only insisted on allowing patriotic ethnic Russian non-party members of Christian persuasion into the ranks of country leadership. As to the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism, Solzhenitsyn advice was: “give it away to the Chinese.” At that time Mao-Tse-Tung accused Moscow of “revisionism” and declared himself the true bearer of the flag of Communism. I was delighted to see two scholars from the People’s Republic of China participating in this forum. They assured us that Solzhenitsyn, totally unknown there during the 1960-s and 1970-s, has lately been on the rise and his books are sold in millions of copies.

At any rate, the PRC leaders woke up sooner than those of the USSR. They became less dogmatic after the devastating Cultural Revolution. Even without reading Solzhenitsyn, they intuitively followed some of his suggestions to Soviet leaders. Under Deng Xiaoping (1904 – 1997) they began to lean back on China’s cultural heritage and abandoned a number of Marxist dogmas by adapting a more pragmatic approach to China’s economy.

Soviet leaders, on the other hand, were too slow in shedding Marxist dogmas, certainly, in running their moribund economy. Remarkably, Solzhenitsyn mailed his Letter to all Soviet party bosses. None replied to the Nobel Prize winner in dereliction of their duty toward their citizens.
The Letter was quickly published in English. Alas, the reception in the West was rather hostile. It was judged as a quirk of an old man who allegedly turned to Russian “chauvinism” and “Tsarist past” while failing to see the bright future of a country successfully competing with the USA in space exploration. None noticed that Solzhenitsyn sought a gradual and peaceful evolution of Soviet society, even the possibility for the border republics to secede if they wished, via referenda.

“Why Not Solzhenitsyn?”   A letter to Mikhail Gorbachev
In spite of the negative reception by US academic establishment, Solzhenitsyn’s world fame continued to grow. During the waning years of Gorbachev’s perestroika when the Berlin Wall already fell and Poland and Czechoslovakia gained independence, I was feverishly working on my book “Russia Beyond Communism.” Still, I managed to urgently write the column “Why Not Solzhenitsyn?” On February 10, 1990, it was carried by “The San Diego Union”, a major California newspaper.

“As the events in Eastern Europe have shown, people are now looking for a new breed of leaders, such as Solidarity founder Lech Walesa and Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel”, I stated. “As for the Soviet Union, no one is better qualified for a national leader than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning novelist…After the untimely death of Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear scientist and a fellow dissident Nobel Peace prize winner, none come even close to the high moral ground Solzhenitsyn so eminently occupies.”

As soon as the article was published, I sent a copy to Solzhenitsyn with whom I had been corresponding for a number of years. Then I wrote an Open Letter to Mikhail Gorbachev asking him to consider the implications of my article (a copy of which was inserted in the envelope). I asked Gorbachev to officially invite the world-famous author to return to Russia. A copy of my letter to Gorbachev, as well as of my article, I mailed to a number of Soviet newspapers.

Alas, I received neither reply nor even an acknowledgement from the Kremlin. This is hardly surprising since the relentless Gorbymania of Western media made Gorbachev confident of the one-party rule. Nor did I get any reply from Soviet media moguls, except one small Young Communist League’s newspaper in my native town in Perm that carried my Open Letter to Gorbachev.

I was disappointed but not too surprised. I knew of both lethargy of Soviet nomenklatura members  and the slowness and unreliability of Soviet postal clerks, especially, with overseas mail.

Still, I felt more disheartened by a rather angry letter from Solzhenitsyn himself. He sternly reproached me for “dragging me into Russian politics without asking my permission.” I replied that I did not have to ask for permission for suggesting a course of action for my Russian compatriots to facilitate a peaceful transition to a post-Communist Russia. While the thrust of my Letter was on securing a timely and honorable return of Solzhenitsyn to his homeland, I left it up to Soviet authorities and public to devise their own ways of using Solzhenitsyn’s world fame and talents which were certainly not below those of Walesa and Havel.

How Can We Make Russia Livable
Still, a few months later I learned that my effort was not entirely wasted. Apparently my letter to Gorbachev prompted Solzhenitsyn to finally speak up about what needs to be done to take the USSR out of the dead-end of Communism. Here is what I wrote then in my book “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth” that just appeared in 1991:

“A portentous event took place in Moscow on September 18, 1990. The Communist Youth League’s newspaper, Komsomol’skaia Pravda, brought to its nearly 22 million readers the long-awaited word of Solzhenitsyn, his pamphlet, ‘How Can We Make Russia Livable [Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiiu]’. The following day the weekly Literaturnaia gazeta offered the same to an additional 4.5 million readers. The event was extraordinary by any standard. Only five years earier these newspapers had berated the exiles author as ‘that vile scum of a traitor’” (p. 43)

Here is not the place to discuss Solzhenitsyn’s pamphlet in detail. So I repeat its brief assessment in the book: “Solzhenitsyn’s central idea is that the particular form of government and economy is secondary to a nation’s spiritual foundations. ‘If the spiritual resources of a nation have dried up’, he says, ‘then not even the best form of government, nor any sort of industrial development, can save it from death.’ One of the chief sources of the present malady is precisely the fact that the Communists reversed the order of priority by putting the ‘cart’ of economic and political power before the ‘horse’ of spirituality of human relations. As a result, not only the country’s political institutions, economy, and ecology but also ‘the souls’ of the people were destroyed in the name of the Marxist Utopia” (p. 53).

I was unable to judge the situation in the USSR during the few crucial months after the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s pamphlet as I was not rehabilitated yet from the same charges as were leveled against Solzhenitsyn.  Only in April 1991 was able to set my foot in my home country for the first time after twenty-nine years of voluntary exile. My subsequent visits to Russia during the 1990s were short and intermittent.

Aleksandr Sevastianov: Solzhenitsyn was late
So much more I was delighted to read the following lines of Aleksandr Sevastianov,  a self-avowed Russian nationalist and perceptive observer of Russian politics. In a 2009 article dedicated to Solzhenitsyn’s memory he wrote: “The timely arrival of Solzhenitsyn could have instantly changed the balance of power, give an absolute advantage to the patriotic wing of dissidence, shorten the hands of traitors, robbers and fraudsters, haters of Russia. No one had a greater prestige at that moment — not even Yeltsin. He himself live was then much more necessary in Russia than his books. His opponents were afraid of his arrival; they did everything to prevent his contacts with Yeltsin! For it could be otherwise”.

Sevastianov also reported that “the Prosecutor General announced the termination of the case (against Solzhenitsyn) under article 64 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (treason) in the absence of corpus delicti. The last obstacle for his return fell. Friends and admirers even those beyond the Iron Curtain, chant: "You are needed at home." This is the truth. But Solzhenitsyn failed to return to Russia. To me, it is an inexplicable”.

“Again a unique opportunity was missed,” morns Sevastianov, and then quotes Solzhenitsyn’s lame excuse: “So what - I did return at the moment of the highest political expectations of me in my homeland. And I am sure that I was not mistaken then. It was the decision of the writer, not a politician. I never groped for political popularity for even a minute. ”

Sevastianov disagrees it was a political issue. It was a call of history that Solzhenitsyn failed to respond to. I tend to agree with Sevastianov. But, being like him a great admirer of Solzhenitsyn, I am just as reluctant to blame exclusively the writer. If anything, the Russian intellectuals of the early 1990s, even the dissidents among it, were not as mature as those in Poland and Czechoslovakia to answer the history call. After all, they had stayed under totalitarian foot a whole generation longer. So I see it rather as a judgment from the Above--for the sins of October Revolution. The country had to be meted out an additional punishment in the form of lawlessness and oligarchy misrule during the 1990s.

Egor Kholmogorov
Another Russian admirer of Solzhenitsyn, Egor Kholmogorov, in a recent article translated for The Unz Review as “Alexander Solzhenitsyn - A Russian Prophet” also thinks that the writer may have missed a chance to set Russia aright during 1991-1993.  Like Sevastianov he gives very high marks to Solzhenitsyn’s statecraft proposals contained in the pamphlet: “Some formulas coined by the writer became part of government policy, such as the emphasis on the “preservation of the people”. Others became a political reality, such as his call for a nationally minded authoritarianism, as opposed to the aping Western multiparty democracy. There are also still many – such as his ideas regarding the zemstvo, organs of “small-space democracy” – that are yet to be widely heard and discussed”.

Moreover, Kholmogorov throws a gantlet to the West by praising Solzhenitsyn for “putting forward a detailed and consistent anti-Enlightenment doctrine: A return to God, voluntary self-restraint and self-restriction of humankind, emphasizing duties instead of ever-expanding “rights”, prioritizing inner freedom, and rejecting the sacrifice of national life not only to totalitarian utopia but also to the orgy of freedom. Solzhenitsyn’s doctrine is one of the most consistent and politically sound Conservative philosophies formulated over the last couple of centuries. His duel with the ghosts of Voltaire and Rousseau goes on after his death, and the score is still in the Russian writer’s favor.”

Lest one suspect that Solzhenitsyn’s Russian admirers naturally tend to exaggerate the importance of their countryman in world history, in my view, spiritually attuned readers outside of the USSR, especially those with Christian roots, have been just as fascinated with him as a cultural hero and world historical phenomenon. I mentioned some of them in my book “Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky”. Thus, Heinrich Böll (1917 –1985) , one of Germany's foremost writers and Nobel Prize winner himself, felt that there was a metaphysical level in Solzhenitsyn that was simply inaccessible for Western writers.  

As professor of Russian Studies, language and literature, I observed a salutary impact of Solzhenitsyn on my students. During the turbulent Vietnam War era, more than once, I heard that Solzhenitsyn saved them from getting involved in insurrection against the status quo in the US. The tragic experience of Russia in the wake of October Revolution certainly cooled off many hot heads in the USA.

Eldridge Cleaver
One such hot head was Eldridge Cleaver whose book “Soul on Ice” was the rage around the States, especially on campus of the University of Washington in Seattle where I taught as a teaching assistant to provide for my Ph.D. studies. During the 1980s, I started corresponding with this former leader of the Black Panther Party, arguing that in some respects American Blacks were “freer” than “white” Russian dissidents inside the totalitarian police state. Later, I met him at a social event at the Hoover Institution. He was there with his wife Kathleen. By that time I knew that, after travelling to Cuba, Algeria and some communist countries Eldridge came to the conclusion that the plight of Blacks in the USA was not as bad as usually reported. I wandered what caused him to change his mind besides the travels; he beckoned to Kathleen and said: “She started to read Solzhenitsyn and then made me do the same. After the reading, we never were the same”.

It is obvious that Westerners of Christian cultural background have been more than others keen on Solzhenitsyn. A number of my articles, including on Solzhenitsyn, were published by a Conservative Catholic magazine Modern Age. Some others were carried by a Methodist review affiliated with the Southern Methodist University where I taught from 1974 to 1977.

Professor Edward Ericson
Shortly thereafter professor Edward Ericson, the author of “Solzhenitsyn, the Moral Vision,” invited me to speak on at Calvin College campus. We became fast friends. I thought of his excellent 1980 book as soon as I got Professor Alexandre Strokanov’s invitation to the Solzhenitsyn Forum at the Northern Vermont University. I immediately wanted to forward it to Ericson. Sadly, I missed him as he passed away in April 2017.  

There is no better way to honor the memory of Professor Ericson than by quoting from of a review of his book written by Bradley P. Hayton. Titled “Americans Need Morally Corrective Glasses,” it says: “Whether or not we have ever chanced a reading, the writings and speeches of Solzhenitsyn have made great impacts on all our lives. Evangelicals, left wing as well as right wing, have been powerfully reaffirmed in their contentions that morality is at the base of all society. Solzhenitsyn is a man with a moral vision, a vision that sees the absolute and direct connection between morality and art, morality and literature, morality and politics”.

Hayton’s review fully confirms Kholmogorov’s contention that Solzhenitsyn is a world phenomenon. He focuses on the most salient trait of Solzhenitsyn’s mission to the world:
“Solzhenitsyn is not theoretical. His writings are grounded in reality, in life, and in action. He is a Christ-like figure, fully human and yet with a divine mission and moral vision. He feels the pangs of human suffering, knows human sin, and heralds human salvation. He has been likened to a prophet who proclaims words of encouragement and hope to a people in despair and darkness. He stirs our minds to the realities of ultimate concern in the face of death”.

Robert Legvold on Daniel Mahoney’s book
Of later books about the writer I would recommend Aleksandr Daniel Mahoney’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology.The title spells out its thesis: secular ideologies which plagued the 20th century offer no salvation for global politics.

Robert Legvold, a knowledgeable and perceptive specialist on Russia and global politics, reviewed the book for “Foreign Affairs”. He says outright: “Mahoney reintroduces Solzhenitsyn as a political thinker who deserves to be included in the ranks of Raymond Aron, Jacques Maritain, Martin Buber, and John Dewey, among others.”

“Trying to free Solzhenitsyn from the reactionary and antediluvian reputation he has in the West”, Legvold rightly observes, “Mahoney highlights his deeper commitment to government under the rule of law and the right of "every private citizen" to "independence and space”…Above all, he would vanquish ideology, that most pernicious product of the Enlightenment, with its arrogant and limitless inhumanity justified in the name of "Historical Necessity."  It seems that both Mahoney and Legvold are in agreement with Sevastianov and Kholmogorov on the pernicious role Marxist ideology played in Russia’s history, as well as of its corruptive influence in the West, especially when paraded as “Cultural Marxism”.

The Tour of Solzhenitsyn’s Estate
After two full days of conferencing at Northern Vermont University in Lyndon, we were very fortunate to have made a trip to Cavendish where we saw the house of Solzhenitsyn as well as the Museum of Local History. Mr. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s son and a prominent musician himself, gave an excellent tour of his father’s writing and research quarters. He made it clear that the whole family was happily involved in the writer’s titanic effort to free Russian history from Soviet distortions and omissions. All family worked 12 hours every day. Happily? Yes! Ignat says that the house routine also included one and a half hour every day when father directly interacted with his three sons teaching them physics and math.

Margo Caulfield: “The Writer Who Changed History”
Our visit to the Museum of Cavendish was revealing. In addition to its local history, a major part of the Museum was dedicated to the memory of its most famous exile. In addition to seeing many Solzhenitsyn photographs decorating it walls, we had a chance to talk to Margo Caulfield, the Museum’s supervisor and Director of Cavendish Historical Society.

I immediately saw on her desk a book with the remarkable title: “The Writer Who Changed History”. As it turned out, the book’s author was Margo Caulfield herself. On its back cover, I read “This book was born of an attempt to answer an American third-grader’s question: “How could it be that a decorated Soviet officer was removed from the front lines and imprisoned for years simply for making a negative comment about Stalin?”

It was a good question, and Margo Caulfield answered it superbly in her children’s book “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:  The Writer Who Changed History”.  Well documented and illustrated, it is brief but comprehensive. Above all, it is written in the awareness that America needs to grow to the stature of a man to whom it gave a refuge and freedom to restore 20th century history, at least, as far as Russia is concerned.  I read the book when I was flying from Vermont to Moscow. I kept thinking that Russian youngsters too need to read such books to fortify their resolve to make the 21st century less cruel and more promising than the Brave 20th Century World.

It is not for nothing that Hilton Kramer of The New York Times once called Cavendish “the capital of contemporary Russian literature”.

The Ark of the First Circle
As a matter of fact, just last night my dear friend and I watched the last sequel of the film series based on Solzhenitsyn’s novel “The First Circle” for which he got the Nobel Prize. The film for which Solzhenitsyn was the screen writer was shown on Russian television channel “Kultura” in the course of a week. We were overwhelmed by the fact that the prisoners of a research lab involved in Soviet armaments program were actually condemned to the “easy” first circle of the Dantean Hell. “Easy” - because they were better fed and able to question the system unlike prisoners of the deeper layers of the GULAG or even the “free” citizens outside the barbed wires who lived in a constant fear of making a political mistake.

Toward the end of the show Solzhenitsyn’s own voice behind the screen (the film was made in 2006 when the writer was still alive) reminded the viewer of what was the highest point of the novel. Reviewing the chapter titled the Ark and placed near the middle of the novel, Solzhenitsyn says that the sleeping quarters of the prisoners were placed in the middle of a half-destroyed Russian church near its cupola. The inmates had just celebrated the birthday of one of them, and prepared for the night. Solzhenitsyn’s voice says:
“From here, from the Ark, confidently plowing its way through the darkness, the whole tortuous flow of accursed History could easily be surveyed as from an enormous height, and yet at the same time one could see every pebble on the river bed, as if one were immersed in the stream.
In these Sunday evening hours solid matter and flesh no longer reminded people of their earthy existence. The spirit of male friendship and philosophy filled the sail-like arches overhead.
Perhaps this was, indeed, that bliss which all the philosophers of antiquity tried in vain to define and to teach others.”


It is hard to disagree with Hayton who sees Solzhenitsyn as “a prophet who proclaims words of encouragement and hope to a people in despair and darkness”.

Hayton praises Ericson for showing Solzhenitsyn “as a man driven by a moral vision. He penetrates into the many writings of Solzhenitsyn, unleashing his Christian view of life that envelopes every sphere of human activity. In order to demonstrate the remarkable continuity in the vision of Solzhenitsyn, Ericson freely quotes from the author throughout. Solzhenitsyn's powerful message grips the reader on every page as Ericson probes into each of his writings and speeches.”

George Friedman
It would be wrong, however, to think that Solzhenitsyn’s appeal is limited to conservatives and Christians. No, his appeal extends to people of all nationalities and walks of life. George Friedman was born a Hungarian Jew whose parents survived the Holocaust and then escaped from Communist Hungary. He is the former founder of STRATFOR, a private intelligence firm, and now runs Geopolitical Futures. That’s what Friedman wrote in his Obituary article “Solzhenitsyn: Struggle for Russia’s Soul” on September 7, 2008:
“There are many people who write history. There are very few who make history through their writings. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died at the age of 89, was one of them. In many ways, Solzhenitsyn laid the intellectual foundations for the fall of Soviet communism. That is well known. But Solzhenitsyn also laid the intellectual foundation for the Russia that is now emerging. That is less well known, and in some ways more important”.  Friedman is certainly right when he says that “Solzhenitsyn was far more prophetic about the future of the Soviet Union than almost all of the Ph.D.s in Russian studies. Entertain the possibility that the rest of Solzhenitsyn’s vision will come to pass. It is an idea that ought to cause the world to be very thoughtful”.

“Thoughtful”, sounds just right. But I would go further. If we are really thoughtful, we may see that Solzhenitsyn has had and is likely to have more healing effect on the West in general and the USA in particular.

Jordan Peterson on Solzhenitsyn’s growing relevance
A good indication that Solzhenitsyn’s relevance grows is the great interest shown in him by Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of the multi-million copy bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Judging by what Peterson has to say in his recent podcast with Jocko Willink, Solzhenitsyn’s works provide one of the strongest antidotes to chaos increasingly besetting our world. As Dr. Peterson points out, one of the reasons for the chaos is that Pol Sci profs in the West tend to be “under the sway of Marxist thinking”. Not for nothing, Dr. Peterson is behind the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago.  The latter is one of the 15 great world books he recommends, while two others belong to Solzhenitsyn’s favorite Dostoevsky.

From Solzhenitsyn to Putin
Friedman is right that “the intellectual foundation” for Vladimir Putin’s Russia was, to a large extent, laid thanks to the influence that Solzhenitsyn exerted on the president. You can read more about that influence in my 2016 interview with Jonas Alexis carried by Veterans Today, a site founded by former US military officers who are now critical of US foreign policy. In that Interview I mentioned that I had foreseen Russia’s return to its Christian roots in my 1991 book Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth. In fact, the book was dedicated to the Millennium of Russian Baptism in 1988. At that time Soviet soldiers were forbidden even to wear a crucifix or any other religious symbol.

“Now, if you watch the military parade on the 9th of May, Victory over Germany Day, you will see on Russian national TV how the commanding General Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s Defense Minister, crosses himself publicly before he enters the Red Square through the Kremlin Gate. If you did not see it, I am not surprised. The Big Media indulges in Putin-phobia to divert attention to the greatest event of the past 25 years, Russia’s spiritual rebirth, of which Putin and Shoigu are just two examples”.

Of course, the process of Russia’s spiritual rebirth was very uneven during the Yeltsin era. After returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn was at pain witnessing the loss of the country’s sovereignty after the neo-liberal “shock therapy” reforms were set in motion with the assistance of US government. That “assistance” was perhaps best described by professor Janine Wedel in her book 2001“Collision  and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe”. In December 1998 Solzhenitsyn publicly repudiated Yeltsin’s “reforms” by refusing  to accept the highest national award. As president of RAGA, on March 17, March 1999, I sent to President Clinton an Open Letter on the Russian Crisis demanding to stop interfering in Russian affairs. The letter was signed by over a hundred of prominent Americans and carried by Johnson’s Russia List, an alternative site for unbiased information about Russia. Clinton’s reply was evasive but polite.

With Kevin Barrett: The USA and Russia trading places
In November 2017, I had a video interview with Dr. Kevin Barrett. He is not just a literary scholar familiar with the works of Mikhail Bakhtin but also a fellow dissident in the USA. He described me as a former Soviet dissident and defector who now “wonders whether Russia and the United States have switched places: Now it’s the USA that surveys its citizens, doesn’t tolerate dissenting voices, and insists on inflicting its mendacious official perspective on everyone, everywhere; while Russia has left Communism behind and emerged as a pluralistic nation, whose worst “crime” (according to the Masters of the Universe in Washington) is allowing Western dissidents to reach a larger audience via RT and Sputnik”.

The interviewer asked: Is the USA becoming monologic and totalitarian?  Yes, I replied, it appears that “Russia and the United States have switched places”. But, to be fair, the situation in the States is not yet totalitarian. But regrettably there are unmistakable proclivities toward more monologism in mass media and toward one or another form of totalitarian rule.

Chantal Delsol calls Solzhenitsyn “liberal conservative”
Recently, Chantal Delsol of France argued that Solzhenitsyn is far from a reactionary, as some people called him in a derogatory rage. Delsol rather sees Solzhenitsyn as “liberal conservative”. According to Delsol, Solzhenitsyn has already played a salutary role for France as he gave “a vivid lesson for the history of France, for the younger generations. Let them never forget that abyss of lies into which our society fell: there were an impressive number of Frenchmen who glorified the Soviet regime, while dissidents like Solzhenitsyn lived in fear. Here, in France, everything was done to deny Soviet reality. I will never forget what false arguments my uncle, a French communist, was trying to make me believe that the GULAG Archipelago was written by the CIA.”

As to Solzhenitsyn’s contribution to Western civilization, I remember reading some early articles of Professor Richard Tempest, who also gave a paper   "Solzhenitsyn contra Lenin” at our Vermont forum. In the early article he listed Solzhenitsyn in the same league with such European cultural heroes as Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche and Byron.

As I have shown above, the Russian philosopher Kholmogorov is even more emphatic in stressing Solzhenitsyn’s global reach as well as the need for Western theorists to see the West’s limitations:
“Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is not only a Russian, but a planetary political phenomenon. It was Solzhenitsyn who in his famous Harvard Speech warned the West that they were not alone on this planet, that civilizations described by Western historians and culture theorists are no mere decorative elements, and instead living worlds in themselves, that cannot have a Western measure imposed upon them. Russia, a unique civilization, is of these historical worlds… This very idea has constituted the bedrock of Russian foreign policy since Putin’s Munich Speech in 2007.”

The best summation of Kholmogorov’s article was made by one of The Unz Review attentive readers, AaronB :
<<A return to religion in some form, not necessarily Christianity, but an appreciation for the numinous and the supernatural that underlies all phenomena and the unseen bonds that unites everything (see quantum mechanics), a return to a moral vision and away from mere instrumentalism, a turn away from individualism and towards appreciation for communal life and the rebuilding of social capital in the form of a unifying culture and sense of shared destiny, identity, origin, and purpose, the renewed appreciation for the aesthetic world view, art, poetry, myth, and legend, and the reduction of logic and rationality to important but limited instruments and as not providing unique access to ultimate truth, based on Kant’s demonstration that logic consistently applied ends in absurdity and contradiction, and retaining scientific and technological development but reducing their importance and firmly subordination them to a scale of human values….>>

In a number of crucial respects Kholmogorov unwittingly reiterates Bakhtin’s arguments against the excessive rationalism of the age of Reason and Enlightenment while justifying the need for Dostoevsky’s polyphonic artistic strategy. It was way back in 1929 and then again in 1963 when Mikhail Bakhtin challenged “the monologic principle as the trademark of modern times.”

Ron Unz on the need to accept the whole of Solzhenitsyn
It is very ironic and bad for America that its mega media establishment turned a deaf ear to Solzhenitsyn’s genuinely liberal commandment to always pay attention to polyphony of different political persuasions and engage opponents in a friendly dialogue. “For decades most Americans would have ranked Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn as among the world’s greatest literary figures, and his Gulag Archipelago alone sold over 10 million copies,” says Ron Unz, the publisher of the most remarkable alternative web-journal The Unz Review.  “But his last work (Two Hundred Years Together) was a massive two-volume account of the tragic 200 years of shared history between Russians and Jews, and despite its 2002 release in Russian and numerous other world languages, there has yet to be an authorized English translation, though various partial editions have circulated on the Internet in samizdat form”. This lack of a dialogue among Americans as a social arrangement is very deplorable indeed. No wonder the US government eschews a dialogue with Russia.

I think the man to whom America gave a refuge and freedom to write and who enjoined all of us “Do not live a lie” deserves that First Amendment to US Constitution is fully applies to all his work without exception.

Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century
Even while American publishers were reluctant to publish Solzhenitsyn’s 2002 book on Russian-Jewish relations, Yuri Slezkine’s pioneering book “The Jewish Century,” published in 2004, largely confirms Solzhenitsyn’s contention that Jews played a very prominent role in the Bolshevik revolution.  Professor Slezkine is extremely ingenious in challenging us to think about a variation of religious patterns, geographic and historical circumstances that contribute to a variety of national responses to the challenge of modernity.  One way or another, Slezkine boldly asserts that "The modern era is the Jewish era, and the twentieth century is the Jewish century".

This is not the place to discuss his book, but it's easy to agree with the publishers that this is “one of the most original and intellectually provocative books on Jewish culture for many years.” Slezkine brought the Jews out of the ghetto of exclusivity by conditionally dividing the whole of humanity into Apollonian people, named after Apollo, the Greek god of reason and the settled life, and the admirers of Hermes, the Greek god of craft, mediation, commerce and, it’s no secret, trickery. In the Roman Empire, Hermes expanded his territory under the name of Mercury. Slezkine’s book implicitly repudiates the Marxist denial of the importance of national character and specificity of each ethnic group in the overall history of mankind.

Because of the inherent dogmatism of pseudoscientific Marxism-Leninism, the topic of different national characters and types of behavior was renounced in the USSR as “reactionary” and contrary to the spirit of “proletarian internationalism.” But without this topic, one can hardly understand what happened in Russia in 1917.  Certainly, the writings of Solzhenitsyn, as well as Slezkine’s, pave the way for further research of the subject and its objective evaluation on a global scale. Let me refer the reader to my earlier essay “Emperor Michael II in the Solzhenitsyn House” where I discuss this topic in some detail, including my disagreements with Solzhenitsyn.

Spiritual Realism
Could not then art and literature, if exercised in Solzhenitsyn’s footsteps, offer a very real succor to the modern world?

When I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Solzhenitsyn, one of my favorite authors on the topic of how Westerners approach Russian literature was George Steiner, especially his volume Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Steiner pointed out that both writers “exercise upon our minds pressures and compulsions of such obvious force, they engage values so obviously germane to the major politics of our time, that we cannot, even if we should wish to do so, respond on purely literary grounds”. I think this is no less true of Solzhenitsyn.

But then Steiner tells how some White Russian émigré were thirsting of a “new religious idea: who believe that in a fusion between the thought of Tolstoy and that of Dostoevsky will be found the Symbol, the Union, to lead and revive.” I believe that such a fusion between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky manifested itself in the art of Solzhenitsyn: it has Tolstoy’s historical sweep and Dostoevsky’s psychological insights expressed through polyphony of its diverse ideological heroes. I have called this fusion spiritual realism.

People to People Diplomacy
On December 10, 2018, while I was writing this article, I made a break to attend the International Conference of Scholars to celebrate Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary in Moscow. It was a sign of time that it took place in The Russian State Library which several generations of Russians had known as The Lenin Library. Now the name of the first Soviet leader is chiefly confined to his Mausoleum on Red Square. Natalya Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow, was the first speaker. “Today we celebrate 100 years since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born. Tomorrow, on December 11th, the Second Century of his life will begin”. She was interrupted by a round of healthy applause.

I firmly believe that Solzhenitsyn’s writing will bless and endow the 21st century in Russia. I also hope it will endow the United States. After all, the major part of his works was researched and produced in the USA. This obliges all his devotees in both countries, as well as in China and the rest of the world, to take seriously his call for “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations” he issued way back in 1973.

“Today, as never before, a Christian initiative is needed to counter the godless humanism that is destroying mankind. … We are too passive. … We do not carry our own religious will. … We seem to have forgotten that we have been entrusted with the great task of transforming the world. … We need new creative efforts, we need a new language. We must speak of what is beyond modernity, of what is eternally living and absolute in this world, of what is simultaneously both eternally old and eternally young. It must mean not only a breakthrough into eternity but the presence of eternity in our own time. … It must lead not to a reformation but to a transformation of Christian consciousness and life, and through it to a transformation of the world.”

It is not an easy task. But, in the face of threat of war that might destroy all life on the Planet Earth, no task, no matter how hard, should be viewed as “unrealistic” or not worthy of trying.  This is not just relevant but highly urgent for both the USA and Russia, the two leading nuclear powers, to hear for Solzhenitsyn’s call.

Margo Caulfield’s Letter to Russia
Let me conclude by pasting the letter that the people of Cavendish, Vermont, sent to the people of Russia, the letter that Natalya Solzhenitsyn shared with the audience in the Russian State Library conference on December 10, 2018.

To the People of Russia:
For 18 of the 20 years he was exiled from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his family lived with us in Cavendish, Vermont. The Solzhenitsyns were then, as they are now, good neighbors, respected and valued members of our community.

While we are sad when residents choose to leave, we were glad that Solzhenitsyn was able to return to his “motherland,” as he predicted he would at our 1977 Cavendish Town Meeting. No matter how much our countryside may have reminded him of Russia, and allowed him the time to write, it would never compensate for the country he cared so deeply about.

Solzhenitsyn’s values were a good match for our Yankee way of life-hard work and the ability to speak freely and openly, yet also respectful of others and their privacy. While he learned from us how grass-roots democracy works, we in turn were reminded of the importance of providing sanctuary to those in need and the value of having courage and strong beliefs.

Upon his departure, Solzhenitsyn left the town not only autographed copies of his books, but more importantly, a homestead which allows his children to remain an integral and important part of our community. The lessons he instilled in his sons are shared with us as we work together to resolve the thorny issues of 21st-century life.

Every town needs a secret, such as the one we kept: “No directions to the Solzhenitsyn’s home,” as it united us for a common good. We still do not give out directions, but we do welcome visitors from around the world.

On this the 100th birthday of Solzhenitsyn, the people of Cavendish extend our best wishes to the people of his homeland.

On behalf of the people of Cavendish,

Margo Caulfield, Director, Cavendish Historical Society

Brendan McNamara, Cavendish Town Manager

As an act of People-to-People diplomacy, this letter has reaffirmed my faith in America which once gave me a refuge and hospitality but now appears to be less civil at home and more war-like abroad than it was when my Russia was in the grip of totalitarian Communism. Solzhenitsyn, more than anybody else, unites Russia and the USA in their urgent task and duty to secure a peaceful, free, fair,  and harmonious global commonwealth in which every nation is a proud member.

Dr. Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow), former professor and head of the Russian Department of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who currently runs an Association of Americans for Friendship with Russia, RAGA (www.raga.org). He is the author of Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth («Новая Россия: от коммунизма к национальному возрождению»)

December 15, 2018, Moscow              © W.G. Krasnow, 2018
​
READING SOLZHENITSYN: AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE. George Krasnow, PhD. Russian-American Goodwill Association (RAGA). Presentation: "If an artist imagines himself as a god…. A.I. Solzhenitsyn – on the role of a writer and art, and Russian national character in the imagination of the writer." https://www.northernvermont.edu/about/news-events/events/reading-solzhenitsyn-international-conference

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture given in 1974 for his 1970 award.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/lecture/


​Vladislav Krasnov. Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel , 1980
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Dostoevsky-Study-Polyphonic-Novel/dp/0820304727

“A World Split Apart” 
​
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm


The Voice of America (VOA) reports about our Forum  includes James Herold’s remarks
https://www.golos-ameriki.ru/a/solzhenitsyn-100-anniversary/4582048.html


Philosophers' ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_ships

​​Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin
​
Pavel Licko, “Jedneho dna u Alexandra Isaevicha Soolzhenitsyna: Literarna tvorba a umelecke nazory,” Kulturny zhivot (Bratislava), March 31, 1967.

​Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Theory and History of Literature) by Mikhail Bakhtin
https://www.amazon.com/Problems-Dostoevskys-Poetics-History-Literature/dp/0816612285

​See the discussion of Bakhtin pp. 8-9 in Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A study in the polyphonic novel. 1980, By Vladislav. Krasnov,. https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Dostoevsky-study-polyphonic-novel/dp/

​Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth, Boulder, CO, 1991.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Beyond-Communism-Chronicle-CONTEMPORARY/dp/0813383617

​Marshall McLuhan  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

​“On The Jewish Question”. 1843. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

​Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
​https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm


​Wladislaw Krasnow, Karl Marx as Frankenstein: Toward a Genealogy of Communism,”
https://www.unz.com/print/ModernAge-1978q1-00072/)


​Max Weber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism))

​Ronald Hingley, https://www.revolvy.com/page/Ronald-Hingley)

​The Russian Mind, a review https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ronald-hingley/the-russian-mind/

​Krasnov’s article about Ronald Hingley’s The Russian Mind is available only in Russian.Владислав КРАСНОВ, Русский склад ума или западное состояние умов? О книге Рональда Хингли «Русский склад ума». Опубликовано в журнале "Континент", 1978, № 17 и потом снова Континент 2013, 152
Читать онлайн http://magazines.russ.ru/continent/2013/152/18k.html

​Wladislaw G. Krasnow, “Richard Pipes's Foreign Strategy: Anti-Soviet or Anti-Russian?” https://www.jstor.org/stable/i207433/  It was carried under my name Wladislaw G. Krasnow in The Russian Review,

​Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 1979). Along with Pipes’s reply, it was later re-published in British “Encounter” magazine. Its Russian translation appeared in Russian expatriate magazine “Posev”, № 1, 1980.

​Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth, Boulder, CO, 1991.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Beyond-Communism-Chronicle-CONTEMPORARY/dp/0813383617

​Richard Grenier, “Solzhenitsyn and Anti-Semitism”.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/13/books/solzhenitsyn-and-anti-semitism-a-new-debate.html

​David Aikman and Solzhenitsyn, Time
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958195,00.html


​Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle Of National Rebirth (C C R S SERIES ON CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY SOVIET SOCIETY) 1st Edition By Vladislav Krasnov  (Author), W. George Krasnow (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Beyond-Communism-Chronicle-CONTEMPORARY/dp/0813383617

​Letter to the Soviet Leaders   
https://www.amazon.com/Letter-leaders-Aleksandr-Isaevich-Solzhenit%CD%A1s%EF%B8%A1yn/dp/0060139137  


​Mao-Tse-Tung, https://www.biography.com/people/mao-tse-tung-9398142

​Deng Xiaoping
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/20/world/deng-xiaoping-a-political-wizard-who-put-china-on-the-capitalist-road.html


​​Lech Wałęsa (born 1943) is a Polish politician and labor activist. He co-founded and headed Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland from 1990 to 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Wałęsa

Václav Havel (1936 – 2011) was a Czech statesman, writer and former dissident, who served as the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. As a writer, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Václav_Havel

​​Quoted as it appears in “Russia Beyond Communism”, p. 330.

​The 
nomenklatura (Russian: номенклату́ра Latin: nomenclatura) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloccountries who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity, whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each region.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura. The term was popularized in the West by the Soviet dissident Michael Voslenski, who in 1970 wrote a book titled Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class.


The usual translation of the article is Rebuilding Russia. I prefer my translation, ‘How Can We Make Russia Livable’ because it is stylistically less authoritative and more inclusive as it invites the readers to a common effort aimed not at an ambitious, grandiose and remote goal but at assuring people’s needs.

​Алекса́ндр Севастья́нов (род. 1954 г, Москва) — российский политический деятель. Бывший сопредседатель Национально-державной партии России, лишённой регистрации в 2003 году
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Севастьянов,_Александр_Никитич
He blogs (in Russian) at http://sevastianov.ru/biografiya/index.html


​2009-01-03 Александр Севастьянов , Солженицын: упущенный шанс? Он не сделал того, для чего был рождён. http://www.apn.ru/publications/article21208.htm

​See Egor Kholmogorov’s bio in Russian https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Холмогоров,_Егор_Станиславович
In English see ANATOLY KARLIN in Egor Kholmogorov: Russians in the 20th Century, Part I
MARCH 26, 2018  http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russians-in-20th-century-1/
See also his interview with Paul Robinson
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/interview-with-egor-kholmogorov


​Egor Kholmogorov: Alexander Solzhenitsyn - A Russian Prophet. ANATOLY KARLIN • APRIL 24, 2018 http://www.unz.com/akarlin/prophet-solzhenitsyn/

​Heinrich Böll (1917 – 1985) Germany's foremost post-World War II writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Böll

​Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (1935 –1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, he wrote Soul On Ice, a collection of essays that was praised by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant and revealing". In 1958, Cleaver  was convicted of rape and assault. While in prison, he was given a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Cleaver was released on parole in 1966,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

​Solzhenitsyn, the moral vision Hardcover – 1980. By Edward E Ericson  
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Moral-Vision-Edward-Ericson/dp/0802835279#customerReviews In 1993 it was followed by Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (Occasional Papers Book 2) Kindle Edition by Edward Ericson (Author), Russell Kirk (Introduction) 
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Modern-World-Occasional-Papers-ebook/dp/B010G77A8G

​CALVIN REMEMBERS ED ERICSON. May 02, 2017 | Lynn Rosendale
https://calvin.edu/news/archive/calvin-remembers-ed-ericson

​Bradley P. Hayton  
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Moral-Vision-Edward-Ericson/dp/0802835279#customerReviews


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology (20th Century Political Thinkers)
by Daniel J. Mahoney  (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn-Ideology-Political-Thinkers/dp/0742521133


​Robert Legvold’s review of Mahoney’s book
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2002-01-01/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-ascent-ideology


​Ignat Solzhenitsyn (born1972) is a Russian-American conductor and pianist. He is the conductor laureate of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and the principal guest conductor of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignat_Solzhenitsyn

​Margo Caulfield, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Writer Who Changed History. February 2016
https://www.amazon.com/Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn-Writer-Changed-History/dp/1530160855

​​A Talk With Solzhenitsyn, The New York Times, May 11, 1980.  By HILTON KRAMER https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-interview.html?_r=3&oref=login&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

​Gleb Panfilov's 2006 film series “The First Circle” (in Russian) https://tvkultura.ru/about/show/brand_id/3858/

​Quoted from Vladslav Krasnov, “Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky”, p. 121
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Dostoevsky-Study-Polyphonic-Novel/dp/0820304727

​George Friedman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Friedman

​​George Friedman, “Solzhenitsyn: Struggle for Russia’s Soul” on September 7, 2008. Remarkably I found his article on an Indian site  http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=14 Courtesy www.stratfor.com

​
Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson See also his site https://jordanbpeterson.com/


John Gretton "Jocko" Willink is an American podcaster, author, and retired United States Navy SEAL. He received the Silver Star and Bronze Star for his service in the Iraq War. He commanded SEAL Team Three's Task Unit Bruiser during the Battle of Ramadi. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocko_Willink

​Jocko Podcast 155 w/ Jordan Peterson: Jordan Peterson and Jocko VS. Evil. The Gulag
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU8IwII8hhc

​The Gulag Archipelago. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/1021095/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn.html

​Peterson’s 15 important books https://jordanbpeterson.com/books/book-list/

​Krasnov and Alexis talk about Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Truth Can and Will Destroy the New World Order and Satanism. By Jonas E. Alexis -July 14, 2016
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/07/14/alexander-solzhenitsyn-truth-can-and-will-destroy-the-new-world-order-and-satanism/

​Something truly amazing happened today. May 09, 2015
http://thesaker.is/something-truly-amazing-happened-today/

​Janine Wedel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_R._Wedel

​Wedel, J. R. Wedel, J. R. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe Palgrave, 2001.  https://www.amazon.com/Collision-Collusion-Strange-Western-Eastern/dp/0312238282

​Johnson's Russia List, http://russialist.org/ For my letter see W. George Krasnow: Open Letter on the Russian Crisis. (Revised version). http://www.russialist.org/archives/3094.html

​See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Krasnov
​See also his book Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Hoover Institution Press Publication) https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Defectors-Wanted-Institution-Publication/dp/0817982329


​Vladislav “George” Krasnov: Is the USA becoming monologic and totalitarian? November 25, 2017 Kevin Barrett
Text is here https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/2017/11/vladislav-george-krasnov-is-the-usa-becoming-monologic-and-totalitarian/ Below is the video with Krasnov: Is the USA becoming monologic and totalitarian? Kevin Barrett, Published on Dec 12, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVX8pEONbzQ

​Chantal Delsol, «Soljenitsyne n'est pas réactionnaire, c'est un conservateur libéral»
http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2018/11/18/31003-20181118ARTFIG00138-chantal-delsol-soljenitsyne-n-est-pas-reactionnaire-c-est-un-conservateur-liberal.php

​Richard Tempest, PhD. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain. Presentation:  "Solzhenitsyn contra Lenin”
https://www.northernvermont.edu/about/news-events/events/reading-solzhenitsyn-international-conference

​Munich speech of Vladimir Putin
​
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_speech_of_Vladimir_Putin


​AaronB says: April 25, 2018 at 8:12 pm GMT • 200 Words @for-the-record

​RON UNZ • JULY 30, 2018, “American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism”.
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-anti-semitism-a-century-ago/

​The Crucifixion of Russia: A new English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together
by Columbus Falco. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36499209-the-crucifixion-of-russia. It includes a review by Jan Peczkis.

​Yuri Slezkine is a Russian-born professor of Russian history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the books The Jewish Century (2004) and The House of Government: A Saga of The Russian Revolution (2017) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Slezkine

​Yuri Slezkine. “The Jewish Century” Princeton University Press (2004). https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7819.html ​

Emperor Michael II in the Solzhenitsyn House - Author: Vladislav Krasnov. 7/16/2018  
http://www.raga.org.prx.us.teleportyou.com/news/emperor-michael-ii-in-the-solzhenitsyn-house-author-vladislav-krasnov

​​Francis George Steiner,(born 1929)is a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Steiner

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, by George Steiner  (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Essay-Criticism-Second/dp/0300069170

Александр Солженицын: взгляд из XXI века. 10 декабря в Доме Пашкова прошло торжественное открытие международной конференции «Александр Солженицын: взгляд из XXI века». https://www.rsl.ru/ru/events/afisha/conf/aleksandr-solzheniczyin-xxi

​REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973) *Selected excerpts: http://my.ilstu.edu/~jguegu/ALEKSANDRSOLZHENITSYN.pdf
​

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

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