Spectator's Journal/In Love in Washington
Stein, Benjamin J.
9 . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....
...He, like the rest of us, has had to come to terms with the fact thal the line between good and evil passes through each human heart...
...And Scammell agrees...
...Nearly fifty years later Solzhenitsyn is still working on it, having changed sides but not literary mentors...
...Thus Soizhenitsyn came to realize that he was on a journey towards spiritual rather than political enlightenment...
...Gulag is what it says...
...It is the story of a soul, an account of how Solzhenitsyn came to realize through suffering that, as he puts it in one of his camp poems quoted in Gulag, the twists and turns of his life were illumined Not with good judgment or with desire . . . . But with the even glow of the Higher Meaning...
...The times were unstable and unconducive to matrimonial permanence...
...Yet Fastenko got the last laugh...
...Significantly, his first serious writing project, an epic novel celebrating the Revolution of 1917, was inspired by War and Peace, whose author Lenin once blamed for defeating the Revolution of 1905...
...Of more immediate concern in Moscow in the early sixties, of course, were the gilded monuments of commissars...
...In his very first cell Solzhenitsyn met Anatoly Fastenko, a Social Democrat whose prison experience went back to 1904, and whose account of it directly contradicted what Solzhenitsyn remembered learning from history teachers...
...No amount of potato probing could prevent either him from airing his honest skepticism, or Solzhenitsyn from being infected by it...
...Thus his first impression was that truth is fixed and transcendent and that its usual exponents are artists, poets, and So the damage was done...
...They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them . . . . And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more...
...Not science, not history, not the class struggle, but beauty...
...A prophet is not without honor save in affluent exile.' There is a sense of anticlimax about the last six chapters of Scammell's mammoth biography...
...0.1zg-z~2-4 ~, (415) 497-3373 Chargecard orders accepted by telephone...
...Once he had thought himself to be in the hands of history...
...So we are back to Aunt Irina and Dostoevsky's famous claim that "Beauty will save the world...
...Nor--will they ever drag you off to the electoral precinct to vote freely and secretly for a single candidate...
...26.95 June 71985...
...Anyone who doubts the validity of Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West should read the memo reproduced by Dunlop in which Henry Kissinger urges President Ford to avoid officially honoring the exiled dissident...
...foreign policy then in place...
...j..fy ~ ~s ~72 pp...
...Dunlop makes clear, tbr example, that President Ford's refusal to receive Solzhenitsyn in the White House was not just a gaffe in the same category as his comment on Poland, but part of consistent U.S...
...It helped him to rediscover life's moral dimension, thus freeing him from the sterilities of socialist realism, but it also inspired him to try out a new genre of writing: transcendental realism...
...These documents will enable readers to form their own judgment about Smith's patriotism and integrity...
...At the age of ten he entitled a notebook, "q~ventieth Century: On the Meaning of the Twentieth Century," but, alas, this boyish bow in the direction of Hegel was very far from indicating that Aunt Irina's influence had waned...
...How could 1 with no one forcing me," he wonders in his memoirs, "have come to inform against myself...
...Solzhenitsyn has the true poet's sense of being responsible for keeping alive sacred truths...
...For him, as for Solzhenitsyn, campaigns to give socialism a human face must fail because socialism and humanity are at cross purposes...
...The burning pronouncements with which he once shocked the conscience of a planet have become his "familiar litany of the West's failings...
...No longer, however, the sheer truth...
...He injects such a burningly prophetic note into his camp writings that it is difficult to imagine him not trying to get them into print...
...The IF YOU ENJOY 9 R. Emmett Tyrrell's musings 9 political and economic analysis 9 incisive book, movie, and saloon reviews 9 idiotic quotations culled from around the world You should not go another month without The American Spectator...
...0-alrg-a~72-~ p~.~, Yearbook on international Communist Affairs" 1985...
...And in fact there is little prospect that any startling new evidence will ever turn up, because with the exception of a few passages in national security documents and some unrecorded conversations between Eisenhower and Central Intelligence Director Allen Dulles, everything relevant to presidential policy-making from 1953 to 1961 is now available to scholars...
...One has to remember that Soviet writers who go underground, unlike their Western counterparts, really do cut themselves off from access to the established media...
...And despite his frequent golf-andbridge vacations (during which, in any case, he couldn't escape the responsibilities of office) he was a prodigiously hard worker--up at six for breakfast and newspapers, at his desk by eight, straight through without a break till a working lunch at one, back at his desk until six or later, a cocktail, dinner off a TV tray while watching the evening news, then more paper work till about eleven, when he would finally knock off to spend an hour painting, before bed and a little light reading...
...Pushing him into the West turns out to have been Moscow's most brilliant stroke...
...In his view this is the question of the age, and he has written at such length about Solzhenitsyn to help his readers come to grips with it...
...Send in your new or renewal subscription order today...
...j~,~y 1 1985...
...What impact can transcendental realism have among readers for whom reality has stopped being transcendent...
...One important service he performs in this book is to shatter the media image of Solzhenitsyn as an Old Believer who spends his days writing outdated novels and chewing over dead quarrels9 To view him thus, of course, is to accept the premise of his enemies...
...Charles Lindbergh, was denounced "The information isrich, reliable, and concisely presented...
...But what will never again be in dispute is Eisenhower's total mastery of the office...
...Having rediscovered Russia's Christian heritage in Gulag, he wished to pay tribute to this fact in the world of meetings, propaganda, and one-man-every-vote democracy which rehabilitation had sentenced him to...
...b,u.~y ~ ~98s ~3~ p0 0.8~79,m-~ p,~ NEW IN PAPERBACK BERLIN ALERT: The Memoirs and Reports of Truman Smith by Robert Hessen . . . A book that is fascinating in every way...
...Orwell was wrong in believing that force could obliterate truth...
...0-8179-8171-3...
...Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir and first publisher of Solzhenitsyn's writings, continued to champion them even after the post-Khrushchev repression which caused the downfall of Novy Mir and may have hastened his own death...
...where his commitment to literature and morality was leading him...
...The dividing line between them," says Scammell, "was still the barbed-wire fence and the ploughed strip, a ghostly barrier that continued to separate the oppressed 'us' from the privileged 'them.' " Solzhenitsyn's comments on Tvardovsky may sound unduly harsh and tendentious, but they were made, Scammell reminds us, in harsh and tendentious times...
...Scammell makes Solzhenitsyn's subsequent nine-year-long confrontation with history's most pitiless despotism the centerpiece of his biography, devoting seventeen of fiftytwo chapters to it...
...Then he was libeled out of the Lenin Prize for literature, and finally in the fall of 1965 the KGB stole a collection of his manuscripts...
...Didn't that troubled genius write against the Enlightenment...
...Nor should it be necessary to add that the kind of work which filled those long hours was rather more wearing than figuring out a lead for today's column or marking exams...
...Only after having had to do penance behind barbed wire did he sense within himself "the first stirrings of good...
...Possessed as he was with an artist's craving for critical recognition, how could he have done otherwise...
...in other words, he appreciates that what divided Solzhenitsyn from his government was not politics but cosmology...
...The added emphasis is mine, but the facts belong to journalism's history...
...In fact Ike was about as arrogant as a man can be, as confident of his own intellectual powers as he was contemptuous of those of most of the people he had to deal with...
...They were on opposite sides in a war of religion, a fact which Scammell tragically confirms in his description of the friendship between Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Tvardovsky...
...At high school he formally converted to Marxism and joined the Komsomol...
...Any official favor bestowed on Ivan Denisovich must therefore be tactical rather than ideological, and Solzhenitsyn could be assured that the rhetoric of liberalization notwithstanding, outside Gulag and the world of samizdat he remained in hostile territory...
...Eisenhower's battle to keep a lid on defense spending encapsulates a good deal of what was most important and characteristic of his eight years as President...
...While the William Appleman Williamses were busy faking United States responsibility for the Cold War and business representatives were hurrying eastwards with software in their sample cases and diplomats were promising never again to challenge the presence of Soviet tanks on the Elbe in return for being allowed to send Canadian symphony orchestras to Byelorussia, this one man living without a residence permit in Moscow created in Gulag so powerful a symbol of Soviet frightfulness that over ten years later it is still necessary for the meanest peace camper in the remotest corner of rural liberaldom to name both superpowers in their broadsheets...
...Here his original question concerning the durability of Soviet power comes most sharply into focus...
...In any case, who are we to demand impartiality when our own much vaunted liberal consensus has come to sound about as sensibly objective as the theology of Hare Krishna...
...Each Karl O'Lessker is senior editor of this journal, professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, and senior research fellow of the Hudson Institute...
...Going public as an author would of necessity mean exposing himself as an antiSoviet...
...The Communist world, then, really /s an evil empire...
...But one thing they cannot do is to take him seriously as an anti-modernist...
...The October Revolution, says Solzhenitsyn, was built on lies...
...In the presence of a known police informer Fastenko repeated Descartes' Maxim, "Question everything," which Solzhenitsyn took to heart so thoroughly that within two years he had abandoned Leninism, and by the end of his sentence had come to regard the October Revolution neither as a red dawn, nor even as a painful if necessary step in human progress, but as an avoidable tragedy...
...For Scammell the exact opposite is true...
...And rightly so...
...Solzhenitsyn records watching his fellow prisoner, Fastenko, opening a lood parcel...
...That his conservatism is an aberration, the result of Gulag-induced bitterness, long separation from current intellectual trends, or just plain Russian curmudgeonliness...
...Instead it is Solzhenitsyn who has undertaken to keep the memory of Gulag aliveqin a series of books about which he is entitled to say without boasting: Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme...
...Nor--articles in the wall newspaper . . . . The character most famously identified with this freedom within slavery is Ivan Denisovich, Everyman in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag morality play, an ordinary Russian of the 1950s who combines peasant cunning with resignation to the will of God in a way that would have delighted Tolstoy and even caught Khrushchev's fancy...
...the questions he received at his press conferences were uniformly hostile...
...In Gulag Solzhenitsyn learnt above all to question Marxist psychological assumptions...
...SOLZHENITSYN: A BIOGRAPHY Michael Scammell/Norton/$29.95 John Muggeridge modern...
...Gulag is investigative literature...
...In fact it was in connection with this same heroic and largely unsung scholarly enterprise that just over a decade ago he began collecting material for a life of Solzhenitsyn which would "illustrate and explain a quintessential Russian and a major figure of our era...
...The best one could say about him was that he had overreached himself, "his v o i c e . . , growing shriller and less convincing as he tried to extend his range further...
...it is to assume that modernity begins with revolution and that therefore anti-Bolsheviks such as Solzhenitsyn are by their natures antiJohn Muggeridge teaches history at Niagara College in Welland, Ontario...
...So much for Eurocommunism...
...Everyone has his own measure of the distance between then and now--cultural, technological, biographical, political...
...This is where Solzhenitsyn nonpluses Western liberals...
...0-8179-8271-X...
...Imagine Allen Ginsberg being content to spend a lifetime memorizing his verses or hiding typescripts of them in Moscow apartments...
...You were either a trustee or a victim...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...Also with authority...
...Why wasn't the United States doing more...
...In fact they are counterproductive...
...Nor does Scammell allow himself to be seduced by the dulcet tones of liberalization...
...Smersh should have either shot him or not picked him up...
...There were, Scammell insists, faults on both sides...
...he belonged to the Party elite, had a dacha, and went HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS--SPRING-SUMMER USSR Foreign Policies After Detente by Richard F. Staar According to V.V...
...But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie...
...There results one of the sweetest marriages between form and content in modern literature...
...Zagladin, one of Moscow's leading ideologists, the The Flat Tax by Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka In his 1985 State of the Union Address, President Reagan called "historic mission" of the USSR has for tax simplification, calling it a three aspects- to build communism "giant step toward unleashing the in the USSR, to assist countries already following the communist path, and to support "social progress" toward communism in all other countries...
...So, what are fair-minded liberals to think of Solzhenitsyn...
...Nor--when someone jerks the string, to shout: "We demand...
...now he knew that he was in those of Providence...
...the prophet who once refused to be silenced is now a celebrity-seeker who "fulfilled his self-chosen function of drawing attention to the subjects and ideas that preoccupied him and putting them on the public agenda...
...In the intoxication of youthful success," he recalls in The Gulag Archipelago, "I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel...
...Scammell refuses to discredit Solzhenitsyn's case against Soviet Communism simply because it appeals to a pre-Soviet Christian tradition...
...Zurich and Vermont are as far as it is possible to be 'Western disparagement of Solzhenitsyn is fascinatingly documented in Solzhenitsyn in Exile, a collection of scholarly essays to be published in September by the Hoover Institution Press...
...Scammell is therefore able to discuss Solzhenitsyn in relation to it with sympathy and understanding...
...Translator, long-time editor of Index on Censorship, a magazine which specializes in documenting the lack of free speech behind the Iron Curtain, he has for many years now devoted himself to keeping Englishspeaking readers in touch with Russia's dissident culture...
...Less than a quarter of a century ago the nation's media elite were a pack of unreconstructed Cold Warriors, regarding the Soviet Union as a threat to world peace and the United States as dangerously unprepared for war...
...He makes them into the setting for an anti-Soviet morality play in which he himself is the central character...
...Gulag encouraged a revisionist approach to the whole Soviet enterprise...
...And isn't the mixture of panslavism and religiosity which Solzhenitsyn finds so admirable precisely what we moderns are supposed to dislike most in Dostoevsky's thinking...
...What will doubtless change over the years is the interpretation and assessment of Ike's motives and actions...
...His prose is workmanlike...
...His portrit is fair, detailed, widely documented, but above all integrated...
...This is what makes Scammell's account of Solzhenitsyn in Moscow so admirable...
...you can resist the progressivism of the day without being written off as an epicure or a fascist...
...Nor--self-criticism of your mistakes...
...Tvardovsky was an establishment man...
...you either betrayed or were betrayed...
...So it was with unshaken confidence in the future that in 1944 he and a fellow Red Army officer found time between defending the Fatherland to draw up "Resolution No...
...Not that Scammell whitewashes Solzhenitsyn...
...it was a case of "the muzhik Ivan Denisovich" appealing to "the supreme muzhik Nikita Khrushchev...
...Always there were choices to make, temptations to overcome, levels of human behavior to avoid sinking below...
...His famous "Letter to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers" demands the emancipation of Russian literature from government control, but says nothing about the virtue of free speech in general, while The Gulag Archipelago, his most eloquent tribute to the victims of political oppression, declares all revolutions to be false...
...reaction to Solzhenitsyn...
...Gradually it was disclosed to him "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, not between political parties either--but right through every human heart--and through all human hearts...
...Here was organized nonSoviet thinking within the Soviet Union, a sprawling community of several million Russians on whom Moscow's ministry of truth exercised about as much influence as the Delphic Oracle, the perfect basis, in other words, for a conservatism untainted by nostalgia...
...He took for granted that governments on the side of the angels would act angelically, and if ever they forgot their obligations as gentlemen and revolutionaries, one could always threaten to restorm the Winter Palace...
...reader today can supply his own contrast with no fear that it will be too sharp...
...Not until Resolution No...
...His aunt lrina began plying him with books by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky when he was barely nine, but even more ominously she presented him with a collection of Russian proverbs...
...Scammell argues that it is perfectly possible to be both...
...Who would have guessed that the grinning dunce of Herblock's cartoons and Arthur Schlesinger's prose had been calling the shots on every major issue of foreign and domestic policy, from mutual security assistance to soil conservation, from arms control to interstate highways...
...in fact the Bolsheviks are the ones whose outlook lacks credibility, and when Solzhenitsyn challenges their claim to be the wave of the future, far from turning his back on the present, he is confronting the central issue facing today's generation: how to keep alive the idea of intellectual freedom in a world so widely committed to believing that every left-wing revolution marks yet another victory for science over ignorance and superstition9 According to Scammell, what turned Solzhenitsyn into so unyielding an opponent of historicism was early exposure to Russian literature...
...Did not the President fear a Soviet first strike...
...It's not just that Eisenhower was thought to be lazy, he was widely regarded as plain dumb, a simple, even simple-minded, soldier being manipulated by far more clever and ruthless men--George Humphrey, John Foster Dulles, oil millionaires and the like...
...You cannot be appointed some kind of delegate...
...In the argument over Solzhenitsyn it has slavishly followed Moscow's line...
...It was this last which he regarded as 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985...
...from the bright vision which Solzhenitsyn wrote so movingly about on his release from prison camp...
...All to no avail...
...Yet he and Solzhenitsyn remained dear enemies...
...you can proclaim your faith in the natural law without having to join a strident minority or carry unfashionably worded picket signs...
...Perhaps none is as startling as this: Through the last years of his presidency, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose reminds us, "Eisenhower was fighting virtually a one-man battle on holding down the costs of defense . . . . Not a single member of the White House press corps was on his side...
...The camps exist...
...It rises above liberal stereotypes...
...His treatment of Solzhenitsyn's divorce and remarriage is in particular a model of balanced and charitable reporting...
...This is understandable...
...Not THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists,, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Perhaps the most chilling essay is that of John B. Dunlop which analyzes U.S...
...their machine-gun-swept perimeters show up in aerial photography...
...Solzhenitsyn, however, does more than take pictures of them...
...Here, as Scammell shows, is the supreme irony of Solzhenitsyn's life...
...Much of it he did with what political scientist Fred Greenstein has called a "hidden-hand...
...The whole duty of man boiled down to a single commandment: Thou shalt save thine THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 29 own skin...
...Largely based on primary sources in the Russian language, this volume presents the people, policies, and practices of recent Soviet foreign policies...
...he confessed while recovering from a cancer operation in the prison hospital at Ekibastuz, "I believe again!/Though I renounced You, You were with me...
...edited by Richard F. Staar The Yearbook, now in its nineteenth consecutive year, continues its complete, authoritative, and timely coverage of communist parties and international front organizations, providing basic data on membership levels, organization, tremendous pent-up power of our economy...
...Most politicians he simply regarded as intellectual and moral pygmies, most businessmen as far too narrow-minded...
...First came articles in literary reviews diminishing the reputation of Ivan Denisovich...
...Intended to demonstrate that the idea of revolution is invincible, they succeed only in exposing its hollowness...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone what--but how...
...Soizhenitsyn is a big book for one reason only: It deals with a big question...
...Needless to say, no concrete or granite monstrosity hasarisen to be added to the itinerary of visiting disarmers...
...Scammell wants to know whether the rise of Soviet power represents "a temporary aberration of European culture (though much less temporary than the similar phenomenon of Nazism)," or whether it points to "a general collapse of our civilization into barbarism...
...What would be the point of prophesying in private...
...Far from being the indolent, ignorant figurehead of liberal demonology, he was as involved and well-informed a leader as we have had in the post-World War II era...
...Not what has been attained--but at what price...
...lies can be kept in place only through violence...
...he treats it, in fact, with the same sort of sympathetic understanding that one would expect to see displayed towards an argument against Nazism based on traditionalist Jewish sources...
...This newspaper is, of course, the voice of the French Communist party...
...Though ready enough to embrace the new patriotism, he could not bring himself to accept the new approach to reality...
...No other periodical contains these well-balanced ingredients...
...The American Spectator...
...Nor does he display the slightest symptom of Carlos Baker's disease, or documentia...
...But still, Solzhenitsyn did commit adultery, and did desert his first wife in her middle age, an act of injustice for which he has felt bitterly sorry ever since...
...at university he became a famous editor of the student wall newspaper and an attempt was even made to recruit him for the NKVD...
...It is only when Solzhenitsyn is forced into the West that Scammell's resistance to liberal stereotypes crumbles...
...Here again the truth could hardly be more different, as the following piece of unimpeachable testimony should make clear: After a stag dinner Ike hosted for some of the nation's top journalists, businessmen, and government officials, George Kennan, dazzled by the President's performance, remarked that he had shown "his intellectual ascendancy over every man in the room...
...We will not permit...
...Everywhere, in fact, was living proof of Solzhenitsyn's exultant assertion: "It is not the result that c o u n t s . . , but the spirit...
...19.95...
...Unbounded as is their admiration for his civil rights record, they cannot help being puzzled by his invoking Dostoevsky's name...
...Never for a moment did he doubt that he was the best man to lead America...
...As soon as the extent of Solzhenitsyn's attack on Soviet historiography became apparent, it was time to attack his credibility...
...How could someone such as Solzhenitsyn, who had dared in 1967 publicly to oppose the Soviet censorship, approve of the "universe of overblown gestures, murky depths and aggressive sentimentality" which the Prague Spring dissident, Milan Kundera, sees evidence of in Dostoevsky's work...
...He says what he is going to say and says it...
...9 . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BOOK REVIEWS If you include notes, bibliography, and index, Michael Scammell's Solzhenitsyrt" A Biography covers 1,051 pages...
...but it was always Ike's hand, nobody else's, on the levers of power...
...All of them he measured by the yardstick of his own self-appraisal--and almost all of them came off badly, lacking that unique and indispensable combination of qualities he saw in himself: character, self-discipline, maturity, devotion to duty, and "common sense...
...In Western left-wing echo chambers the word then went out that we should admire Solzhenitsyn more as a freedom fighter than as a writer--which ignores the basic point that what makes him a freedom fighter is his achievement as a writer...
...Scammell, however, is concerned less with judging Solzhenitsyn than with describing him...
...When would we catch up with the Russians...
...No reference or research library concerned with world affairs can afford to be without a copy"--Current History $49.95...
...Dostoevsky...
...No one comes around to squeeze membership dues out of you in voluntary societies...
...For in the struggle with lies art always triumphs and always will...
...For Scammell the art of writing a man's life always transcends that of piecing together the torn-off pages of his desk diaries...
...1" which not only criticized Stalin for trampling on civil rights, but called for the formation of a new party dedicated to putting Russia back on the path of true Leninism...
...7.95...
...But what most interests Scammell is the effect that Gulag had on Solzhenitsyn's development as a writer...
...Doesn't being against the censorship make one per se a progressivist...
...Perhaps we should expect moralists at least to avoid public immorality...
...Not that Scammell rambles...
...Otherwise Gulags would work...
...The picture one takes away from them is of a hero who has outlived his greatness...
...1 had duly landed Solzhenitsyn in Gulag did he come to appreciate the contradiction between truth as propounded by Lenin and as handed down by Aunt Irina...
...they might even agree with blahlettrist Peter Ustinov, whom I once heard accuse Solzhenitsyn of being more interested in making money than in saving civilization...
...Even with Scammell the Soviet campaign to marginalize Solzhenitsyn has succeeded...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 31 on hard-currency visits to the West...
...their three million innocent inhabitants can be counted...
...It contained a few ounces of black bread and a dozen peeled potatoes through each of which an awl had been pushed...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...and a corollary: business and individual income taxes must be integrated...
...Yet some resisted it...
...Imagine a world without slim 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 volumes, university quarterlies, or writers-in-residenceships...
...Perhaps he should have called it Solzhenitsyn...
...In The Oak and the Ca/f Solzhenitsyn attributes the success of his first published story neither to poetry nor to politics but to "unchanging peasant nature...
...Nor was it just literary claustrophobia that prompted Solzhenitsyn to take the momentous step of offering ivan Denisovich to Novy Mir...
...600 pp...
...Gulag not only turned Solzhenitsyn into a Christian patriot, but gave his Christian patriotism post-revolutionary credentials...
...It says that life does indeed have a higher meaning, and one, moreover, which is beyond the power of governments, however cunning their propagandists or brutal their thought police, to tamper with...
...For in their eyes love of freedom and love of modernity are coterminous...
...327 pp...
...Yet for all Khrushchev's homespun wit and tearful anti-Stalinist breast-beating, he remained, as Solzhenitsyn well knew, a dedicated and ruthless Marxist, in fact the last man in Russia likely to tolerate peaceful coexistence between transcendental and socialist realism...
...His inability to identify a successor in whom he could have full confidence had more to do, I think, with his own self-esteem than with the objective failings of those around him...
...God of the Universe...
...There is no trade union . . . . And there are no "production meetings...
...You cannot be elected to any position...
...The Gulag Archipelago, then, is a documented country of the mind...
...At last the fog of materialism was lifting...
...At a particularly lachrymose point in the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Khrushchev promised to erect a monument to fallen zeks...
...Nor--to listen to propaganda...
...That," observes Solzhenitsyn, "was what this human being had earned for sixty-three years of honesty and doubts...
...This volume shows with what depressing regularity Sovietmanufactured lies and half-truths about Solzhenitsyn get taken seriously in such organs of enlightened opinion as the Guardian, the New York Times, Die Zeit, and l'Humanit~ The case of l'Humanit~is particularly interesting...
...No one tries to persuade you to apply for Party membership...
...An Encyclopedia...
...Instead it sent him to the one place in Stalin's Russia where Stalinism could be discussed on its merits...
...No one requires any "socialist undertakings" of you...
...The HallRabushka plan has one basic principle: "income should be taxed exactly once, as close as possible to the source of that income...
...In this world honor, loyalty, and decency were not only out of fashion but suicidal...
...Gulag taught him that sin, not sociology, causes human suffering, and that those who ignore this truth are fated to reinforce it...
...The main thing that made camp life bearable for Solzhenitsyn was the fact that for ten years he was free from all kinds of meetings...
...Was not the President's insistence on fiscal soundness imperiling the nation's security...
...The IVa// Street Journal...
...The camps were supposed to make him see the error of his ways, but they ended up disabusing him of the wrong heresy...
...Does the future belong to the Christian West or the Marxist East...
...10.95 juo~ 7 l~s 3v p...
...As Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize address: "The simplest act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions...
...And not only Stalinism...
...Both take the Cold War seriously...
...At least "the sheer verve, the sheer courage, and the sheer ambition of the man commanded attention and admiration...
...And the really important thing i s . . . that they cannot compel you to be a propagandist...
...Kennan may have been surprised by this, but the object of his new-found admiration certainly would not have...
...P.O...
...Only now, with the publication of the second and final volume of Ambrose's magnificent biography, can we see the man and his administration as nearly whole as we are likely to for another generation...
...He had the wrong sort of moral imagination to make a good apparatchik...
...Not in Solzhenitsyn's case...
...But the journalists and professors of the day were happy to believe in Ike's indolence and incapacity...
...The great merit of this biography is that author and subject are on the same ideological wavelength...
...D EISENHOWER: THE PRESIDENCY Stephen E. Ambrose/Simon and Schuster/S24.95 Karl O'Lessker President Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House only a little over twenty-four years ago, but to those of us who are old enough to remember how things were in those days it sometimes seems an ice-age or two have gone by...
...In whatever prison or camp Solzhenitsyn found himself, altruism was practiced and friendship sacrificed for...
...In Gulag you can believe in the ancien r~girne without appearing ancient...
...1~3 172 pp 0-sw~-Te91-7 $9.95...
...the notebook itself he filled with tales of fantasy and adventure...
...He called d&ente's bluff...
...political repression is therefore a necessary precondition for Soviet government...
...personalities, and domestic and in- In 1940, Truman Smith, along with ternational policies...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, IN 47402 $11.95 for 8 issues [] New _FJ Renewal [] Payment enclosed [] Bill me Name Address City (please print) State Zip I 5MAW I I most famous example of it, of course, is The Gulag Archipelago, which Solzhenitsyn revealingly subtitles "An Experiment in Literary Investigation...
...The fact that it required him to attach significance to both words in the expression, "Soviet legality," caused him no intellectual difficulties...
...there is no necessary connection between reality and revolution...
...Solzhenitsyn's achievement is to have precluded the possibility of a third scenario...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
...his ideas are well ordered...
...HOOVER INSTITUTION STANFORD UNIVERSITY STANFORD, CA 94305 as a Nazi sympathizer...
...But not for long...
...Here was the dialectic red in tooth and claw...
...The tax simplification plan presented in The Flat Tax is "radical, yet thoroughly practicable," according to Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman...
Vol. 18 • July 1985 • No. 7
