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NY 1974 Harper and Row. Translasted by H. Sternberg. Hardcover. 12mo., cloth. Fine in VG DJ.
199 pages, Unknown Binding
First published April 1, 1974
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About the author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
287 books4,089 followersalso known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 22, 2017
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April 5, 2019قسمت اولش بسيار شبيه به حال و روز امروز ايران بود.
March 3, 2022
Fascinating example of clashing views between the Soviet leaders and the writers. I think that this encompasses the impending consequences of Marxism very well, and it's also interesting with the context of Socialist Realism and "engineers of human souls" — despite all of the bombastic declarations of progress and idealism, there are clear cracks in the USSR that Solzhenitsyn points out in a very compelling way.
October 25, 2020
This is absolutely fearless. Solzhenitsyn wrote this letter six months before the KGB confiscated The Gulag Archipelago. It’s dated March 1974. He thought the greatest danger facing the Soviet Union at the time was war with China. He didn’t fear the use of nuclear weapons, but thought that war with China would cost 60 to 100 million Soviet lives—for a dead ideology of Marxism and Leninism! He thought China should be burdened with this ideology, with all of its international obligations. He even had the audacity to point out that Vodka consumption was a major socially destructive issue. Here’s what he wrote about Marxism:
"Marxism is not only no accurate, is not only not a science, has not only failed to predict a single event in terms of figures, quantities, time-scales or locations…How can such a discredited and bankrupt doctrine still have so many followers in the West! In our country are left the fewest of all! …This ideology clogs up the whole life of society—mind, tongues, radio and press—with lies, lies, lies. For how else can something dead pretend that it is living except by erecting a scaffolding of lies? …This Ideology bears the entire responsibility for all the blood that has been shed."
He proffered a form of patriotism, which means a rejection of Marxism. He also believed that Christianity was the only living spiritual force capable of healing Russia. He didn’t want special privileges for it, just that it stop being suppressed. He thought the leaders could make this transition within three, five or even ten years, “For the demands life is going to make on you later will be even harder and more pressing.” Was that ever prescient.
One area of profound disagreement I have with this is his citation of the Club of Rome report and how society if running out of resources, overpopulated, and misguided focus on growth. He even cites its computer models, which of course were wildly incorrect. Though Solzhenitsyn did believe that the West would not perish because of its technological dynamism. After all, the USSR at that point was a net grain importer; it couldn’t even feed its people. Incorrect economics aside, Solzhenitsyn was exactly right about this regime. Little wonder he got kicked out of his country, to live in exile in the USA. He was truly a great man.
"Marxism is not only no accurate, is not only not a science, has not only failed to predict a single event in terms of figures, quantities, time-scales or locations…How can such a discredited and bankrupt doctrine still have so many followers in the West! In our country are left the fewest of all! …This ideology clogs up the whole life of society—mind, tongues, radio and press—with lies, lies, lies. For how else can something dead pretend that it is living except by erecting a scaffolding of lies? …This Ideology bears the entire responsibility for all the blood that has been shed."
He proffered a form of patriotism, which means a rejection of Marxism. He also believed that Christianity was the only living spiritual force capable of healing Russia. He didn’t want special privileges for it, just that it stop being suppressed. He thought the leaders could make this transition within three, five or even ten years, “For the demands life is going to make on you later will be even harder and more pressing.” Was that ever prescient.
One area of profound disagreement I have with this is his citation of the Club of Rome report and how society if running out of resources, overpopulated, and misguided focus on growth. He even cites its computer models, which of course were wildly incorrect. Though Solzhenitsyn did believe that the West would not perish because of its technological dynamism. After all, the USSR at that point was a net grain importer; it couldn’t even feed its people. Incorrect economics aside, Solzhenitsyn was exactly right about this regime. Little wonder he got kicked out of his country, to live in exile in the USA. He was truly a great man.
May 3, 2020
I thought it was pretty informative. What would be a necessary help is plenty background info as you read, since he wrote this letter without the need for explanatory segments for a current day audience. Outside of that though, there are timeless aspects to this book. Noteworthy points and quotable sections.
My first introduction to Solzhenitsyn. What I will say is, he shines through as a writer, rich use of language and imagery to drive home his points. He pulls no punches as scathingly critiques the Russian government of his time of gross neglect of national interest, while emphasizing too much on spread the Ideological views globally. Every chapter comes back to the major issue he finds at the heart of the decline of Russia, being their unwillingness to part with a dead and pointless ideology.
My first introduction to Solzhenitsyn. What I will say is, he shines through as a writer, rich use of language and imagery to drive home his points. He pulls no punches as scathingly critiques the Russian government of his time of gross neglect of national interest, while emphasizing too much on spread the Ideological views globally. Every chapter comes back to the major issue he finds at the heart of the decline of Russia, being their unwillingness to part with a dead and pointless ideology.
September 10, 2021
Solzhenitsyn is concerned with many things here, some of which we are still dealing with (the Enlightenment-derived idea that we need to have unlimited, perpetual progress) and some of which were probably not ever going to happen (a Sino-Soviet war). Solzhenitsyn convincingly and surprisingly conservatively argues that the Soviet Union, still licking its wounds from WWII and collectivization, should focus on national interests rather than international Marxism, specifically accomplishing this through focusing on Russian values - agrarian society, Christian morals - rather than atheism, international expansion, space race, etc.
Some of the dangers were overstated, but it's hard to argue a guy who opens the letter with a plea to prevent "our destruction, together with Western civilization, in the crush and stench of a befouled earth."
Some of the dangers were overstated, but it's hard to argue a guy who opens the letter with a plea to prevent "our destruction, together with Western civilization, in the crush and stench of a befouled earth."
November 30, 2022
A very interesting and informative perspective of the anti government position of many Russians at this time. This is structured like an ultimate shower argument, the premise being a letter completely indicting the Soviet leaders of all the crimes they were certainly guilty of, with the end goal being their resignations I guess? The idea anyone would have gotten the letter and taken it serious is laughable, but part 6 especially shows his perspective on the current state and his position of moral authority.
November 23, 2023
No estoy seguro de qué es lo que pretendía el autor con esta carta. Como panfleto político, no ofrece aportes sustanciales más allá de ciertas ideas progresistas y bien intencionadas que suenan demasiado ingenuas como para ser tomadas con mucha seriedad. Como documento programático, su llamado al nacionalismo y a la nostalgia por “épocas doradas” como forma de vencer el ideologismo no ha envejecido nada de bien. Como texto literario, tiene momentos que me impulsan a dejar dos estrellas en vez de una.
September 17, 2025
"All these arsenals of lies, which are totally unnecessary for our stability as a state, are levied as a kind of tax for the benefit of Ideology—to nail down events as they happen and clamp them to a tenacious, sharp-clawed but dead Ideology: and it is precisely because our state, through sheer force of habit, tradition and inertia, continues to cling to this false doctrine with all its tortuous aberrations, that it needs to put the dissenter behind bars. For a false ideology can find no other answer to argument and protest than weapons and prison bars."
February 24, 2024
Solzhenitsyn: "I show no self-interest in my advice."
Also Solzhenitsyn: "Keep your autocratic rule over all other occupations, but let us writers write whatever we want to."
Then there is the fact that several of his dire warnings never came to pass. But I guess he would stubbornly "Any day now."
Also Solzhenitsyn: "Keep your autocratic rule over all other occupations, but let us writers write whatever we want to."
Then there is the fact that several of his dire warnings never came to pass. But I guess he would stubbornly "Any day now."
December 4, 2023
While much of this is specific to Russia and early 20th century history, others parts are still relevant. Fun to read my dad's personal copy!
December 31, 2016
http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.co...
As with everything Solzhenitsyn writes, his Letter to the Soviet Leaders is truly a pleasant surprise, and he reminded me much more strongly of Wendell Berry or Edward Abbey than anyone else, or of the Chinese Confucian philosopher Jiang Qing. In common with the last, his primary outlook is a conservatism that is informed at the deepest possible level by an ecological conviction, a profound and abiding suspicion that his beloved country is despoiling and destroying itself through its ideological commitments to endless economic growth, to limitless technological mastery and to a spiritually-deadening consumerism. His detestation of the Soviet system is primarily a detestation of its ideology, and the way in which that ideology is poisoning ‘the soil and the waters and all of Russian nature’ – as well as the human ecologies of the family and of the society.
Three charges he levels at the Soviet ideology: firstly, that it is barrelling toward a needless and catastrophic war with China (one which by God’s grace never happened!); secondly, that it is pursuing a model of industry which is harming Russia’s natural environment while leaving vast swathes of Siberia underdeveloped; thirdly, that it is wasting the talents and the spiritual character of its people, particularly its women and children, in useless and degrading endeavours. And above all these charges he issues a much broader attack on the Soviet ideology, and the way in which it blankets all inquiries in a thick miasma of lies. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t have a problem – and indeed, he takes considerable pains given the polemical thrust of his Letter to make clear that he doesn’t have a problem – either with collective farming or with an authoritarian mode of government. He merely insists, true to the Slavophil roots of his ideas, on the older forms of collectivism, some voluntary (the village, the town) and some less-so (the family). He even champions the original intent of the local soviet, and asks that they be given the authority which they had been promised from the start.
If this Letter is on one side a broadside against Soviet overreach, against the ideological make-the-world-anew zeal which dumps toxic industrial and nuclear wastes into Russia’s lakes and rivers whilst fomenting revolution abroad, on the other side it is a patriotic call for the Russian town and the Russian village. It is a conservationist plea for the Russia whose towns were ‘made for people, horses, dogs—and streetcars too… humane, friendly, cosy places, where the air was always clean, which were snow-clad in winter and in spring redolent with garden-smells’. Rather than being merely a jeremiad against Soviet authoritarianism, it is also a plea for the elder Russia, whose ‘authoritarian order possessed a strong moral foundation’, that of ‘Christian Orthodoxy’. Over and against the Soviet emphasis on regimenting the lives of its women and children, Solzhenitsyn desires to liberate women from the degradations of the workplace, and children from the regimentation of an inhumane school system which, not allowing any room for personality in the child, also allows no room for the natural respect which schoolteachers are rightly due.
The attentive reader will be struck by the twin edges of his thrusts. There is ample reason for the West to have begun to distrust Solzhenitsyn, because practically all of the critiques he levelled first and most powerfully against the Soviets, could indeed be turned again and levelled against the modern West. Solzhenitsyn’s Letter makes only this explicit reference to the West: that in losing a war to North Vietnam, it has lost its confidence and moral courage, and has ‘grown weak and effete’. But forty years later, with the Soviet Union gone and one sole superpower left standing victorious, what part of the Ideology Solzhenitsyn decries, what part of the faith in Progress, can we not own? True, we are not Marxist. But do we not risk war with China over ideological differences? Do we not neglect our own countryside and spend our efforts in shipping arms and revolution abroad? Do we not choke our air with emissions and befoul our waters with the byproducts of fracking? Do we not make dual-earner households a necessity of the family’s economic survival? Do we not invade every home with television, laden with lies and propaganda?
The economic and political elites of the West all but disowned Solzhenitsyn because he would not fall in line with the dogmas of democratic capitalism. But now it is more necessary than ever to listen and to heed his green, cooperativist, conservationist and Christian personalist epistle to his homeland.
As with everything Solzhenitsyn writes, his Letter to the Soviet Leaders is truly a pleasant surprise, and he reminded me much more strongly of Wendell Berry or Edward Abbey than anyone else, or of the Chinese Confucian philosopher Jiang Qing. In common with the last, his primary outlook is a conservatism that is informed at the deepest possible level by an ecological conviction, a profound and abiding suspicion that his beloved country is despoiling and destroying itself through its ideological commitments to endless economic growth, to limitless technological mastery and to a spiritually-deadening consumerism. His detestation of the Soviet system is primarily a detestation of its ideology, and the way in which that ideology is poisoning ‘the soil and the waters and all of Russian nature’ – as well as the human ecologies of the family and of the society.
Three charges he levels at the Soviet ideology: firstly, that it is barrelling toward a needless and catastrophic war with China (one which by God’s grace never happened!); secondly, that it is pursuing a model of industry which is harming Russia’s natural environment while leaving vast swathes of Siberia underdeveloped; thirdly, that it is wasting the talents and the spiritual character of its people, particularly its women and children, in useless and degrading endeavours. And above all these charges he issues a much broader attack on the Soviet ideology, and the way in which it blankets all inquiries in a thick miasma of lies. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t have a problem – and indeed, he takes considerable pains given the polemical thrust of his Letter to make clear that he doesn’t have a problem – either with collective farming or with an authoritarian mode of government. He merely insists, true to the Slavophil roots of his ideas, on the older forms of collectivism, some voluntary (the village, the town) and some less-so (the family). He even champions the original intent of the local soviet, and asks that they be given the authority which they had been promised from the start.
If this Letter is on one side a broadside against Soviet overreach, against the ideological make-the-world-anew zeal which dumps toxic industrial and nuclear wastes into Russia’s lakes and rivers whilst fomenting revolution abroad, on the other side it is a patriotic call for the Russian town and the Russian village. It is a conservationist plea for the Russia whose towns were ‘made for people, horses, dogs—and streetcars too… humane, friendly, cosy places, where the air was always clean, which were snow-clad in winter and in spring redolent with garden-smells’. Rather than being merely a jeremiad against Soviet authoritarianism, it is also a plea for the elder Russia, whose ‘authoritarian order possessed a strong moral foundation’, that of ‘Christian Orthodoxy’. Over and against the Soviet emphasis on regimenting the lives of its women and children, Solzhenitsyn desires to liberate women from the degradations of the workplace, and children from the regimentation of an inhumane school system which, not allowing any room for personality in the child, also allows no room for the natural respect which schoolteachers are rightly due.
The attentive reader will be struck by the twin edges of his thrusts. There is ample reason for the West to have begun to distrust Solzhenitsyn, because practically all of the critiques he levelled first and most powerfully against the Soviets, could indeed be turned again and levelled against the modern West. Solzhenitsyn’s Letter makes only this explicit reference to the West: that in losing a war to North Vietnam, it has lost its confidence and moral courage, and has ‘grown weak and effete’. But forty years later, with the Soviet Union gone and one sole superpower left standing victorious, what part of the Ideology Solzhenitsyn decries, what part of the faith in Progress, can we not own? True, we are not Marxist. But do we not risk war with China over ideological differences? Do we not neglect our own countryside and spend our efforts in shipping arms and revolution abroad? Do we not choke our air with emissions and befoul our waters with the byproducts of fracking? Do we not make dual-earner households a necessity of the family’s economic survival? Do we not invade every home with television, laden with lies and propaganda?
The economic and political elites of the West all but disowned Solzhenitsyn because he would not fall in line with the dogmas of democratic capitalism. But now it is more necessary than ever to listen and to heed his green, cooperativist, conservationist and Christian personalist epistle to his homeland.
April 2, 2023
Encore un petit opus très réjouissant de Soljenitsyne.
Il s'agit d'un recueil de lettres et d'interviews du début des années 70...dans lesquels il fustige avec brio les dérives perverses de l'Union Soviétique...peu de temps avant son expulsion de sa terre natale qu'il ne reverra que 20 ans plus tard.
Il s'agit d'un recueil de lettres et d'interviews du début des années 70...dans lesquels il fustige avec brio les dérives perverses de l'Union Soviétique...peu de temps avant son expulsion de sa terre natale qu'il ne reverra que 20 ans plus tard.
March 31, 2015
amazon.com/author/sergiupobereznic
Many people talk of the 'anger' in this skilful essay by the literary genius that is, Solzhenitsyn.
What I read into his carefully selected words was 'optimism' and the distinct possibility of 'change'. Nothing more and nothing less. And the writing is, academically speaking, excellent.
This essay could easily be applied to today's problems around the world. It is well paced and full of audacity.
However, the reader must place the text in its true context for it to have the impact that it deserves; the significant historical period of the Cold War era. It must be judged for its weighty relevance at the time.
Solshenitsyn carried out an extremely brave act by openly analysing and then voicing his view of the communist, political landscape. This was a time when people that escaped the communist regime, or were expelled (as he was), feared for their lives. My own father defected in 1975 from Romania and he managed to extract my mother and me out of the country three years later. The fear that asylum seekers lived with was tremendous. Never knowing what waits just around the corner.
Solzhenitsyn was recognized for raising awareness of the Gulags and the forced labour system that Russia was built upon. And the awareness was accomplished through his selflessness.
This essay is worth reading.
I am truly glad to have found a hard back copy of it.
Sergiu Pobereznic (author)
amazon.com/author/sergiupobereznic
Many people talk of the 'anger' in this skilful essay by the literary genius that is, Solzhenitsyn.
What I read into his carefully selected words was 'optimism' and the distinct possibility of 'change'. Nothing more and nothing less. And the writing is, academically speaking, excellent.
This essay could easily be applied to today's problems around the world. It is well paced and full of audacity.
However, the reader must place the text in its true context for it to have the impact that it deserves; the significant historical period of the Cold War era. It must be judged for its weighty relevance at the time.
Solshenitsyn carried out an extremely brave act by openly analysing and then voicing his view of the communist, political landscape. This was a time when people that escaped the communist regime, or were expelled (as he was), feared for their lives. My own father defected in 1975 from Romania and he managed to extract my mother and me out of the country three years later. The fear that asylum seekers lived with was tremendous. Never knowing what waits just around the corner.
Solzhenitsyn was recognized for raising awareness of the Gulags and the forced labour system that Russia was built upon. And the awareness was accomplished through his selflessness.
This essay is worth reading.
I am truly glad to have found a hard back copy of it.
Sergiu Pobereznic (author)
amazon.com/author/sergiupobereznic
April 29, 2012
A great primary source from the USSR's most eloquent dissenter, Solzhenitsyn boldly and accurately predicts post-Gorbachev Russia. Perestroika was a call to democratization, one that the soon unpopular Communist party could not survive and eventually lead to a Russification and nationalization of the country's politics. He also advocates for sustainability and critiques the concept of unlimited economic growth, a position that places him solidly in the vanguard of 1970s academia, along with such groups as the Club of Rome. Unfortunately, it is also here where his argument stumbles, as he also proposes a utopia of sustainable development in Siberia, a concept that does contain ideas found in today's locavore movement, but is ultimately too fanciful and detracts from an otherwise brilliant essay.
June 26, 2012
At first I was skeptical. However, as I kept reading I realized that this was another example of Solzhenitsyn's ability to connect with the common man (because he was for much of his life). While some may view this letter as an example of his anger, I think that idea is misplaced, especially when so much of it revolves around his optimism for the possibilities of actual and substantial change, not from above or by revolution, but through simple changes. These ideas strike home just as much for current day America as they did for Soviet Russia, and I think this letter will always be relevant in any powerful nation.
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August 4, 2011While it is dated in most respects, Solzhenitsyn's arguments can be re-applied, ironically, to the United States, the West, and the global elites. Solzhenitsyn predicted the fall of Sovietism (only to see it re-arise in Barack Obama). He said that Russia has spiritual and economic resources that Marxism spurns. But it is these resources, and only these, that will allow it to combat a decadent West.
September 28, 2007
It might be wrong of me to criticize Solzhenitsyn for going off on, what felt to me like one big rant to the Soviet Leaders. Course, after living through the stuff he had I can understand him being a bit upset. Still, I got bored with the anger. I think he was rushed for time when writing this. Still interesting for historical reasons, but not as satisfying as I was hoping.
April 11, 2013
Solzhenitsyn is an incredible beacon of courage. This letter was well thought out and very logical, but he basically took his life into his own hands by writing it in the first place, but to then publish it for the masses to ensure that his concerns were heard was incredibly brave. This was a very interesting read, and made me admire this man even more.
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