What do you think?
Rate this book
Warning to the West
‘Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not?
Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger...to assess soberly the worldwide menace that threatens to swallow the whole world?
I was swallowed myself. I have been in the dragon’s belly, in its red-hot innards. It was unable to digest me and threw me up. I have come to you as a witness to what it is like there, in the dragon’s belly’
During 1975 and 1976, Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn embarked on a series of speeches across America and Britain that would shock and scandalise both countries. His the West was veering towards moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and with it the world’s one hope against tyranny and totalitarianism.
From Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about the allure of communism, to his rebuke that the West should not abandon its age-old concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the speeches collected in Warning to the West provide insight into Solzhenitsyn’s uncompromising moral vision. Read today, their message remains as powerfully urgent as when Solzhenitsyn first delivered them.
Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger...to assess soberly the worldwide menace that threatens to swallow the whole world?
I was swallowed myself. I have been in the dragon’s belly, in its red-hot innards. It was unable to digest me and threw me up. I have come to you as a witness to what it is like there, in the dragon’s belly’
During 1975 and 1976, Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn embarked on a series of speeches across America and Britain that would shock and scandalise both countries. His the West was veering towards moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and with it the world’s one hope against tyranny and totalitarianism.
From Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about the allure of communism, to his rebuke that the West should not abandon its age-old concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the speeches collected in Warning to the West provide insight into Solzhenitsyn’s uncompromising moral vision. Read today, their message remains as powerfully urgent as when Solzhenitsyn first delivered them.
156 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1976
59 people are currently reading
1767 people want to read
About the author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
288 books4,121 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...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
October 24, 2007
as i recall, these speeches were initialy delivered before an audience of spoiled whiney lazy rich kids at harvard. solzhenitsyn told told them to stop being so spoiled whiney and lazy, or they'd get eaten alive by the totalitarians.
the spoiled whiney lazy kids did not like the speech.
the spoiled whiney lazy kids did not like the speech.
April 7, 2014
Spectacular!! I can't believe that I majored in political science and took many courses from an expert on Russia and never once heard of Mr. Solzhenitsyn. This collection of speeches given in 1975 and 1976 is just as poignant today, if not more so, as it ever was.
From an interview in March 1976: "[A]t the moment the question is not how the Soviet Union will find a way out of totalitarianism but how the West will be able to avoid the same fate." And this: "The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments, it makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted."
From a speech on July 9, 1975: "Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter... Communism is anti-humanity."
I could go on and on quoting the keen observations of this artist from Soviet Russia, but really, you should just read the book. It is not easy, I am sure, for many Westerners to honestly reflect on these observations, but it is becoming increasingly necessary, if we wish to maintain our civilized society, to ponder the realities of the world, as opposed to the world as we wish it to be.
From an interview in March 1976: "[A]t the moment the question is not how the Soviet Union will find a way out of totalitarianism but how the West will be able to avoid the same fate." And this: "The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments, it makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted."
From a speech on July 9, 1975: "Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter... Communism is anti-humanity."
I could go on and on quoting the keen observations of this artist from Soviet Russia, but really, you should just read the book. It is not easy, I am sure, for many Westerners to honestly reflect on these observations, but it is becoming increasingly necessary, if we wish to maintain our civilized society, to ponder the realities of the world, as opposed to the world as we wish it to be.
March 8, 2020
3.5 stars. Really good. Solzhenitsyn is needed now more than ever, as capitalist materialism continues to degrade our common life together. Marxist materialism had its own place on the international stage, but is now replaced by the materialism of the global elites and their pink police state, embodied by the EU and even worse, the UN; the latter of which has the strange arrogance of accusing Israel of war crimes and North Korea of almost nothing. It is because the west suffers from a terrible sickness, that of self-negation in the name of multi-culturalism, which is a euphemism for anti-western.
July 16, 2023
Solzhenitsyn repeatedly analogized détente between the West and the Soviet Union to shaking hands and making peace with someone who’s wielding a rock in their other hand. I have a different comparison; it is more like the act of the Soviet Union spitting infectious phlegm into its hand before shaking the West’s hand, and subsequently the West becomes ill with the same fatal sickness that plagues the East. Solzhenitsyn is probably one of the most qualified men to speak on totalitarianism and how crucial it is to thwart its rapid spread. Yet, his messages are lost on Westerners today, and for our ignorance we will receive our payback when we look upon our diagnosis and see the black cancer growing in the stomachs of our countries.
June 30, 1975: Solzhenitsyn addresses the oppression of the Soviet Union against its own people which has gone under the radar of the Western world (both by ignorance and the fact that the USSR is so closed off). He says that the Western nations (particularly the European Allied Powers in WWII) are compliant in the spread of totalitarianism because they allied with the oppressive, Stalinist Soviet Union in World War II. He states that America is actually the least guilty of the Western nations of allowing totalitarianism to flourish because the U.S. has extended its humanitarian efforts for the sake of “détente”, essentially meaning to make peace by easing tensions between these nations on a political level, though not necessarily ensuring peace for the people under these totalitarian governments’ thumbs. He calls upon his American audience to not yield to totalitarianism and allow it to flourish under the pretense of “peace” and “goodness” because it is only allowing for the oppression, imprisonment, and murders of innocents.
July 9, 1975: Solzhenitsyn addresses the doctrine of communism and its application to the world. He argues that communism is a weak and vitriolic philosophy, worsened by Lenin. He says that communism doesn’t care who it kills and what systems it destroys in order to achieve full fruition. Communism is incongruent with democracy, freedom, and morality. It was against peace up until it could utilize peace in the name of peace treaties in order to blindside other nations by violating these treaties. He also explains that the Soviet Union’s strength is a façade and its economy is surviving solely on humanitarian aid and trade from America. Solzhenitsyn says to stop aiding this country that prides itself in its nationalistic superiority in order to call its bluff. He also says to stop paying for the shovels the USSR uses to bury its own men (metaphorically and literally).
July 15, 1975: Solzhenitsyn implores the American Congressmen to be cognizant of the weight of their decisions and positions in the world. As Americans, they lead the anti-totalitarian force in the world and their voices go far beyond the American border. It is up to the American lawmakers to continue to uphold morals both in and outside America, and to recognize and thwart oppressive forces that threaten the lives of many millions of civilians. They are the beacon of hope for the oppressed.
March 1, 1976: Solzhenitsyn is interviewed by Michael Charlton. Solzhenitsyn explains that he is seeing parallels in the present West to the past East. He is seeing patterns that were evident at the dawn of communist totalitarianism, and he is warning the British to steer away from the direction of Western collapse immediately. He is also disappointed to find that the weakened Soviet Union was gaining strength over the West while the West inversely weakened and capitulated more to the Soviet bloc. When the interviewer asks multiple times about Lenin, Solzhenitsyn gets passionately angry in his response. He concludes by explaining to not make “détente” with the Soviet Union for political reasons when all it does is enable and fund the oppression of Soviet citizens.
March 24, 1976: Solzhenitsyn has less praise to offer Britain than he does for the United States. He is disappointed in Britain’s reluctance to be aware of the state of affairs within the borders of the totalitarian countries it has ambassadors in. It prioritized the comfort of political and economic calm over the value of millions of innocent lives, wasted away in labor camps. He describes exactly what’s wrong with the West today that was wrong with pre-Soviet Russian society. He calls upon Britain to come to its senses as a strong, successful, and educated nation and to cease to allow totalitarianism to flourish by choosing “peace” and freedom for themselves instead.
I say that Solzhenitsyn is the most valuable, crucial author to read, especially today. His words and warnings will only continue to ring true as the disease of totalitarian continues to spread and culminate in even the most democratic of nations.
June 30, 1975: Solzhenitsyn addresses the oppression of the Soviet Union against its own people which has gone under the radar of the Western world (both by ignorance and the fact that the USSR is so closed off). He says that the Western nations (particularly the European Allied Powers in WWII) are compliant in the spread of totalitarianism because they allied with the oppressive, Stalinist Soviet Union in World War II. He states that America is actually the least guilty of the Western nations of allowing totalitarianism to flourish because the U.S. has extended its humanitarian efforts for the sake of “détente”, essentially meaning to make peace by easing tensions between these nations on a political level, though not necessarily ensuring peace for the people under these totalitarian governments’ thumbs. He calls upon his American audience to not yield to totalitarianism and allow it to flourish under the pretense of “peace” and “goodness” because it is only allowing for the oppression, imprisonment, and murders of innocents.
July 9, 1975: Solzhenitsyn addresses the doctrine of communism and its application to the world. He argues that communism is a weak and vitriolic philosophy, worsened by Lenin. He says that communism doesn’t care who it kills and what systems it destroys in order to achieve full fruition. Communism is incongruent with democracy, freedom, and morality. It was against peace up until it could utilize peace in the name of peace treaties in order to blindside other nations by violating these treaties. He also explains that the Soviet Union’s strength is a façade and its economy is surviving solely on humanitarian aid and trade from America. Solzhenitsyn says to stop aiding this country that prides itself in its nationalistic superiority in order to call its bluff. He also says to stop paying for the shovels the USSR uses to bury its own men (metaphorically and literally).
July 15, 1975: Solzhenitsyn implores the American Congressmen to be cognizant of the weight of their decisions and positions in the world. As Americans, they lead the anti-totalitarian force in the world and their voices go far beyond the American border. It is up to the American lawmakers to continue to uphold morals both in and outside America, and to recognize and thwart oppressive forces that threaten the lives of many millions of civilians. They are the beacon of hope for the oppressed.
March 1, 1976: Solzhenitsyn is interviewed by Michael Charlton. Solzhenitsyn explains that he is seeing parallels in the present West to the past East. He is seeing patterns that were evident at the dawn of communist totalitarianism, and he is warning the British to steer away from the direction of Western collapse immediately. He is also disappointed to find that the weakened Soviet Union was gaining strength over the West while the West inversely weakened and capitulated more to the Soviet bloc. When the interviewer asks multiple times about Lenin, Solzhenitsyn gets passionately angry in his response. He concludes by explaining to not make “détente” with the Soviet Union for political reasons when all it does is enable and fund the oppression of Soviet citizens.
March 24, 1976: Solzhenitsyn has less praise to offer Britain than he does for the United States. He is disappointed in Britain’s reluctance to be aware of the state of affairs within the borders of the totalitarian countries it has ambassadors in. It prioritized the comfort of political and economic calm over the value of millions of innocent lives, wasted away in labor camps. He describes exactly what’s wrong with the West today that was wrong with pre-Soviet Russian society. He calls upon Britain to come to its senses as a strong, successful, and educated nation and to cease to allow totalitarianism to flourish by choosing “peace” and freedom for themselves instead.
I say that Solzhenitsyn is the most valuable, crucial author to read, especially today. His words and warnings will only continue to ring true as the disease of totalitarian continues to spread and culminate in even the most democratic of nations.
January 20, 2017
Essential reading, no matter what your political leanings are. Solzhenitsyn warns against being politically simple and believing in supposedly liberal regimes. This collection of speeches is well-written, and you can really hear the author's voice come out in each speech. The message remains consistent with his fears of a failing west, and it's consistent with his other works (although much shorter and more digestible).
Very appropriate that I finished this book on the day of a massive change in America; going into a Trump presidency. In these speeches, Solzhenitsyn predicts the election of Trump-like leaders all the way back in 1975, and for all the correct reasons that he saw already manifesting themselves 40 years ago. Although I remain mostly skeptical of Trump, and disgusted by his character, this book gave me a bit of hope that the next 4 (or 8) years may be necessary to really change the political landscape of both America and the world at large, and may result in an actual progressive reaction that has been promised for the last few decades.
Very appropriate that I finished this book on the day of a massive change in America; going into a Trump presidency. In these speeches, Solzhenitsyn predicts the election of Trump-like leaders all the way back in 1975, and for all the correct reasons that he saw already manifesting themselves 40 years ago. Although I remain mostly skeptical of Trump, and disgusted by his character, this book gave me a bit of hope that the next 4 (or 8) years may be necessary to really change the political landscape of both America and the world at large, and may result in an actual progressive reaction that has been promised for the last few decades.
January 18, 2022
"Is it possible or impossible to transmit the experience of those who have suffered to those who have yet to suffer? Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not? Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger?" (47)This is a collection of speeches that Solzhenitsyn gave in the United States and the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s. Solzhenitsyn had moved to the U.S. after his Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1974 (having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970). The speeches were given on various occasions, as he was invited to address different organizations in the U.S. and, later, in the U.K. (mostly the BBC). The theme is clear and inspires the title: he is giving a Warning to the West about the dangers of totalitarianism in general and about communism in particular. He thinks that the West is being too complacent, have given up fighting for their freedom.
Some of the developments that he discusses are topical and mostly of historical interest; but there are great passages here and there, especially about the history and workings (and dangers to humanity) of communism as he experienced it. It's interesting to compare what was happening in the mid to late 70s to today (one really can't help but compare). In particular, there is the complacency that those in the West felt with regard to their freedom. Once you've had freedom for a while and have gotten used to it, it's difficult to imagine yourself losing it, and harder still to realize when you (slowly—that's the problem!) are in danger of irreversible losses. Solzhenitsyn uses a Russian proverb to drive home the point: Catch on you will when you're tumbling downhill.
April 4, 2023
▪️
I bought this wee book last week in a bookshop in Prague, attracted perhaps by its size, its cover and its title. And it’s been a good few years since I last read this author - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, An Incident at Krechetovka Station, and Matronya’s House - all rather bleak and depressing though fabulous writing, so another read was long overdue.
Warning to the West is a collection of speeches that may be forty or so years old but Solzhenitsyn’s desperate warnings of the evils and hypocrisies of, and the systemic corruption of, communism and socialism, still shriek of relevance to our world today. The content equally as depressing as my previous visits to his writing though perhaps even more insightful and thought-provoking. I’ll be making further visits to his works.
“Is it possible or impossible to transmit the experience of those who have suffered to those who have yet to suffer? Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not?”
“Why is it societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.”▪️▪️▪️
Read
May 31, 2019This was a brilliant book, if not a bit disturbing. The book is a compilation of speeches he gave in 1975 and 1976 to the USA and to England. Even though the speeches were given almost 40 years ago - they are extremely relevant today. In the process of explaining the history behind Russia, China, Japan, the world - they warn of what is happening now. I always heard that Russia plays the "long game" - and I believe we may be seeing the results of this right now. Many years ago I read The Gulag Archipelago - and for the first time since then, I was frightened by what he had to say. What he says is that we may not win. And no one listened then - and they are not listening now
February 20, 2016
Totalitarian Communism may no longer be the greatest threat to Western liberalism, but the attributes of East and West that are described by this victim of repression are no less timely.
His warnings are as applicable to a world confronted by religious radicalism and economic fascism as they were during the Cold War. Hopefully my generation does a better job of listening than my parents and grandparents.
His warnings are as applicable to a world confronted by religious radicalism and economic fascism as they were during the Cold War. Hopefully my generation does a better job of listening than my parents and grandparents.
September 5, 2022
The speeches represent an interesting reminder that Soviet dissidents often requested that the West double down on aggressive opposition to the Soviet Union and its proxies. The speeches are also interesting when set against the great man’s sometimes odd intervention in post Soviet Russian politics.
October 7, 2025
Thought-provoking little book of speeches and talks. Solzhenitsyn has been proven both true and false but his words are challenging and provocative.
December 24, 2018
Good chunks of this book -- a collection of Solzhenitsyn's mid-'70s speeches to US labor unions and the US Senate, along with interviews with the BBC -- are dated or moot. However, there are enough nuggets of historical wisdom and prescience that made a read of "Warning to the West" worthwhile (the book runs only around 150 pages).
Some examples:
Solzhenitsyn excoriates the "burning greed among Western capitalists for profit that goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience, only to get money." (Solzhenitsyn, to be sure, was no fan of Marx or socialism, either.) He notes that such capitalists wouldn't hesitate to "strengthen the economy" of his native country if there was profit in it, so that the "Soviets will buy from one rather than from the other." One could substitute "Soviets" for Saudi Arabia -- with Trump ignoring the murder of a Washington Post journalist by the Saudi Crown Prince, stating that we want the Saudis to buy our weapon systems -- and Solzhenitsyn's observation would be very much up to date, some 40-plus years later.
Solzhenitsyn also gets at Trump's amoral and craven transactionalism-as-foreign-policy, willfully ignoring civil and human rights violations: "One cannot think only on the low level of political calculations. It is also necessary to think of what is noble, and what is honorable -- not just of what is profitable. Resourceful Western legal scholars have now introduced the term 'legal realism,' which they can use to obscure any moral evaluation of affairs. They say, 'Recognize realities: if certain laws have been established in countries ruled by violence, these laws still must be recognized and respected.'"
Some examples:
Solzhenitsyn excoriates the "burning greed among Western capitalists for profit that goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience, only to get money." (Solzhenitsyn, to be sure, was no fan of Marx or socialism, either.) He notes that such capitalists wouldn't hesitate to "strengthen the economy" of his native country if there was profit in it, so that the "Soviets will buy from one rather than from the other." One could substitute "Soviets" for Saudi Arabia -- with Trump ignoring the murder of a Washington Post journalist by the Saudi Crown Prince, stating that we want the Saudis to buy our weapon systems -- and Solzhenitsyn's observation would be very much up to date, some 40-plus years later.
Solzhenitsyn also gets at Trump's amoral and craven transactionalism-as-foreign-policy, willfully ignoring civil and human rights violations: "One cannot think only on the low level of political calculations. It is also necessary to think of what is noble, and what is honorable -- not just of what is profitable. Resourceful Western legal scholars have now introduced the term 'legal realism,' which they can use to obscure any moral evaluation of affairs. They say, 'Recognize realities: if certain laws have been established in countries ruled by violence, these laws still must be recognized and respected.'"
March 7, 2021
https://gretchenjoanna.com/2021/03/05...
Five speeches that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave in the U.S. and in Britain in 1975 and 1976 make the book, Warning to the West. Today I sat on a log at the beach and got on with reading this collection that I’d started before Christmas; a while later I sat in my car overlooking the ocean and finished it.
It’s a nice little book, if you’d like a taste of Solzhenitsyn but don’t feel up to tackling one of his novels or The Gulag Archipelago. He said he prefers to write, but his speeches are powerful, and complement his writings. Taken altogether, these talks present a lot of history “from the inside,” and the perspective of someone whose analysis is based on thorough knowledge. His unique vantage point combines with true wisdom.
In different striking and blunt words to different groups, such as U.S. legislators and BBC listeners, he gives his prophetic message. While he uses details of events that were then recent history to make his points to his audience at the time, the heart of his concerns is ever pertinent and enduring.
“There is a German proverb which runs Mut verloren — alles verloren. ‘When courage is lost, all is lost.’ There is another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction. But what happens to a society in which both these losses — the loss of courage and the loss of reason — intersect? This is the picture which I found the West presents today.”
-Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn, 1976
Five speeches that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave in the U.S. and in Britain in 1975 and 1976 make the book, Warning to the West. Today I sat on a log at the beach and got on with reading this collection that I’d started before Christmas; a while later I sat in my car overlooking the ocean and finished it.
It’s a nice little book, if you’d like a taste of Solzhenitsyn but don’t feel up to tackling one of his novels or The Gulag Archipelago. He said he prefers to write, but his speeches are powerful, and complement his writings. Taken altogether, these talks present a lot of history “from the inside,” and the perspective of someone whose analysis is based on thorough knowledge. His unique vantage point combines with true wisdom.
In different striking and blunt words to different groups, such as U.S. legislators and BBC listeners, he gives his prophetic message. While he uses details of events that were then recent history to make his points to his audience at the time, the heart of his concerns is ever pertinent and enduring.
“There is a German proverb which runs Mut verloren — alles verloren. ‘When courage is lost, all is lost.’ There is another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction. But what happens to a society in which both these losses — the loss of courage and the loss of reason — intersect? This is the picture which I found the West presents today.”
-Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn, 1976
June 7, 2021
I can't get enough of Solzhenitsyn right now. In this collection of speeches, he criticizes the West for its "supine inattention" to socialism and its march through Europe and Asia. One is tempted to think that the worst of Solzhenitsyn's fears were not realized: we did avoid nuclear war, we did see the fall of the Soviet Union, Communism has largely retreated. But I'm not as hopeful, nor would he be if he were here. The thoughts and ideas underlying socialism have fortified in the Western world since then. The philosophy that catalyzes socialism is that man is the supreme and "crowning glory of the universe", and he is not, as we used to think, a spiritual being. So all that could matter is his material existence, his comfort and pleasure. The decay of obligation to anything higher than himself has weakened or even killed his moral stance--his ability to make distinction between good and evil. And since "man himself is irreproachable," then, "everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society".
His gloomy picture of the West is reflected today: "But what happens to a society in which both of these losses--the loss of courage and the loss of reason--intersect?" What will the consequence be for the West? He continues, "what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them."
The remedy for this ideological takeover is to be resolute in making moral distinctions--between right and wrong--and then to courageously stand up and defend those distinctions. I couldn't agree more.
His gloomy picture of the West is reflected today: "But what happens to a society in which both of these losses--the loss of courage and the loss of reason--intersect?" What will the consequence be for the West? He continues, "what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them."
The remedy for this ideological takeover is to be resolute in making moral distinctions--between right and wrong--and then to courageously stand up and defend those distinctions. I couldn't agree more.
September 17, 2020
Read the book is the point of the book, not the book’s review.
Within short time of his arrival in America, Solzhenitsyn came to realise that from The New York Times down, no one actually read his books in the educated, intellectual “West”.
Reviews of books were instead read, précis instead of long prose, critics of esteem estimating themselves well read as reviewer, who themselves read but other reviews, and not a single original idea beyond posture and stance disguised as such revealed between all.
Within short time of his arrival in America, Solzhenitsyn came to realise that from The New York Times down, no one actually read his books in the educated, intellectual “West”.
Reviews of books were instead read, précis instead of long prose, critics of esteem estimating themselves well read as reviewer, who themselves read but other reviews, and not a single original idea beyond posture and stance disguised as such revealed between all.
December 28, 2024
Being a compilation of several 1975-76 speeches and broadcasts, several parallels can be drawn to today's post-Soviet Russia and echoes of détente and appeasement from the West. Solzhenitsyn was obviously heavily propagandized in the West at the time for his anti-communist stance, therefore Solzhenitsyn's portrayals of communism as inherently anti-humanity came across as overly reductive.
The irony of Solzhenitsyn is just how fierce of an opponent he was of authoritarianism only to more or less lay the groundwork for Putin's authoritarian Russia in his later life.
The irony of Solzhenitsyn is just how fierce of an opponent he was of authoritarianism only to more or less lay the groundwork for Putin's authoritarian Russia in his later life.
May 11, 2023
More people need to read and consider the words of someone who endured the atrocities of the Communist regime in Russia.
August 27, 2024
Solzhenitsyn's speeches were delivered in 1975 and 1976, but they’ve never been more relevant than they are now. Highly recommend.
February 18, 2025
Interesting but skippable, also needs you to be very aware of what was happening around 1975.
Go read The Gulag Archipelago.
Go read The Gulag Archipelago.
October 6, 2025
A principle of mechanics tells us that, given a long-enough lever, one man can move the entire world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a living test of that principle.
His lever is his pen, extended far beyond his reach by his mind, his talent, his courage, and his unshakable integrity.
He seeks to move a world that today seems far gone in madness and in cowardice. A world where terror, murder, and oppression are welcomed and are exalted in the glass and marble temples of universal peace and justice that were built by a highly optimistic generation after World War II.
*
This is something which is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: a burning greed for profit that goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience, only to get money.
*
Lenin said: “Comrades, don’t panic, when things get very tough for us, we will give the bourgeoisie a rope, and the bourgeoisie will hang itself.”
Then Karl Radek, who was a very resourceful wit, said: “Vladimir Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?”
Lenin effortlessly replied, “They will sell it to us themselves.”
*
It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then to turn to the humanitarian world for help. We see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path. And the same thing happened in Russia in 1921. When the three-year civil war, started by the Communists—and “civil war” was a slogan of the Communists, civil war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, “America, feed our hungry.” And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry.
*
If all these countries together could not defeat Hitler’s little Germany, what are they going to do today, when more than half the globe is inundated by totalitarianism? I don’t want to accept this explanation.
*
We have a Russian proverb: “Don’t call a wolf to help you against the dogs.” If dogs are attacking and tearing at you, fight against the dogs; do not call a wolf for help. Because when the wolves come, they will destroy the dogs or drive them away, but they will tear you apart as well.
*
Something that is incomprehensible to the ordinary human mind has taken place. In any case, the powerless, average Soviet people could not understand, year after year and decade after decade, what was happening. How were we to explain it? England, France, the United States, were the victors in World War II. Victorious states always dictate peace: they create the sort of situation which conforms to their philosophy, their concept of liberty, their concept of national interest.
*
At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned. We must acknowledge it with our hearts and souls.
*
The world needs to think more about those who are losing their freedom every day.
*
Marxism has always opposed freedom. I will quote just a few words from the founding fathers of Communism, Marx and Engels (I quote from the first Soviet edition of 1929): “Reforms are a sign of weakness” (vol. 23, p. 339); “Democracy is more to be feared than monarchy and aristocracy” (vol. 2, p. 369); “Political liberty is a false liberty, worse than the most abject slavery” (vol. 2, p. 394). In their correspondence Marx and Engels frequently stated that terror would be indispensable after achieving power, that “it will be necessary to repeat the year 1793. After achieving power, we’ll be considered monsters, but we couldn’t care less” (vol. 25, p. 187).
*
They cannot grasp the true nature of Communism. Recently, the leader of the Swedish socialists, Olof Palme, said that the only way that Communism can survive is by adopting the principles of democracy. That is the same thing as saying that the only way in which a wolf can survive is to stop eating meat and become a lamb.
*
I understand that you love freedom, but in our crowded world you have to pay a tax for freedom. You cannot love freedom for yourselves alone and quietly agree to a situation where the majority of humanity, spread over the greater part of the globe, is subjected to violence and oppression.
*
a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well-known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion.
*
take the word “nationalist”—it has become almost meaningless. It is used constantly. Everyone flings it around, but what is a “nationalist”? If someone suggests that his country should have a large army, conquer the countries which surround it, should go on expanding its empire, that sort of person is a nationalist. But if, on the contrary, I suggest that my country should free all the peoples it has conquered, should disband the army, should stop all aggressive actions—who am I? A nationalist!
*
Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.
*
And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.
*
There is a borderline beyond which the natural cause of “progressive principles,” of “the dawn of a new era,” becomes nothing more than calculated, conscious hypocrisy; for this makes life more comfortable to live.
*
We, the oppressed people of Russia, the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery that we have paid. But your society refuses to heed our warning voices. I suppose we must admit, sad though it is, that experience cannot be transmitted: everyone must experience everything for himself.
*
We have become hopelessly enmeshed in our slavish worship of all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable, all that is material—we worship things, we worship products.
*
A work of art always consists of many parts, many facets and sides, and that means many aims. The artist cannot set himself political aims, the aims of changing a political regime; it may come as a by-product of it, but to fight against untruth and falsehood, to fight against myths, or to fight against an ideology which is hostile to mankind, to fight for our memory, for our memory of what things were like—that is the task of the artist. A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. Yes, the main thing is to re-create. When I sit down to write, my only task is to re-create everything as it happened. And naturally many deductions follow. If today the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were widely published in the Soviet Union and were freely available to all, then in a very short space of time no Communist ideology would be left. For people who read and understood all this would simply have no more room in their minds for Communist ideology.
***
His lever is his pen, extended far beyond his reach by his mind, his talent, his courage, and his unshakable integrity.
He seeks to move a world that today seems far gone in madness and in cowardice. A world where terror, murder, and oppression are welcomed and are exalted in the glass and marble temples of universal peace and justice that were built by a highly optimistic generation after World War II.
*
This is something which is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: a burning greed for profit that goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience, only to get money.
*
Lenin said: “Comrades, don’t panic, when things get very tough for us, we will give the bourgeoisie a rope, and the bourgeoisie will hang itself.”
Then Karl Radek, who was a very resourceful wit, said: “Vladimir Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?”
Lenin effortlessly replied, “They will sell it to us themselves.”
*
It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then to turn to the humanitarian world for help. We see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path. And the same thing happened in Russia in 1921. When the three-year civil war, started by the Communists—and “civil war” was a slogan of the Communists, civil war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, “America, feed our hungry.” And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry.
*
If all these countries together could not defeat Hitler’s little Germany, what are they going to do today, when more than half the globe is inundated by totalitarianism? I don’t want to accept this explanation.
*
We have a Russian proverb: “Don’t call a wolf to help you against the dogs.” If dogs are attacking and tearing at you, fight against the dogs; do not call a wolf for help. Because when the wolves come, they will destroy the dogs or drive them away, but they will tear you apart as well.
*
Something that is incomprehensible to the ordinary human mind has taken place. In any case, the powerless, average Soviet people could not understand, year after year and decade after decade, what was happening. How were we to explain it? England, France, the United States, were the victors in World War II. Victorious states always dictate peace: they create the sort of situation which conforms to their philosophy, their concept of liberty, their concept of national interest.
*
At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned. We must acknowledge it with our hearts and souls.
*
The world needs to think more about those who are losing their freedom every day.
*
Marxism has always opposed freedom. I will quote just a few words from the founding fathers of Communism, Marx and Engels (I quote from the first Soviet edition of 1929): “Reforms are a sign of weakness” (vol. 23, p. 339); “Democracy is more to be feared than monarchy and aristocracy” (vol. 2, p. 369); “Political liberty is a false liberty, worse than the most abject slavery” (vol. 2, p. 394). In their correspondence Marx and Engels frequently stated that terror would be indispensable after achieving power, that “it will be necessary to repeat the year 1793. After achieving power, we’ll be considered monsters, but we couldn’t care less” (vol. 25, p. 187).
*
They cannot grasp the true nature of Communism. Recently, the leader of the Swedish socialists, Olof Palme, said that the only way that Communism can survive is by adopting the principles of democracy. That is the same thing as saying that the only way in which a wolf can survive is to stop eating meat and become a lamb.
*
I understand that you love freedom, but in our crowded world you have to pay a tax for freedom. You cannot love freedom for yourselves alone and quietly agree to a situation where the majority of humanity, spread over the greater part of the globe, is subjected to violence and oppression.
*
a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well-known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion.
*
take the word “nationalist”—it has become almost meaningless. It is used constantly. Everyone flings it around, but what is a “nationalist”? If someone suggests that his country should have a large army, conquer the countries which surround it, should go on expanding its empire, that sort of person is a nationalist. But if, on the contrary, I suggest that my country should free all the peoples it has conquered, should disband the army, should stop all aggressive actions—who am I? A nationalist!
*
Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.
*
And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.
*
There is a borderline beyond which the natural cause of “progressive principles,” of “the dawn of a new era,” becomes nothing more than calculated, conscious hypocrisy; for this makes life more comfortable to live.
*
We, the oppressed people of Russia, the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery that we have paid. But your society refuses to heed our warning voices. I suppose we must admit, sad though it is, that experience cannot be transmitted: everyone must experience everything for himself.
*
We have become hopelessly enmeshed in our slavish worship of all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable, all that is material—we worship things, we worship products.
*
A work of art always consists of many parts, many facets and sides, and that means many aims. The artist cannot set himself political aims, the aims of changing a political regime; it may come as a by-product of it, but to fight against untruth and falsehood, to fight against myths, or to fight against an ideology which is hostile to mankind, to fight for our memory, for our memory of what things were like—that is the task of the artist. A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. Yes, the main thing is to re-create. When I sit down to write, my only task is to re-create everything as it happened. And naturally many deductions follow. If today the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were widely published in the Soviet Union and were freely available to all, then in a very short space of time no Communist ideology would be left. For people who read and understood all this would simply have no more room in their minds for Communist ideology.
***
December 27, 2024
Read this in two sittings.
Certainly a nice compilation of a few speeches, a nice and quick read. While I don’t have all the historical context to truly grasp what was going on, the message still resonates. The situation of the world has changed a lot, although everything seems existential again. Ultimately, it seems, he believed that apathy and ignorance are the ultimate sins and root of evil. I think I can mostly agree with this. You could apply his morals to about any time in history and see how fucked up everything is. Good read.
Certainly a nice compilation of a few speeches, a nice and quick read. While I don’t have all the historical context to truly grasp what was going on, the message still resonates. The situation of the world has changed a lot, although everything seems existential again. Ultimately, it seems, he believed that apathy and ignorance are the ultimate sins and root of evil. I think I can mostly agree with this. You could apply his morals to about any time in history and see how fucked up everything is. Good read.
February 20, 2015
A collection of interviews with and speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dating from the mid '70s. The author states his admiration for the West (US and Western Europe), but warns for its policy of détente and appeasement with the USSR and its allies.
Of course, history has proven that communism has fallen apart in no more than 15 years later. But this joyful event is mainly thanks to activism from pope John Paul II and former president Ronald Reagan, who may have read the book. Brandt's Ostpolitik and US policy of appeasement have only prolonged the communist terror for a couple of decades. Solzhenitsyn states that without Western help (food, technology,...) the regime would have given up much quicker.
I can imagine many communists would not like to be reminded of their fellow travelling during the 20th century. We better remind them as often as we can, because these cultural marxists are more active as ever in destroying marriage and promoting mass immigration. The blood on their hands does not wash away that easily.
Of course, history has proven that communism has fallen apart in no more than 15 years later. But this joyful event is mainly thanks to activism from pope John Paul II and former president Ronald Reagan, who may have read the book. Brandt's Ostpolitik and US policy of appeasement have only prolonged the communist terror for a couple of decades. Solzhenitsyn states that without Western help (food, technology,...) the regime would have given up much quicker.
I can imagine many communists would not like to be reminded of their fellow travelling during the 20th century. We better remind them as often as we can, because these cultural marxists are more active as ever in destroying marriage and promoting mass immigration. The blood on their hands does not wash away that easily.
April 15, 2025
I didn't even bother tabbing this book because it would be pretty much every page. I shed tears a couple times reading these speeches/interviews. My heart is heavy for humanity, and this quote from the book partially sums up why:
"Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts about this. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand."
While I don't need convincing that communism is harmful, some of Solzhenitsyn's statements challenged my current beliefs a bit (which I think is a good thing. It's important to repeatedly examine one's own beliefs).
I'll definitely be rereading this. I thought it was a good intro to Solzhenitsyn. One day I'll read The Gulag Archipelago...
"Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts about this. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand."
While I don't need convincing that communism is harmful, some of Solzhenitsyn's statements challenged my current beliefs a bit (which I think is a good thing. It's important to repeatedly examine one's own beliefs).
I'll definitely be rereading this. I thought it was a good intro to Solzhenitsyn. One day I'll read The Gulag Archipelago...
September 8, 2009
Wow. This little collection of speeches gives profound insight into the spread of communism as the author attempts to explain how our human nature and politics allowed and ignored the spread of the most murderous ideology in history.
Sad, yes. But even more eye-opening and thought-provoking.
Sad, yes. But even more eye-opening and thought-provoking.
September 13, 2010
This is an excellent collection of speeches and one interview. Solzhenitsyn understands and articulates the fundamental evil of communism as well as the flaws found in the West. This is a good, short introduction into the thought of Solzhenitsyn. Highly recommended.
October 30, 2019
All who love freedom should read.
KAG
KAG
July 9, 2022
The fact that this is not required reading in schools today is proof that civilization has already collapsed, and barbarism is now the norm.
March 22, 2024
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
… The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
… We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities. And present-day Europe, seemingly so unlike the Russia of 1913, is today on the verge of the same collapse, for all that it has been reached by a different route. Different parts of the world have followed different paths, but today they are all approaching the threshold of a common ruin.
In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation.
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends. Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly go about carrying them out.
… Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis ― race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism…the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain “equality”― the equality of destitute slaves.
… To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate 20th century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
—The Tempeton Address (excerpts)
“I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust to prevent those pundits who are attempting to establish fine degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality (some because of their distorted outlook, others because of shortsightedness, still others out of self-interest), to prevent them from using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat one which has never before been seen in the history of the world. Not only in the history of your country, but in the history of the world.”
“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending upon circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends upon class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this very respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea. Among progressive people, it is considered rather awkward to use seriously such words as "good" and "evil." Communism has managed to persuade all of us that these concepts are old-fashioned and laughable. But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another. We will sink to the status of animals.”
“Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.”
“…we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today. And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.”
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
… The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
… We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities. And present-day Europe, seemingly so unlike the Russia of 1913, is today on the verge of the same collapse, for all that it has been reached by a different route. Different parts of the world have followed different paths, but today they are all approaching the threshold of a common ruin.
In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation.
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends. Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly go about carrying them out.
… Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis ― race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism…the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain “equality”― the equality of destitute slaves.
… To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate 20th century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
—The Tempeton Address (excerpts)
“I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust to prevent those pundits who are attempting to establish fine degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality (some because of their distorted outlook, others because of shortsightedness, still others out of self-interest), to prevent them from using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat one which has never before been seen in the history of the world. Not only in the history of your country, but in the history of the world.”
“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending upon circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends upon class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this very respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea. Among progressive people, it is considered rather awkward to use seriously such words as "good" and "evil." Communism has managed to persuade all of us that these concepts are old-fashioned and laughable. But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another. We will sink to the status of animals.”
“Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.”
“…we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today. And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.”
December 8, 2025
Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West is less a book than a flare shot into a night sky he believed was rapidly darkening.
What’s astonishing—reading it now, decades after its delivery—is not the prophetic accuracy (though that’s unsettling enough) but the emotional temperature of the text: a man who has survived the furnace of Soviet totalitarianism is trying, with the last remaining fibres of his ethical nerve, to wake up a civilization sleepwalking toward its own philosophical amputation.
Solzhenitsyn speaks to Europe and America not as an émigré writer but as a surgeon who has seen the anatomy of unfreedom from the inside and is attempting an emergency diagnosis before the infection spreads.
His tone is urgent, unvarnished, sometimes harsh—but necessarily so. He detects in the Western world a strange complacency: a naïve belief that freedom, once obtained, becomes self-sustaining, like a machine left running in an empty room.
Solzhenitsyn dismantles this illusion with surgical precision. Freedom, he insists, can decay internally long before the walls of democracy collapse externally.
The West’s flirtation with moral relativism, its fascination with ideological fashion, and its chronic inability to recognize the lethal clarity of totalitarian doctrines—these become, in his speeches, symptoms of a deeper spiritual erosion.
What makes the text startlingly contemporary is how easily the rhetoric of the Soviet empire maps onto the anxieties of our own age.
Solzhenitsyn warns not only of geopolitical threats, but of the quieter, subtler dangers: a press more enamoured with sensation than truth; intellectuals who mistake cynicism for wisdom; a culture that has forgotten the cost of its own liberty.
Reading him is like listening to a clock that ticks louder as the page turns, not because time is running out, but because he wants you to hear it—wants you to remember that history is not a linear march but a spiralling echo.
But the work is not a sermon of despair. Beneath its grim admonitions lies something else: a fierce and almost tender faith in the human conscience.
Solzhenitsyn believes that the West, if it can rediscover its moral spine, can still refuse the soft slide into ideological numbness. His warnings are not curses; they are invitations.
An invitation to examine the fragility of our freedoms, the thin membranes protecting truth from distortion, and the recurring temptation—across nations and generations—to trade responsibility for comfort.
The effect is bracing. The text leaves you with the sense that Solzhenitsyn is still alive somewhere, still gripping the lectern, still scanning the horizon for signs of awakening.
Warning to the West isn’t a document of its time; it’s a test of ours.
Most recommended.
What’s astonishing—reading it now, decades after its delivery—is not the prophetic accuracy (though that’s unsettling enough) but the emotional temperature of the text: a man who has survived the furnace of Soviet totalitarianism is trying, with the last remaining fibres of his ethical nerve, to wake up a civilization sleepwalking toward its own philosophical amputation.
Solzhenitsyn speaks to Europe and America not as an émigré writer but as a surgeon who has seen the anatomy of unfreedom from the inside and is attempting an emergency diagnosis before the infection spreads.
His tone is urgent, unvarnished, sometimes harsh—but necessarily so. He detects in the Western world a strange complacency: a naïve belief that freedom, once obtained, becomes self-sustaining, like a machine left running in an empty room.
Solzhenitsyn dismantles this illusion with surgical precision. Freedom, he insists, can decay internally long before the walls of democracy collapse externally.
The West’s flirtation with moral relativism, its fascination with ideological fashion, and its chronic inability to recognize the lethal clarity of totalitarian doctrines—these become, in his speeches, symptoms of a deeper spiritual erosion.
What makes the text startlingly contemporary is how easily the rhetoric of the Soviet empire maps onto the anxieties of our own age.
Solzhenitsyn warns not only of geopolitical threats, but of the quieter, subtler dangers: a press more enamoured with sensation than truth; intellectuals who mistake cynicism for wisdom; a culture that has forgotten the cost of its own liberty.
Reading him is like listening to a clock that ticks louder as the page turns, not because time is running out, but because he wants you to hear it—wants you to remember that history is not a linear march but a spiralling echo.
But the work is not a sermon of despair. Beneath its grim admonitions lies something else: a fierce and almost tender faith in the human conscience.
Solzhenitsyn believes that the West, if it can rediscover its moral spine, can still refuse the soft slide into ideological numbness. His warnings are not curses; they are invitations.
An invitation to examine the fragility of our freedoms, the thin membranes protecting truth from distortion, and the recurring temptation—across nations and generations—to trade responsibility for comfort.
The effect is bracing. The text leaves you with the sense that Solzhenitsyn is still alive somewhere, still gripping the lectern, still scanning the horizon for signs of awakening.
Warning to the West isn’t a document of its time; it’s a test of ours.
Most recommended.
January 24, 2021
This book collects a series of speeches and interviews that Solzhenitsyn gave in America and England soon after his expulsion from Soviet Russia. The main thread connecting these works is a fear that the west was becoming too complacent towards totalitarian powers like the USSR and China. He felt that the west had done much to fight fascism during WWII but afterward it was too quick to make concessions to the USSR without receiving much in return or resulting in meaningful change for the people living in those countries. He strongly felt that westerners did not understand the degree to which Russia wanted to destroy the west ways of life and that the USSR ideology was designed for that entire purpose. He also felt that westerners didn't understand the extent that socialism/marxism/communism were failed ideologies and that freedom and western ideas were not compatible with them. He expressed again and again that communism in Russia would fail without the economic support given to them by the west. The USSR was basically unable to produce anything they needed in modern society and that without receiving western support it would fall apart. He was also very critical of England. His critiques started with England's failure to produce Russian immigrants after WWI that were all sent back to Russia and were eventually killed. English troops also forced Russian troops to return to Russia after WWII sealing their deaths. Overall, he was very critical of England's efforts to confront communism in any meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews