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Monday, September 2, 2013

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Paradigmatic Zek

September 2, 2013 By Vladimir Tismaneanu
Editor’s Note: Zek is a Russian slang term for a prison or forced labor camp inmate.
Five years have passed since the demise, on August 3, 2008, of the great novelist, dissident, and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Forty-five years ago, on August 25, 1968, seven people demonstrated in the Red Square heroically against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, thus ushering in an era of open dissent and ruthless persecutions, including forcible internments into psychiatric institutions. More than twenty years ago, in December 1991, the ideocratic empire called the USSR collapsed. As historian Boris Souvarine, who wrote an unsurpassed Stalin biography, noticed mordantly:…..
The Solzhenitsyn effect, associated with the publication in the West of his non-fiction monument titled “The Gulag Archipelago,” a most devastating indictment of Sovietism, engendered a mutation in the global perception of communism and contributed to the inexorable de-legitimization of totalitarianism. The Soviet myth was dealt a mortal blow. Communist “humanism” turned out to be similar to the Nazi one. The Bolshevik “conscience” was not different from the Fascist one.  No one has demonstrated more persuasively than Solzhenitsyn the duplicitous, schizophrenic nature of communism, its absolute moral falsity…..To Read More…..
 

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