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Solzhenitsyn's Letter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

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Extract

The now famous “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, written before his exile, is undoubtedly a remarkable, even historic, document. It deserves to be read along with, say, Dostoevski's “Address on the Unveiling of the Pushkin Monument” as a witness to the human spirit and to Russia. One Soviet leader, upon the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's celebrated expulsion, remarked to the effect that now he will be out of our hair and you Westerners will soon find him a bore, a nuisance and a neurotic, just as we did. The remark was not entirely unperceptive. It recognized that much of the novelists news value was based precisely upon his being inside of the Soviet Union. Once out, he might soon have as little impact on public opinion as did Kerensky during his declining and obscure years in America.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1974

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