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An Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

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Extract

In Great Britain, on the first of March, the BBC broadcast an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted by Michael Charlton of BBC. The impact of that interview upon the British public made news around the world. In late March the interview was shown in this country by the Public Broadcasting System on its program “Firing Line.” We are pleased to publish, with permission, the full text of the BBC interview.—Eds.

Aleksandr Isaech, when Mr. Brezhnev and the Politburo took the decision to exile you abroad rather than send you once more to a concentration camp, they must have believed that you would do less damage to the Communist state outside the Soviet Union than inside it. So I wonder if you believe time will prove that judgment to be correct?

In the way you put that question there is a certain false assumption. If one puts the question in this way, we assume that the Politburo is all-powerful and independent in the decisions it makes, that it was free to decide one way or another.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1976

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