Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Washington, D.C., on June 30, delivered a dramatic warning to all the world – and to Americans in particular. The Nobel Prize winning author, in his first major public address since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, stripped bare the crimes and excesses of the Communist masters in his native land. And he denounced the West for a “senseless process of endless concessions to aggressors” in the Kremlin. The text of the 90-minute address that follows is the translation approved by the author, reprinted with permission of the AFL-CIO, which invited him to speak.
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Through the decades of the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, the whole Soviet press wrote: Western capitalism, your end is near.
But it was as if the capitalists had not heard, could not understand, could not believe this.
Nikita Khrushchev came here and said, “We will bury you!” They didn’t believe that, either. They took it as a joke.
Now, of course, they have become more clever in our country. Now they don’t say “we are going to bury you” anymore, now they say “detente.”
Nothing has changed in Communist ideology. The goals are the same as they were, but instead of the artless Khrushchev, who couldn’t hold his tongue, now they say “detente.”
In order to understand this, I will take the liberty of making a short historic survey – the history of such relations, which in different periods have been called “trade,” “stabilization of the situation,” “recognition of realities,” and now “detente.” These relations ‘now are at least 40 years old.
Let me remind you with what sort of system they started.
The system was installed by armed uprising.
It dispersed the Constituent Assembly.
It capitulated to Germany – the common enemy.
It introduced execution without trial.
It crushed workers’ strikes.
It plundered the villagers to such an unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible way.
It shattered the Church.
It reduced 20 provinces of our country to a condition of famine.
This was in 1921, the famous Volga famine. A very typical Communist technique: To seize power without thinking of the fact that the productive forces will collapse, that the fields will not be sown, the factories will stop, that the country will decline into poverty and famine – but when poverty and hunger come, then they request the humanitarian world to help them.
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