The historians are Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich, and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Compiled and edited by Flagg Taylor (Assistant Professor of government at Skidmore College) "The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism" showcases the insights of such giants as
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, Czeslaw Milosz, Leo Strauss, and Raymond Aron, along with neglected but important thinkers such as Waldemar Gurian, Aurel Kolnai, Leszek Kolakowski, Pierre Manent, Claude Lefort, and Chantal Delsol.
Caption: Celebrity exile:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn addresses the press after his 1974 exile to the West, the same year Time magazine declared him "the world's most celebrated writer." From 1962 until his death in 2008, Solzhenitsyn's writings warned the world of the dangers of communism.
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978, by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Peter Constantine.
Stockdale, USN, wrote of frequently with respect to his captivity (as have many others, such as
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Viktor Frankl).
It's an ignorant mentality that forgets we are all human - or that, as philosopher and writer
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn puts it: "The dividing line between good and evil cuts through every human heart."
This phenomenon -- "Finlandization" -- helps explain why, when
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was translated into Finnish in 1974, the first edition was printed in neighboring Sweden.
Take
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was repeatedly imprisoned and exiled in his native land, rejected materialism in his United States exile and lived in similar seclusion after returning, in short-lived triumph, to Russia -- ever the lone voice in the wilderness.
In 1962, Khrushchev allowed writer
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the camps, to publish his novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a typical day in the gulag.
'Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.' -Russian novelist and historian
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship on February 13, 1974.
Writers rise together, and without formidable peers and a tradition of literary giants, we might not have had
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.