Warning to the West Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Title Page

  Speeches to the Americans

  June 30, 1975

  July 9, 1975

  July 15, 1975

  Speeches to the British

  March 1, 1976

  March 24, 1976

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in physics and mathematics from Rostov University and studied literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War Two he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced-labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he was formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by the publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He eventually settled in Vermont, USA, and completed his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored, and four years later, he returned to settle in Russia. He died in 2008 near Moscow, at the age of eighty-nine.

  ALSO BY ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

  Novels

  In the First Circle

  Cancer Ward

  The Red Wheel

  Non-fiction

  The Gulag Archipelago

  The Oak and the Calf

  Between Two Millstones

  Stories & Poems

  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

  Matryona’s Home

  Miniatures (Prose Poems)

  The Trail

  Plays & Screenplays

  Victory Celebrations

  Prisoners

  The Love-Girl and the Innocent

  Candle in the Wind (The Light Which is in Thee)

  Tanks Know the Truth

  Essays & Speeches

  One Word of Truth (Nobel Lecture)

  A World Split Apart (Harvard Address)

  Letter to the Soviet Leaders

  Rebuilding Russia

  The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century

  ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

  Warning to the West

  Speeches, 1975-6

  Speeches to the Americans

  [JUNE 30, 1975]

  INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE MEANY

  When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of this century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty.

  Yet today, in this grave hour in human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and more lethal than ever before, the single figure who has raised highest the flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see.

  But there is a movement—a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our entire lifetime.

  Where are the members of this invisible movement? As we prepare tonight to honor the presence of one of them among us, let us give some thought to the rest: to the millions who are trapped in Soviet slave-labor camps; to the countless thousands drugged and strait-jacketed in so-called insane asylums; to the multitudes of voiceless workers who slave in the factories of the commissars; to all those who strain for bits and pieces of truth through the jammed frequencies of forbidden broadcasts, and who record and pass outlawed thoughts from hand to hand in the shadows of tyranny.

  But if they remain invisible to us, we can hear them now, for there has come forth from under the rubble of oppression a voice that demands to be heard, a voice that will not be denied.

  We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit and to embrace the lies by which that power lives.

  What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been stilled? Its strength is art.

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn is not a crusader. He is not a politician. He is not a general. He is an artist.

  Solzhenitsyn’s art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of the Big Lie.

  No man in modern times and very few in all of history have demonstrated as drastically as Alexander Solzhenitsyn the power of the pen coupled with the courage to free men’s minds.

  We need that power desperately today. We need it to teach the new and the forgetful generations in our midst what it means not to be free. Freedom is not an abstraction; neither is the absence of freedom. Solzhenitsyn has helped us to see that, thanks to his art and his courage.

  His art is a unique gift. It cannot be transmitted to another. But let us pray that his courage is contagious.

  We need echoes of his voice. We need to hear the echoes in the White House. We need to hear the echoes in the Congress and in the State Department and in the universities and in the media, and if you please, Mr. Ambassador Patrick Moynihan, in the United Nations.

  The American trade-union movement, from its beginnings to the present, has been dedicated to the firm, unyielding belief in freedom. Freedom for all mankind, as well as for ourselves. It is in that spirit that we are honored to present Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

  MOST OF THOSE present here today are workers. Creative workers. And I myself, having spent many years of my life as a bricklayer, as a foundry-man, as a manual worker, in the name of all who have shared this forced labor with me, like the two Gulag prisoners whom you just saw,fn1 and on behalf of those who are doing forced labor in our country, I can start my speech today with the greeting: “Brothers! Brothers in Labor!”

  And not to forget the many honored guests present here tonight, let me add: “Ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Workers of the world, unite!” Who of us has not heard this slogan, which has been sounding through the world for 125 years? Today you can find it in any Soviet pamphlet as well as in every issue of Pravda. But never have the leaders of the Communist Revolution in the Soviet Union used these words sincerely and in their full meaning. When so many lies have accumulated over the decades, we forget the radical and basic lie which is not on the leaves of the tree but at its very roots.

  It is now almost impossible to remember or to believe … For instance, I recently reprinted a pamphlet from the year 1918. This was a detailed record of a meeting of all representatives of the factories in Petrograd, the city known in our country as the “cradle of the Revolution.”

  I repeat, this was March 1918, only four months after the October Revolution, and all the representatives of the Petrograd factories were denouncing the Communists who had deceived them in all their promises. What is more, not only had the Communists abandoned Petrograd to cold and hunger, themselves having fled from Petrograd to Moscow, but they had given orders to open machine-gun fire on the crowds of workers in the factory courtyards who were demanding the election of independent factory committees.

  Let me remind you, this was March 1918. Scarcely anyone now can recall the
other, similar acts: the crushing of the Petrograd strikes in 1921, the shooting of workers in Kolpino in the same year …

  At the beginning of the Revolution, all those in the leadership, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were émigré intellectuals who had returned after disturbances had already broken out in Russia to carry out the Communist Revolution. But one of them was a genuine worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the last day of his life, Alexander Shliapnikov. Who is familiar with that name today? And yet it was he who expressed the true interests of the workers within the Communist leadership. In the years before the Revolution it was Shliapnikov who ran the whole Communist Party in Russia—not Lenin, who was an émigré. In 1921, he headed the Workers’ Opposition, which charged that the Communist leadership had betrayed the interests of the workers, that it was crushing and oppressing the proletariat and had degenerated into a bureaucracy.

  Shliapnikov disappeared from sight. He was arrested later, and since he firmly stood his ground he was shot in prison; his name is perhaps unknown to most people here today. But I remind you: before the Revolution the head of the Communist Party of Russia was Shliapnikov—not Lenin.

  Since that time, the working class has never been able to stand up for its rights and, in contrast to all the Western countries, our working class receives only handouts. It cannot defend its simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike for pay or for better living conditions is viewed as counter-revolutionary. Thanks to the closed nature of the Soviet system, you have probably never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and Alexandrovo, or of the major workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962—this was in Khrushchev’s time, well after the so-called thaw.

  The story of this uprising will shortly be told in detail in my book, The Gulag Archipelago, III. It is a story of how workers went in peaceful demonstration to the Novocherkassk party headquarters, carrying portraits of Lenin, to request a change in economic conditions. They were fired on with machine guns and dispersed with tanks. No family could even collect its wounded and dead: all were taken away in secret by the authorities.

  I don’t have to explain to those present here that in our country, ever since the Revolution, there has never been such a thing as a free trade union.

  The leaders of the British trade unions are free to play the unworthy game of paying visits to imaginary Soviet trade unions and receiving odious visits in return. But the AFL-CIO has never given in to these illusions.

  The American workers’ movement has never allowed itself to be blinded and to mistake slavery for freedom. And today, on behalf of all of our oppressed people, I thank you for this!

  In 1947, when liberal thinkers and wise men of the West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word “liberty,” were swearing that there were no concentration camps in the Soviet Union at all, the American Federation of Labor published a map of our concentration camps, and on behalf of all of the prisoners of those times, I want to thank the American workers’ movement for this.

  But just as we feel ourselves your allies here, there also exists another alliance—at first glance a strange and surprising one, but if you think about it, one which is well-founded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.

  This alliance is not new. The very famous Armand Hammer, who flourishes here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip to Soviet Russia in Lenin’s time, in the very first years of the Revolution. He was extremely successful in this reconnaissance mission and ever since then, for all these fifty years, we see continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West for the Soviet Communist leaders. The clumsy and awkward Soviet economy, which could never cope with its difficulties on its own, is continually getting material and technological assistance. The major construction projects in the initial five-year plan were built exclusively with American technology and materials. Even Stalin recognized that two thirds of what was needed was obtained from the West. And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces—in a country which is poor by contemporary standards—forces which are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—we have Western capital to thank for this as well.

  Let me remind you of a recent incident which some of you may have read about in the newspapers, although others might have missed it: certain of your businessmen, on their own initiative, set up an exhibit of criminological technology in Moscow. This was the most recent and elaborate technology that here, in your country, is used to catch criminals, to bug them, to spy on them, to photograph them, to tail them, to identify them. It was all put on exhibit in Moscow in order that the Soviet KGB agents could study it, as if the businessmen did not understand what sort of criminals would be hunted down by the KGB.

  The Soviet government was extremely interested in this technology and decided to purchase it. And your businessmen were quite willing to sell it. Only when a few sober voices here raised an uproar against it was this deal blocked. But you must realize how clever the KGB is. This technology didn’t have to stay two or three weeks in a Soviet building under Soviet guard. Two or three nights were enough for the KGB to examine and copy it. And if today persons are being hunted down by the best and most advanced technology, for this I can also thank your Western capitalists.

  This is something which is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: a burning greed for profit that goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience, only to get money.

  I must say that Lenin predicted this whole process. Lenin, who spent most of his life in the West and not in Russia, who knew the West much better than Russia, always wrote and said that the Western capitalists would do anything to strengthen the economy of the U.S.S.R. They will compete with each other to sell us cheaper goods and sell them quicker, so that the Soviets will buy from one rather than from the other. He said: They will bring us everything themselves without thinking about their future. And, in a difficult moment, at a party meeting in Moscow, he said: “Comrades, don’t panic, when things get very tough for us, we will give the bourgeoisie a rope, and the bourgeoisie will hang itself.”

  Then Karl Radek, who was a very resourceful wit, said: “Vladimir Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?”

  Lenin effortlessly replied, “They will sell it to us themselves.”

  For decades on end, throughout the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, and 1950’s, the Soviet press kept writing: Western capitalism, your end is near. We will destroy you.

  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. Today they don’t say “We are going to bury you,” now they say “Détente.”

  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 “Détente.”

  In order to make this clear, I will take the liberty of presenting a short historic survey—the history of these relations which in different periods have been called “trade,” “stabilization of the situation,” “recognition of realities,” and now “détente.” These relations have at least a forty-year history.

  Let me remind you with what kind of system relations began.

  The system was installed by an armed uprising.

  It dispersed the Constituent Assembly.

  It capitulated to Germany—the common enemy.

  It introduced punishment and execution without trial through the Cheka.

  It crushed workers’ strikes.

  It plundered the countryside to such an unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible manner.

&
nbsp; It smashed the Church.

  It reduced twenty provinces of our country to utter famine.

  This was in 1921, the infamous Volga famine. It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then to turn to the humanitarian world for help. We see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path. And the same thing happened in Russia in 1921. When the three-year civil war, started by the Communists—and “civil war” was a slogan of the Communists, civil war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, “America, feed our hungry.” And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry.

  The so-called American Relief Administration was set up, headed by your future President Hoover, and indeed many millions of Russian lives were saved by this organization of yours.

  But what sort of gratitude did you receive for this? In the U.S.S.R. not only did they try to erase this whole event from the popular memory—it’s almost impossible in the Soviet press today to find any reference to the American Relief Administration—they even denounced it as a clever spy organization, a cunning scheme of American imperialism to set up a spy network in Russia.

  I continue: this was a system that introduced the first concentration camps in the history of the world.

  This was a system that, in the twentieth century, was the first to introduce the use of hostages—that is to say, to seize not the person whom they were seeking, but rather a member of his family or simply someone at random, and to shoot him.

  Such a system of hostages and the persecution of families exists to this day. It is still the most powerful weapon of persecution, because the bravest person, who is not afraid for himself, can flinch at a threat to his family.