Nobel archives reveal judges’ safety fears for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Hacker News Reader

Nobel archives reveal judges’ safety fears for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

theguardian.com

140 pointskzrdude89 comments

A cold war mentality is still pervading many Western sources, here even when the article itself does not have any inkling that physical safety of Solzhenitsyn was ever a cause for concern, the headline makes it so feeding a certain perception. The Soviet Union of the 1970s was not the Soviet Union of the 30s.

Solzhenitsyn was also a fierce critic of the West, and many who thought who would find him a pro-western voice was gravely surprised in his further commentary after coming to the west.

From his commencement address Harvard/78:

"Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events."

you're sure it's 1978, not 2021?

Can you find any period in history when this is not true, it just seems like restating a fairly obvious fact about what happens to human society as it grows.

It's a bit of a circular definition. Certainly it shouldn't be surprised that the set of popular things is full of things that are popular. It shouldn't be a surprise that people are focused on fashionable topics since the notion of fashion is defined by what people are talking about.

The runaway effect though ensures that once was a small fashion becomes a stronger fashion until it overrepresents what people would otherwise naturally care about.

>Can you find any period in history when this is not true

Probably not.

> it just seems like restating a fairly obvious fact about what happens to human society

obvious and sad fact.

>as it grows.

why as it grows?

Maybe it doesn't even need to grow but Eternal September's are definitely a real thing.

When it comes to prescient-ness, reading some ancient Greek history (contemporaneously written) really changed my view in that if you read what (IIRC) Thucydides is writing about it's pretty much exactly the same as today ("An old man complained in the streets that the youths are spending too much time lounging around instead of fighting") but slower.

By Solzhenitsyn's account, he was the victim of an attempted poisoning in 1971. Also see the attempted poisoning of Voinovich in 1975 and the poisoning of Markov in 1978.

The full speech here:https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenit...

One of the import speeches made in the USA in second half of 20th century.

"But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening."

> The Soviet Union of the 1970s was not the Soviet Union of the 30s.

Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov has been assassinated by KGB in 1978

American dissident Fred Hampton was assassinated by the CIA in 1969.

This

a) Is a great example of whataboutism

b) Totally irrelevant to the discussion

c) Is just not true

c) It really is.

a) b) Of course it's relevant. If you condemn one but not the other you are engaging in a double standard.

>The Soviet Union of the 1970s was not the Soviet Union of the 30s.

Yet it was still the Soviet Union and people disappeared.

I first read this speech a few years ago and read it again just now and, while I admire the force and clarity of the writing, the speech is frustratingly long on generalities and platitudes and short on ... anything concrete? Our leaders are feckless, our youth are directionless, our forefathers were wiser and deeper and more spiritual, the powers that be ignore the wisdom of their people, nobody will talk about this -- it's the sort of speech that's been given repeatedly throughout history, and part of that is because the gaps in it are nicely filled by whatever prejudices the listener has. It's not hard, for example, to draw a line between the ideas of this speech and Solzhenitsyn's eventual boosting of Putin, who was just the man to acquire immense power in the name of getting things done and some vague alignment with tradition and Christianity.

I do, of course, admire Solzhenitsyn's courage and work. Part of the speech's moral force is probably lost because I read it instead of seeing him speak it. But as a piece of writing, I struggle to find anything new or incisive in it.

Oh, and fun fact I learned reading about him this morning: his son did his undergrad at Harvard, and is (or recently was) a senior partner at McKinsey in Moscow [1, 2].

[1] https://www.castelli-international.it/online-interview-with-...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180614021146/https://www.mckin...

I suppose if you merely skimmed over the speech, which I presume you did, since you found it boring, I can see why you'd arrive at those generalizations and platitudes.

I instead found insight on the strong spiritual characteristic of the East that the West lacked.

-of America's inability to decisively win wars after Vietnam

-of its future alliance/allegiance to China, which is more economic, but we see the exact same problematic outcome

-of the similarities of the outcome of censorship produced by Western media and groupthink compared to Eastern state controlled media, where unpopular ideas might as well be censored as they will never reach anybody.

-the problem of humanism without much 'spirituality', and how that drives forward America's mediocrity by its adherence to the letter of the law without much moralism, and how that cold adherence has led to a society that is prosperous yet at the same time quick to looting as soon as electricity is gone for a few hours.

-his questioning of the West's backbending subservience to former colonies

-the notion that communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat in the East, but the West's infatuation with it continues to allow it to persist.

-He actively critiques the 'forefathers' (as you put it) as well. Elaborating that the Western born view of the world developed during the Enlightenment and Renaissance has inevitably led to this self centered materialistic worldview.

I suppose this summarizes his main prevailing hope:

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it"

The use of assassination did not come to an end at least until Beria was out of the picture (ironically, through assassination), and, as we know, it has seen a resurgence lately. The Nobel judges were not aware of the latter, of course, but their concern was not entirely irrational.

In this context, whether Solzhenitsyn was either admirable or would have any lasting influence is beside the point.

The article itself do not indicate that the Nobel Committee feared for Solzhenitsyn's physical safety, concern was about how the Soviet Government would react like not allowing back to the USSR after receiving the prize or not allowing him to travel to Stockholm. There is no concerns elucidated about his personal safety as insinuated by the headline (though not by the rest of the article itself).

Article does bot substantiate what the headline wants to insinuate.

Beria died in 1953. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the prize in 1972.

I’m simply pointing out that justified concerns over the safety of those who opposed to whoever held power in Russia did not end with the 1930s, as was suggested by your original post. They are, of course, with us now.

A concern over Solzhenitsyn's movements being constrained is even harder to paint as alarmist than concerns over his physical safety.

Solzehnitsyn strikes me as someone who struggled with cultural shock and language barriers after arrival in a new country, but who had the sort of personality that would build up this myth of spiritual decay and opposition of civilizations in order to channel that personal frustration.

Another example might be Sayyid Qutb: was 1940s USA really that heinous for an ordinary Egyptian, or did Qutb just feel ill at ease during his time in the country and direct that frustration in an unhealthy direction?

myth of spiritual decay

Would you consider a society in which metal detectors at school entrances are a widely accepted norm "spiritually enlightened"?

The "myth" of spiritual decay? That seems rather dismissive both of his perspective as an outsider looking in and of the general observations of those Americans who somehow have preserved or gained some measure of perspective. This is not an unusual or even original analysis of where we are. Tell a fish he's swimming in water and he'll ask you "what's water?", so I am not surprised that some might not understand. But the culture is truly stupid.

> myth of spiritual decay

Advertising has been warping the West since Gutenberg, but it really took off exponentially after 1900.

You drop anyone from former centuries (or more insular/insulated cultures) into the late XX century, they'll go into shock.

Anyone with current average Western beliefs, as induced by media, would be considered mentally ill in the not too distant past.

Who knew the man was a savant.

The man had, word for word, given a concise description if the internet platforms in 2021 and the last 5-6 years.

With a few notable exceptions, such as HN, a different opinion/worldview is wholly unacceptable. The power of these platforms to silence dissent would have probably made the likes of Joseph Goebels salivate and smack his lips in approval.

"exceptions, such as HN", you really don't think there's a hivemind here? Or are you censoring yourself in fear of downvotes, precisely as per OP. There are many ways to get to top of HN, few examples: write a rehashed "Kubernetes sucks" article. Write anything about Rust. Write an article criticizing Google. Write an article about how webdev is "wrong" nowadays. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Nope. I have plenty of downvotes but HN really does have a better incidence of open discussion unless someone is obviously giving an answer that's not thought out or off-topic with unneccesary hostility adding no value to the discussion (like a racial slur)

Not to say there isnt a hivemind, there is but conversation rarely disintergrates into mindless name-calling.

There is space to disagree. And anecdotally I tend to disagree with a lot of things but I've never been banned/silenced.

I think the 'hivemind' stuff is a bit overstated, but there are a few areas where, given the topic, you have a high chance of being downvoted even if you provide a rational, non-personal, non-offensive, and careful opinion. This is just what I've witnessed based on the article-type that I click on and observe the commentariat (I'm sure there are many other topics):

- If the article is about Bitcoin or crypto and there are a large number of people talking about externalities. If someone says something that's perceived as being not in line, it's getting heavily downvoted.

- If the article is about the stock market and there are a large number of people who are recommending index fund dollar-cost averaging. Someone says they picked stocks. Bye-bye, comment font contrast against the background. Greyed. Those grey comments are probably mine in this example.

- If the article is about a recent event around a cancellation such as a firing or a conversation around misinformation, anything perceived as questioning that (such as using the word censorship in the comment) has a near-guarantee of downvotes. There is no way to ever come to the defense of someone who said something that has been deemed misinformation, a conspiracy theory, or such, without being associated with the cancelled. It's almost dangerous to even opine at this point if you have feelings around freedom of speech. Note: I'm not talking about the opinion itself, but the right to air it, and coming to defense of that. It's poorly received.

- Criticisms of Google, curiously, and I've seen Facebook as well (although I think Facebook fell out of favor in the last few years). I have a theory about many employees coming to the defense of their employer out of loyalty.

There are probably many other examples of dangerous topics that provoke the group. I think there is something in people's mind that lets them justify this as follows:

"If you question the popular wisdom here, when you have a group saying A, and you say B, you must be a troll out to provoke people."

I simply upvote anything that's gray.

I often do that, even if I completely disagree, if I feel like someone was rational and reasonable in their comment. I like to think comment vote should be around quality of argument, not the Correct Opinion / Side.

> I think there is something in people's mind that lets them justify this as follows:

> "If you question the popular wisdom here, when you have a group saying A, and you say B, you must be a troll out to provoke people."

The HN moderation team holds to this "principle" and has thereby essentially developed a community around it. That is, this isn't a bug, it's a feature.

I don't think the moderation team sought out to create a monoculture- is that what you are suggesting? Downvotes and upvotes for comments for many people are viewed as ways to reward/punish well-constructed/poorly constructed argumentation. I'm sure originally it was a way to conceive of a popularity rating for an article/post. Something with tons of upvotes is popular.

I think I'm offering this as an alternative to the theory that a monoculture was intentionally created, which is one which the mod team disclaims as I understand it. But if every individual moderation decision is made on the basis of "disagreeing with the 'accepted' answer is trolling" or something like that, and the HN community is [self-]selected on that basis, then I think that's an equally good or better explanation for what I actually observe in comment sections.

There's something to be said that the monoculture path or end result - if that's what we think is the trend - is more a function more broadly of either technology or some cultural norm. Because it's so incredibly widespread outside of HN, the comment voting behavior here seems to me more like a symptom of a broader problem than a design artifact.

I see contrarian opinions all the time on HN. This is a fairly libertarian place. There is plenty of groupthink, but there are pro/con opinions of just about every thread posted here.

> With a few notable exceptions, such as HN, a different opinion/worldview is wholly unacceptable

I don’t see any difference on Hacker News. Dang does an amazing job moderating and people are somewhat more civil to each other and more curious on average but the culture here strongly weeds out people who are not comfortable with aggressively stated opinions.

I like it here but Hacker News has a culture that suits the people who come here. Only approved non-conformity is tolerated. This is true of every community, to pretend otherwise is kind of silly in my opinion.

I would argue that instead of approved nonconformity it is polite nonconformity that is tolerated. Some people self-censor out of fear of disagreement downvotes, but I see all kinds of opinions and that is why I come here. I also think we see what we want in a lot of dialog. Either folks look for opposition and find it or they seek out likeminded opinions and find that too. Its not that there is a central culture here, it is that there are so many differing opinions that you can perceive the site however you choose.

You think Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was prescient? Try George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).

Or maybe it's that human society doesn't change as quickly as our technological innovations make it feel, so accurate observations about the present tend to hold true centuries after they're made.

The other alternative is that Solzhinitsyn and Eliot had their heads so far up their own asses that they imagined any rebuke or slight as a sure sign of the end of days for civilization when in fact it was not. You could fill entire libraries with the books and articles written by notable (at the time) intellectuals who all decry the state of the current world, blame it all on 'fashion' (as opposed to their own firmly deduced logical conclusions that no one should dare to question), and tell everyone else that we are already tumbling quickly down the slippery slope to some undesirable end state.

It must be terrifying for people like this (and those in this same thread trying to make statements from the late 70s sound like prescient warnings for the 2020s) to see the world turning away from their writings or simply deciding that they were not as important or significant as society once thought. When the crowd goes one way and you desperately want it to follow in the direction you are trying to lead it must be quite frightening and depressing.

> The other alternative is that Solzhinitsyn and Eliot had their heads so far up their own asses that they imagined any rebuke or slight as a sure sign of the end of days for civilization when in fact it was not.

Plato does this too. Was his head also up his ass? Anyway, he was right, no? He was writing at the end of the Classical period.

The truth is just that there's a constant struggle between past and future, tradition and innovation, and to go all in on one side or the other (which is what we are all drawn to) is insane. Pointing out the downsides of innovation is not wrong unless you're arguing for doing away with it altogether.

Speeches like these occur in all eras of history, including both the waxing and waning phases of powerful civilizations. It’s about as novel as an old man complaining about “kids these days.”

If you discount that factor: these sentiments are also a pretty normal reaction to any society that has experienced substantial improvements in the average person’s well-being within the speaker’s lifetime. If you’ve watched your country emerge from pre-industrial poverty, then of course your forebears are going to seem (in retrospect) powerful and resilient to harsh conditions, while your contemporaries are going to appear relatively soft and materialistic. That doesn’t necessarily mean you want such people leading you into the future. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn‘s late-life endorsement of Putin shows the peril in that.

I don't think either of these people wrote or talked about the end days of civilisation.

Meh. Don't like CNN/NY Times? There's always Fox News/Reason/The Federalist. Your voice isn't heard at Harvard? Well, there's Hillandale College and others.

It would be hard to find a point of view that can't be found in print or on line today.

You make it sound like there’s an ideological 50/50 ratio in US media. This isn’t even close to the truth. The ratio is likely closer to 90/10, if not worse.

Simple example: A huge portion of the US population has no clue of the tragedy unfolding at the US/Mexico border.

Why?

Because the media is actively suppressing coverage. If they don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist. Out of all the reporters in the White House briefing room, only one asks questions about this, and the answers are a study in political avoidance.

Did you know kids are being found dead on a regular basis? Drowned, dehydrated in the desert, etc. And, of course, girls are being molested, abused, raped and trafficked.

No, this didn’t come from Fox News. We watch the Hispanic new networks every morning. They are reporting some of this on a daily basis. Just a couple of days ago they found four little girls in the desert, one if them thought dead and later survived.

These events alone should be reason for mass demonstrations against the abject incompetence and callousness of current border policies. And yet, because of the overwhelming alignment of the media with the current ideological bend, the death and suffering continues.

Had this happened during the last four years you would have 24/7 coverage of the carnage, including live helicopter video of dead kids in the desert.

That’s how bad it is. This is precisely what the quoted portion of Solzhenitsyn‘s speech was referring to.

I understand his frustration. Having come from a place where military rule controlled it all, it is disheartening to see the US in the grips of ideology through a less centralized mechanism. This society is supposed to be “free” and yet people are afraid to speak up because their lives or livelihoods are at very real risk. This is sad to watch.

Is this happening on a different scale? Because I have heard/read about this happening since I was a kid, and I meant hearing tales from my uncles who did cross the border illegally, and certainly don’t remember anything other than the rhetoric about kids in cages by liberals and the “build the wall” chants by conservatives during Trump’s administration.

I meant I could be wrong, but given the historical disinterest that the media has shown about the border drama, I would imagine this is more the same apathy than a concerted effort to suppress coverage, and I would in fact argue that the sudden interest by conservative media is only because this is something that can be blamed on Biden.

I am not taking sides. As a descendant of genocide survivors I don’t care about sides, only life. What’s going on right now is way beyond kids in cages. It’s horrific. And, yes, it’s a lot worse that it has been in decades. I think we are at a run rate approximating 1.8 million a year. That’s just insane, particularly in an economy that is not creating 1.8 million extra jobs per year.

I thought this was about the humanitarian catastrophe, not about economy or jobs, so my take is that US migration policy is not humanitarian with Biden, was not humanitarian with Trump, Obama and previous administrations; claiming that there’s a concerted effort to hide this now… well might be true, but I think it can be better explained with just a general apathy, after all, people were dying during Trump era like they are now, and as mention, while I remember a certain anti Trump rethoric, I don’t remember anti Trump media specially fixated on the worse part.

Migration is a complicated business, and I definitely agree that uncontrolled migration can crash the economy. I don’t think conservative media cares about the border crisis more than just as a power grab.

They are interconnected. If you promote uncontrolled migration and you get 1.8 million people per year, you have to create an additional 1.8 million jobs per year. If not, you are going to have 1.8 million additional unemployed per year. Or, even worse, 1.8 million people working illegally for way below minimum wage being abused and, effectively, living in serfdom without possibility of escape due to both their legal status and the fact that we are not creating enough excess jobs to support such an influx. This is how the economy and jobs turns into an invisible humanitarian catastrophe.

If I remember correctly, last jobs report we created somewhere in the order of 250K jobs. The expectation was in the order of one million. That did not happen. We have somewhere in the order of ten million people unemployed. Do we really want to add another million or two per year through uncontrolled migration.

The principle is very simple. Under ideal conditions, if we want to allow N million people to come into the country (legally or not) we ought to have N million jobs waiting for them. If we cannot generate jobs IN EXCESS of our baseline, we should cut down on migration (legal or not). If we don't, all we are doing is adding unemployed without controls. Aside from the fact that they will require assistance we just can't provide, this isn't a formula for long term success.

When my parents emigrated to the US they went through a series of interviews at the US embassy and had to prove they would not be a burden to US taxpayers for five years. Like it or not, that's the way a country manages immigration responsibly. Yes, of course, you make some allocations for those who need help. That's just being nice people. However, you can't have 50% of your immigration come in without sensible controls. This is the very definition of insanity: You are importing unemployment, which can't lead to anything good in the long term for both the people coming in and the nation.

Please note that I am not injecting Democrat vs. Republican analysis here. You can do this purely by the data and with some common sense peppered into it. The US immigration system currently accepts about 675K people per year into the country legally [0].

Is this number too low? We could explore this argument. What metric do we use? In other words, other than "feelings", how do we objectively assess how many people per year a country --any country-- can or should accept?

The easiest argument to make is: People who can come in and make a substantial job-creating investment should be allowed in because this expands the jobs marketplace. Of course, we have to make sure the investment is actually going to create jobs. Someone coming in to buy ten million dollars of properties isn't going to create a single job. Those properties already exist and all the trades servicing them are working on them. No new jobs.

Beyond that, I think you have to look at the employment situation and see where the country might have gaps. This would change from year to year. For a period you might need doctors, welders, engineers or farm workers. Fine, have legal immigration policy reflect that.

Again, I am talking about ANY country on earth, not the US. This removes the bothersome Democrat vs. Republican arguments. Responsible immigration policy should look after both the nation and immigrants in order to ensure that immigration does not become a burden for one and a tragedy for the other.

Of course you have to allow some number of people to migrate on humanitarian basis. That's just being nice people. It can't be millions though. That's just a sad reality of the equation any nation faces.

And so, as one goes through this analysis, one never encounters a "let's allow millions of people per year into the country without controls". And that is because this makes no sense whatsoever for any nation on earth.

What I find interesting is that nobody argues with the immigration rules of countries like New Zealand or pretty much any other nation in the world. I mention New Zealand because I have a friend who moved there. They had to go through a points-based system and all the legalities to get in. And they did. The funny part is that they did not object to that system at all and actually thought it was sensible. And yet, with the other side of their face, when it comes to the US, they are full-on open borders supporters. I have to admit I don't understand this at all.

Love or hate Trump, his strong southern border illegal immigration position was the correct one for a nation that IS NOT CREATING EXCESS JOBS. We are on a fight for survival. More and more industries and jobs are being eroded by China and other global competitors. Sorry, we just can't have millions of people come in without controls. It makes no sense for the nation or those coming in.

We can't use past examples (50+ years ago) of illegal immigration as a metric to justify what's going on today. Why? Because of the thing I have been repeating: We are not creating jobs in excess. Back then things were very different. China was an agrarian economy. Today they are the second largest economy in the world, are landing drones on Mars and are sucking jobs from every nation in the world. Fifty years ago we were exploding with jobs and growth. Today we are shrinking, and, sadly, it is likely to get worse.

I don't know how to solve this equation without saying that illegal immigration at the current scale is nothing less than insanity.

[0] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/how-unit...

Look, I fully agree with you, and I also don’t care about Republican/Democrat drama, as I’m not even American.

My point is that on the other side of the border, I fail to see this “open border policy”. If I wanted to migrate to America (which I don’t), I would have to go through the same as your parents, my friends who applied for a Work visa, had to go through the same stuff. Just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine who is a lawyer, who has his own practice and earns a decent amount of money, got his tourist visa denied at the embassy. The legal way is already hard, those who I know nowdays who are illegally, entered legally because crossing the border is deemed too dangerous and only for desperate people.

So you think the amount of people America can house is lower than current immigration, well I don’t have the numbers but I don’t disagree with you. The thing is migrants on the southern border are already risking death. A couple of more border patrol officers might do a nice anti immigration rhetoric, but I don’t really think it’s discouraging enough, and still doesn’t address the problem of people overstaying their visa. So in my eyes, this policies, the critics of “promoting uncontrolled immigration”, and the concern about the humanitarian crisis on the border is more a political argument than something that really address the immigration problem, something that -I might need to reiterate- I agree that should be controlled.

Solzhinitsyn is fairly authoritarian and pro-Putin. It is odd too talk about him as if he would be pro freedom and free speach. He is not.

HN is definitely not an exception.

HN is very much a very close-minded bubble with very strongly held, specific and quite weird ideologies that you are definitely not allowed to break.

It is far more insular than most social media.

What is this whitewashing? The Soviet Union never stopped assassinating people, and the practice clearly continued into present day Russia. Boris Yeltsin was one whim away from being assassinated in 1991 on orders from the KGB; the only reason it didn't happen is because the Alfa group commanders decided not to be bloodthirsty that day.

This I would like to learn more about

Here are some quick links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Group#1991_Soviet_coup_d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat...

The gist of it is in August of 1991, hardline Soviet leaders, opposed to political reform, attempted a coup. As part of this coup, the elimination of Yeltsin was planned. Yeltsin was inside the Russian White House, which was surrounded by a very large crowd of civilians who opposed the coup. KGB chairman and leader of the coup, Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered the KGB's spetzna (Alfa) to fight their way through the crowd of civilians into the Russian White House to eliminate Yeltsin. Alfa showed up to do the job, but upon seeing and mingling with the crowd of civilians, decided against slaughter.

Incidentally, Alfa is also the group that in 1979 stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassinated Hafizullah Amin, starting the Soviet-Afghan War.

Aha. Perhaps the same day when the famous photo of Yeltsin on a tank was taken?

Thank you!

So much vitriol only to spend the remainder of his life travelling across Siberia in Putin's carnival wagon.

The media wasn’t interested, but now it doesn’t care. Today every person is media conglomerate (at least until YouTube bans them)

Who is the woman in the photo? Is that his second wife?

Yes, it's his second wife, and the photo was taken in 1972 when he was visiting Mstislav Rostropovich. There is another photo from the same series here: https://rg.ru/2019/12/10/vospominaniia-solzhenicyna-o-tom-ka...

Thank you!

the caption says it is "his wife, Natalia"

However, Wikipedia says both his wives were called Natalia. He married the second one after receiving the Nobel.

The woman in the photo is his second wife, Natalia née Svetlova.

Unsurprising, given the one thing that regime could not allow to prevail was truth, documentary or literary. Soviets ultimately used communism as a distraction for their totalitarian aim, which was dominion by creating a mental hall of mirrors that isolated each person from their own humanity and subordinated them to the "state," which itself was by every other account of regular purges and fear, just another kind of multi-layered chaotic hell as well. Once you were arguing, to engage at all meant you were already implicated and compromised by your "class," as the ideology and intellectual conflict was not their real tool, it was the bait for the trap that identified potential people with the instinct to resist, as the true aim of a totalitarian movement is to destroy all possible resistance by unmooring people from any concept or belief in truth. That is, for good men to do nothing.

It's the intellectual strategy of the same kind of people today, to destabilize, leverage chaos, and reduce people to their animal level political instincts instead of allowing us to use our higher capacity for principle, order, and reason. That's the great game, between order and chaos. Solzhenitsyn (and earlier, Hannah Arendt) wrote a warning for all time about the tactics of what is an essential and ancient evil. I'm kind of what you would call "the first to stop clapping." The things people talk about in the culture wars today are the same thing. Without a meta-understanding of them, we're going to fall prey to the same tactics.

Solzhenitsyn seems beloved by HN so - what did you all think of Two Hundred Years Together?

I don't think anything good about it. Apart from the standard anti-Semitic polemic, which innovates nothing, he insulted a number of people whom he had no right to insult, and reinvented a number of episodes of his own biography in a self-serving and mendacious way. If you wish to look into it, you can start here:

http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2003/0723/win/badash.htm

>I don't think anything good about it.

I've never seen a physical copy in English.

Did you download it from somewhere before reading it?

I read it online, in Russian. Well, in the late-Solzhenitsyn version of Russian, which diverged considerably from the standard language. I don't know if there is an English translation of it. I saw on a few occasions that people expressed the intention to translate it, generally as part of some anti-Semitic agenda, but I don't think that anybody got past a few chapters, since there is nothing particularly new or interesting in it, even (and especially) for anti-Semites, and rendering Solzhenitsyn's unusual diction and neologisms in another language is difficult.

You can read it in English here, I believe:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40871113?seq=1

Outstanding book by one of the greatest of Russian authors that should be required reading today.

thirded

Seconded.

There’s a difference between a book and its author (although I guess critical theorists would have something to say about that).

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