Warning to the West
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974: on June 30 and July 9 to trade-union leaders of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., and in New York City, and on July 15 to the United States Congress; and also the texts of his BBC interview and radio speech, which sparked widespread public controversy when they were aired in London in March 1976.
Solzhenitsyn's outspoken criticism of the West's growing weakness and complacency and his belief that Russia's growing strength will enable her to establish supremacy over the West without risk of a nucelar holocaust are expressed with the moral authority of a great novelist and historian.
"Solzhenitsyn mounts a public indictment of the supine inattention of the West that rings like the blows of the hammer with which Luther nailed his manifesto to the doors at Wittenberg."--Times Literary Supplement
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
After serving as a decorated captain in the Red Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was sentenced in 1945 to eight years of hard labor for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his long short story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1970. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, just weeks after The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet penal system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont, where he wrote The Red Wheel. In 1994 he returned home to Moscow, where he died in 2008.
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