NB: This is an astonishing declaration, The most outstanding Rusian conservative of the twentieth century, an ex-Red Army officer, imprisoned in the Gulag for eight years for criticising Stalin, expelled from his homeland, and winner of the Nobel Prize, still invoking the democratic spirit of the soviets of 1917; and asking for civil dialogue amongst all religious and ideological traditions. Whether we agree with his diagnosis or not, it is always worth remembering the spirit of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. DS
May I remind you that the soviets, which gave their name to our system and existed until July 6, 1918, were in no way dependent upon Ideology: Ideology or no Ideology, they always envisaged the widest possible consultation with all working people.
So that the country and people do not suffocate, and so that they all have the chance to develop and enrich us with ideas, allow competition on an equal and honorable basis not for power, but for truth between all ideological and moral currents, in particular between all religions – there will be nobody to persecute them if their tormentor, Marxism, is deprived of its state privileges. But allow competition honestly, not the way you do now, not by gagging people…
Translation by Hilary Sternberg
The murky whirlwind of Progressive Ideology swept in on us from the West at the end of the last century, and has tormented and ravaged our soul quite enough …
A second danger is the multiple impasse in which Western civilization (which Russia long ago chose the honor of joining) finds itself, but it is not so imminent; there are still two or three decades in reserve. We share this impasse with all the advanced countries, which are in an even worse and more perilous predicament than we are, although people keep hoping for new scientific loopholes and inventions to stave off the day of retribution. I would not mention this danger in this letter if the solutions to both problems were not identical in many respects, if one and the same turnabout, a single decision, would not deliver us from both dangers. Such a happy coincidence is rare. Let us value history’s gift and not miss these opportunities.
And all this has so “suddenly” come tumbling out at mankind’s feet, and at Russia’s! How fond our progressive publicists were, both before and after the Revolution, of ridiculing those retrogrades (there were always so many of them in Russia): people who called upon us to cherish and have pity on our past, even on the most Godforsaken hamlet with a couple of hovels, even on the paths that run alongside the railroad track; who called upon us to keep horses even after the advent of the motorcar, not to abandon small factories for enormous plants and combines, not to discard organic manure in favor of chemical fertilizers, not to mass by the million in cities, not to clamber on top of one another in multistory apartment blocks. How they laughed, how they tormented those reactionary “Slavophiles” (the jibe became the accepted term, the simpletons never managed to think up another name for themselves). They hounded the men who said that it was perfectly feasible for a colossus like Russia, with all its spiritual peculiarities and folk traditions, to find its own particular path; and that it could not be that the whole of mankind should follow a single, absolutely identical pattern of development.
No, we had to be dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeois-industrial and Marxist path in order to discover, toward the close of the twentieth century, and again from progressive Western scholars, what any village graybeard in the Ukraine or Russia had understood from time immemorial and could have explained to the progressive commentators ages ago, had the commentators ever found the time in that dizzy fever of theirs to consult him: that a dozen worms can’t go on and on gnawing the same apple forever, that if the earth is a finite object, then its expanses and resources are finite also, and the endless, infinite progress dinned into our heads by the dreamers of the Enlightenment cannot be accomplished on it. No, we had to shuffle on and on behind other people, without knowing what lay ahead of us, until suddenly we now hear the scouts calling to one another: We’ve blundered into a blind alley, we’ll have to turn back. All that “endless progress” turned out to be an insane, ill-considered, furious dash into a blind alley. A civilization greedy for “perpetual progress” has now choked and is on its last legs …
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival. By Madhavan Palat
The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool: Madhavan Palat’s lecture on Dostoevsky
Book review: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing
The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of Communism (1931) // The Paradox of the Lie (1939)
Hari Vasudevan and the Soviet Archives: A Remembrance, by Sobhanlal Datta Gupta
After the truth-shower 