Question by Islam Delenda Est: How important was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the ultimate downfall of the USSR?
I don’t think he was as important as President Reagan, PM Thatcher, or Pope John Paul II, but I think he was instrumental in that “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” and “The Gulag Archipelago” helped open the eyes of Western apologists for the Soviet régime.
He was the voice of the Soviet conscience for a half century. RIP, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
justin: So you believe a man whose entire career was made up of rising through the bureaucracy of the CPSU just woke up one morning and decided, “Hmmm, know what? We’ve been wrong for 70 years. I think I’ll dismantle our system”?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Patronage Job Employment Agency
Ecnomics is the down fall, and still The Russians don’t get it they
just dont get it,
I was in Novosibirsk in Oct 2006,
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montcalm says
i think that he was a thorn in the side of the soviets and a welcome exile to the US where americans were eager to hear of soviet abuses. i think his work did have an incredibly important effect in exposing the vast extent of the injustices committed against the russian people, but what is less known about him is that he was also incredibly critical of the US whose citizens he saw as greedy, morally corrupt, shallow, and materialistic. he voiced support for the tsarist russia that was lost in the revolution and criticized the US for losing the vietnam war. so i think in the end, he was a complicated personality who eventually succumbed to reactionary thinking.
regarding his role in the downfall of the soviet union, i think that had more to do with the economic implosion of that state. i think he mostly affected how westerners viewed the soviet union and had less effect on its actual downfall.
Justin says
Reagan was the talk.
Gorbachev was the walk.
Solzhenitsyn was the spirit.
Yeah, he worked his way up in the existing system, who wouldn't?
He realized that the CCCP was collapsing under its own weight. As soon as he was in a position of real power, he took action to reform the country with Glasnost and Peristroika, as well as democratization attempts.
Charlton Heston& says
mr. obama will not mourn his loss or attend his funeral to be sure…
when castro kicks, it will be a different story!