Warning to the West is a criticism of both the west and his own nation. Solzhenitsyn expresses his deep pain and frustration toward the nations of the world for ignoring the atrocities and even aiding the Soviet Communist Government in which he hails from. Solzhenitsyn expresses his slanted view of a perfect Détente and what he feels should be a true Marxist state by showing some of the atrocities claimed by the Soviet regime. He expresses to the United States that nations can no longer stand by and let communism take over the world.
Solzhenitsyn complains about the western allies supporting and aligning with the USSR. He offers explanations to why the allies decided to aid USSR against Nazi Germany. However, although his arguments are somewhat valid, Solzhenitsyn is missing two main keys and reasons to why the west aligned with Soviet Russia. First, The USSR signed a pact with Germany and even aided Germany take over Eastern Europe. This is problematic because if both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia work together with Imperial Japan, the Allies had no chance. The Allies needed to divide these nations. This same tactic was worked in the 1970’s with China. Convince China to become “enemies” with soviet Russia. Why would the US support a horrible dictator like Mao Zedong? To prevent a collaboration of communist superpowers that could overrun the world overnight. And second, The Allies simply had no real proof of the atrocities being committed by Stalin during his reign.
Solzhenitsyn does express the evils of his own nation clearly, which becomes eerie when looking through the same lens upon which we see our own nation slipping into. He makes remarks about the soviet government controlling everything. Elections are folly; the...
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...en it was written. As I wrote above, even the “light of the world”(USA) has seemingly ignored the warning by Solzhenitsyn. As America, the prime example of democratic success, turns toward socialism, the world will follow. This warning by Solzhenitsyn has been brushed aside. More importantly, Solzhenitsyn’s Warning was for the West to learn from history, to which the West has failed to do. However, we still have time to learn. This book is a must read for anyone who believes in liberty, freedom, and democracy because it heeds warnings to what we have brushed off for decades. “Americas will never let that happen to America”, this statement has shown to be completely untrue. Solzhenitsyn’s writing is empowering and reminding of man’s truest sin, ignorance of truth.
Works Cited
Warning to the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
Tucker, Robert C. "The Mortal Danger". Course Reader for World Culture: Russia Since 1917. New York University, Spring 2001.
Lydia Chekovskaya wrote about Sofia Petrovna and the transformation she had undergone to closely reflect the state of mind and changes experienced by citizens of the Soviet Union during that time. As people began to suffer from the purges and other hardships due to Stalin’s incompetence, their minds and logic, much like Sofia Petrovna’s, became impaired leading them to try their best to rationalize Stalin’s actions. They believed in the party wholeheartedly, but when they finally realized the wrongdoing of the party, it was far too late.
“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” Foreign Affairs, 1947, explains the difficulty of summarizing Soviet ideology. For more than 50 years, the Soviet concept held the Russian nations hypnotized, discontented, unhappy, and despondent confined to a very limited Czarist political order. Hence, the rebel support of a bloody Revolution, as a means to “social betterment” (Kennan, 567). Bolshevism was conceptualized as “ideological and moral, not geopolitical or strategic”. Hoover declares that… “five or six great social philosophies were struggling for ascendancy” (Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 20).
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich takes place in a camp run by the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. This camp is called a Gulag which was established for people who were working against the soviet union under the man named Stalin. You would go there for disobeying, not believing in what stalin wanted the perfect soviet society to be. One of the men named Ivan denisovich told his story about the life in the Gulags. When ivan was sent there for being a soldier. He would always wake up on time and do the work he was demanded of. But one of the days he fell ill. he hoped he was going to be put on the sick list. So that day he decided to lay in bed for a few minutes longer. Instead the guard so rudely does tell him to get up and said you're coming with me. When you disobeyed the guards orders you were sent to a prison cell.A guard named TarTar took him to the punishment cells for his tardiness but instead he makes him clean the floor in the guard room. This job was for After doing this he goes to eat breakfast which consists of bread and water. When he was done with breakfast he went to the doctor because he felt ill but the guy took his temperature and sent him to do some work. The only thing that kept him moving and fighting was having people he was close with which was necessarily his gang consisting of tiuryn, tsezar, aloysha a baptist not being able to have his own religion. As Shukhov he said “Come on, boys, don’t let it get you down! It’s only a Power Station, but we’ll make it a home away from home.” ( page, Schukov wanted to make knifes with the scrap metal he found. He wanted to be able to fight back with the soviet guards in hopes to go home. But when he was searched at first he remembered that ...
Being one of the greatest Russian writers of 20th century, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn had a unique talent that he used to truthfully depict the realities of life of ordinary people living in Soviet era. Unlike many other writers, instead of writing about “bright future of communism”, he chose to write about everyday hardships that common people had to endure in Soviet realm. In “Matryona’s Home”, the story focuses on life of an old peasant woman living in an impoverished collectivized village after World War 2 . In the light of Soviet’s propaganda of creating a new Soviet Nation, the reader can observe that Matryona’s personality and way of life drastically contradicted the desired archetype of New Soviet Man. Like most of the people in her village,
Intro with Thesis: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that documents totalitarian communism through the eyes of an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labor camp. This story describes the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, as he freezes and starves with the other prisoners, trying to survive the remainder of his ten-year sentence. In this story, Solzhenitsyn uses the struggles in the camp as a way to represent the defaults of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. By doing this, Solzhenitsyn uses authoritative oppression in his labour camps to demonstrate the corrupt nature of the Soviet system.
Throughout the book Solzhenitsyn uses the portrayal of the common prisoner, the man with average desires, views and means of survival, to show how civil values are victorious over evil. To show how the person who wins the small victories is not the person who lets go of his disciplines and drops to a place where nothing and no one matters except themselves. To show how the person who will make it through the night without having their throat cut is the one who holds on to their mental constitution. They will be the ones who get the extra cigars and the friends who will help them in times of need. The book is truly a story of victory; the victory of morals over selfishness.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken writer, who used his short stories to be vocal about the reality of Soviet society. Many pieces of Soviet literature were regulated, in which the reality was masked by Soviet Union propaganda. Solzhenitsyn broke past this wall barrier in his two short stories, Matryona’s Home and An Incident at Krechetovka Station. Both novellas describe the harsh reality of Soviet life, the former in rural Russia, and the latter during World War II at an army station. While having different and distinct plots and characters, both pieces of literature play on key themes of the real Soviet life. Matryona’s Home emphasizes Soviet society’s blatant disregard of Russian tradition, while An Incident at Krechetovka comments on the society’s blind trust on the failing Soviet system. Both of Solzhenitsyn’s novellas focus on the perpetual suffering that all individuals went through in Soviet society.
Who could possibly be able to imagine the utter hopelessness and misery that a soviet prisoner experienced during Stalinism. Thousands of innocent men were taken from their families, homes, and lives, stripped of their dignity and banished to the harsh labor camps where they were to spend the rest of the days scraping out an existence and living day to day. This is exactly what Alexander Solzhenitsyn tries to express in his masterpiece work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn gives the reader a glimpse into the life of every man who ever experienced this hardship and shares the small acts of thriving humanity that are sparingly, but unendingly passed through their dreary lives and offer a bit of comfort to help them get through a single hour, a day, or even just a meal time. Solzhenitsyn uses One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to portray the endurance of humanity through out terrible hardships and shows the strength of the human spirit.
...he destitution and demoralization of the citizens of Petrograd. Andrei, the character with the most honor and virtue, still finds ruin because of his affiliation with the immoral politic. All morality is beaten out of the characters with the most potential for it by the dire circumstances of their lives. An excellent, emotionally moving story, this novel leaves no doubt as to the author's feelings about the path of destruction down which socialism leads.
When most people hear the name Joseph Stalin, they usually associate the name with a man who was part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. He was willingly to do anything to improve the power of the Soviet Union’s economy and military, even if it meant executing tens of millions of innocent people (Frankforter, A. Daniel., and W. M. Spellman 655). In chapter three of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book, Everyday Stalinism, she argues that since citizens believed the propaganda of “a radiant future” (67), they were able to be manipulated by the Party in the transformation of the Soviet Union. This allowed the Soviet government to expand its power, which ultimately was very disastrous for the people.
In his address, Solzhenitsyn has several intentions. He attacks the communist ways of Russia and the West and defends Christianity. He exhorts the action of keeping Christ in our hearts and dissuades the action of removing Christ. He praises those who stand for Christ and blames Communist for the downfall of the world.
Love is the foundation and the weakness of a totalitarian regime. For a stable totalitarian society, love between two individuals is eliminated because only a relationship between the person and the party and a love for its leader can exist. The totalitarian society depicted throughout the Orwell’s novel 1984 has created a concept of an Orwellian society. Stalin’s Soviet state can be considered Orwellian because it draws close parallels to the imaginary world of Oceania in 1984. During the twentieth century, Soviet Russia lived under Stalin’s brutal and oppressive governments, which was necessary for Stalin to retain power. In both cases, brutality and oppression led to an absence of relationships and love. This love was directed towards Stalin and Big Brother, and human beings became willing servants of their leader. The biggest threat to any totalitarian regime is love, or the lack of it. As Orwell said, they key danger to the system is “the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks” (Orwell 171). For example, in the novel it was the desire of the Party to eliminate love and sex, in order to channel this pent-up passion towards the love of Big Brother. Similarly, Stalin used propaganda and extreme nationalism to brainwash the peoples of Russia. He channeled their beliefs into a passion for Soviet ideals and a love of Stalin. In both cases, love for anything but the Party is the biggest threat to the regime. The stability of the Party and Stalin’s regime directly depended upon loyalty to the government above all else. By drawing upon the close relationships between the two Orwellian societies, we can examine just how dangerous love is to the Party.
World War II had barely ended when the Cold War began in 1945 and with it, a time in which American culture stressed patriotism and fervent hatred of anything remotely Communist. The fear and paranoia of the cold war eliminated social and political nonconformity and created a strict, conformist society where traditional values of family, domesticity, and religion were forcefully embraced by most Americans (Maltz 61). For works by authors such as Ayn Rand, who detested the very principal of communism, this meant a wildly enthusiastic acceptance. In her 1946 novella Anthem, Rand wrote about a dystopian society in which the motto is “We are one in all and all in one./There are no men but only the great WE./ One, indivisible and forever” (Rand 19). The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, later known as Prometheus, is ‘cursed’ with an individualistic streak that will not allow h...
Stalin, a paranoid ruler, always feared his political opponents, military officials and even common citizens. In his mind he felt they were...