Tag: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Historically, when an authoritarian regime takes power, the written law tends to cease to be representative of real-life interaction with the state. (more…)

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Spencer J. Quinn
Solzhenitsyn & the Right
Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill

The widespread perception of Solzhenitsyn as a figure inseparable from the vanished world of the Cold War has become an obstacle to appreciation of his works. To some extent, an earlier generation of his Western admirers contributed to this misunderstanding: e.g., many Cold War conservatives were dead set against any discussion of race, which would make it impossible to apply any of Solzhenitsyn’s insights to our struggle against today’s racially-obsessed Left. (more…)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

This is an audio recording of Spencer J. Quinn’s six-part review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work Two Hundred Years Together, a history of the Jews broadly in Russia and specifically as part of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union. We would like to thank Gaddius Maximus for this reading. (more…)

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Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here

Much of the tremendous value of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together rests in how it was written completely without rancor. Only a highly cynical or unreasonable person could call it anti-Semitic — that is, a work that professes animosity or anger towards Jews as a people. (more…)

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Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here

Large numbers of Jews who did not leave after the revolution failed to foresee the bloodthirstiness of the new government, though the persecution, even of socialists, was well underway. The Soviet government was as unjust and cruel then as it was to be in 1937 and 1950. But in the Twenties the bloodlust did not raise alarm or resistance in the wider Jewish population since its force was aimed not at Jewry. (more…)

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Part 1 here, Part 2 here

By the time the reader begins the second volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, he’s aware of a complex yet fragile balance established by the author in volume one. Jews and Russians have shared the same empire and language for centuries, but not without conflict brought about by their different natures and the exigencies of history. (more…)

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Part 1 here

Chapter Ten: The Period of the Duma

Despite including little by way of terrorism or atrocity, chapter ten is one of the most revealing and fascinating chapters in all of Two Hundred Years Together. (more…)

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Two Hundred Years Together
Moscow: Vagrius, 2005

No sane person wants to lie. Aside from whatever harm lying might cause, lying also chips away at a person’s dignity. (more…)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The memoirs of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are unique in his vast body of work given that they serve more as metadata than data regarding the man’s impact upon the culture and perspective of the political Right. I’m sure this could be the case with the memoirs of any important person. However, with Solzhenitsyn, so often his work was his life. He drew directly from his experiences as a zek to develop his early works, such as his prison plays, his unproduced screenplay The Tanks Know the Truth (about a gulag uprising),  (more…)

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn et al.
From Under the Rubble
Boston: Little, Brown & Company (1975)

Shortly before being deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn contributed three essays to a volume that was later published in the West as From Under the Rubble. (more…)

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Benjamin Ginsburg
How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism
Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013

Benjamin Ginsburg has his uses for the Dissident Right. As a Jewish author who sometimes airs dirty Jewish laundry for his readers, he can be placed in the same category as David Cole — Jews who offer critical assessments of their own people that justify the claims of anti-Semites, (more…)

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The white man stood tall and proud. He was handsome and confident, and was well-dressed in his white summer-weight frock coat. Regal, although not quite the Tsar. As Prime Minister, he was the next best thing. Despite this, Pyotr Stolypin had remarkable little security around him when he attended a play at the Kyiv Opera House on September 14th, 1911. His relationship with the Tsar had soured a bit recently due to his insistence that the local governments of the western provinces (called zemstvos) be dominated by the Russian people and not the influential Polish landowners. (more…)