Sunday, August 03, 2008

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, 89

Death announced late Sunday by his son. He was a Nobel Prize winner.

According to The Associated Press:
Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
Ivan Denisovich lives on.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Uh, I believe the "defeat" of the totalitarian machinery of an empire is best credited to Ronald Reagan.
Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Credit Ronnie Ray-Gun if you want, but the Eastern Bloc collapsed from its own weight upon an anemic economic system. Moscow simply couldn't hold together a string of bankrupt states any longer than it did. Viewed as a nationalistic act of corporate divestiture, the events that symbolically culminated in the "fall of the wall" have now put Russia alone on its way toward a future as an economic powerhouse. Some victory for Bonzo.

Anonymous said...

That was a lucid, well-thought out piece of textbook BS. As Reagan said the Soviet Union would "end up on the ash heap of history."

It helps when you actually live through something like this versus some socialist professor on a college campus revising history and cramming it down your throat.