08 July 2021

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part I

 



In 1975-1976, Alexandr Solzhenistyn, Nobel Peace Prize winner (back when it still had some meaning) spoke to UFL-CIO gatherings in the United States, and was allowed on the BBC in the United Kingdom.  Someone transcribed those speeches into a compendium that was published in 1976 as "Warning to the West".

 

Ruth bought this compendium for me last month in honor of Fathers' Day, and I read it furiously for about three days.  I sat on it, and I can't do so any further, because you need to read what this man, who spent a decade in the Gulag, had to say regarding the expectations of a downtrodden people of the free folk in the United States.  What he describes, his predictions, and the method in which he describes it, should be imparted to every free man as a caution. 

 

Without further ado, I transcribe a selected portion of the speech that Solzhenitsyn gave to the AFL-CIO in Washington D.C. on 30 June 1975.

 

At the beginning of the Revolution, all those in the leadership, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were émigré intellectuals who had returned after disturbances had already broken out in Russia to carry out the Communist Revolution.

But one of them was a genuine worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the last day of his life, Alexander Shliapnikov.  Who is familiar with that name today?  And yet it was he who expressed the true interests of the workers within the Communist leadership. 

In the years before the Revolution, it was Shliapnikov who ran the whole Communist Party in Russia—not Lenin, who was an émigré.  In 1921, he headed the Workers’ Opposition, which charged that the Communist leadership had betrayed the interests of the workers, that is was crushing and oppressing the proletariat, and had degenerated into a bureaucracy.

Shliapnikov disappeared from sight.  He was arrested later, and since he firmly stood his ground he was shot in prison; his name is perhaps unknown to most people here today.  But I remind you: before the Revolution, the head of the Communist Party of Russia was Shlipnikov—not Lenin.

Since that time, the working class has never been able to stand up for its rights and, in contrast to all the Western countries, our working class receives only handouts.  It cannot defend its simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike for pay or for better living conditions is viewed as counter-revolutionary.  Thanks to the closed nature of the Soviet system, you have probably never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and Alexandrovo, or of the major workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962—this was in Khrushchev’s time, well after the so-called “thaw”.

The story of this uprising will shortly be told in detail in my book, The Gulag Archipelago III.  It is a story of how workers went in peaceful demonstration to the Novocherkassk party headquarters, carrying portraits of Lenin, to request a change in economic conditions.  They were fired on with machineguns and dispersed with tanks.  No family could even collect its wounded and dead; all were taken away in secret by the authorities…

…In 1947, when liberal thinkers and wise men of the West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word “liberty,” were swearing that there were no concentration camps in the Soviet Union at all, the American Federation of Labor published a map of [Soviet] concentration camps, and on behalf of all prisoners of those times, I want to thank the American workers’ movement for this. 

But just as we feel ourselves your allies here, there also exists another alliance—at first glance a strange and surprising one, but if you think about it, one which is well-founded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.

This alliance is not new.  The very famous Armand Hammer, [a businessman] who flourishes here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip to Soviet Russia in Lenin’s time, in the very first years of the Revolution.  He was extremely successful in his reconnaissance mission and ever since then, for all these fifty years, we see continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West for the Soviet Communist leaders.  The clumsy and awkward Soviet economy, which could never cope with its difficulties on its own, is continually getting material and technological assistance.  The major construction projects in the initial five-year plan were built exclusively with American technology and materials.  Even Stalin recognized that two-thirds of what was needed was obtained from the West.  And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces—in a country which is poor by contemporary standards—forces which are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—we have Western capital to thank for this as well…

Here is a man talking 45 years ago about something that happened 104 years ago that is currently happening right now between the global corporations and the Chinese Communist Party.  We’ve fucking been here before, and we don’t need to do it again.  More tomorrow.  Thanks for reading to the end.

-Unclean

 


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