Warning to the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Mr. Solzhenitsyn delivered this speech in New York City at a luncheon which was given in his honor by the AFL-CIO and hosted by Lane Kirkland, the union’s secretary-treasurer.

[JULY 15, 1975]

GENTLEMEN:

HERE, IN THE Senate Office Building I must begin by saying that I have not forgotten the high, indeed the exceptional, honor paid me by the United States Senate in twice endeavoring to declare me an honorary citizen of the United States.

I take this to mean that you had in mind not only myself as an individual but also the millions of my fellow countrymen who have been deprived of rights, and even those in the other Communist countries, those millions who have never been able, and are still unable, to express their opinions in the press, in parliaments, or at international conferences.

As I convey to you my gratitude for the decisions of the United States Senate concerning myself, I am all the more conscious of my responsibility as a spokesman for those others, a responsibility almost too massive for the shoulders of a single human being. But I have never lost sight of the suffering, the striving and the hopes of those voiceless millions, and have had no aim in life other than to give them expression, and this lends me strength for my public appearances in this country and for my appearance before you today. For the time being, there are few people in the Communist countries who speak out publicly, but millions understand the loathsome nature of the system and feel a revulsion toward it. Whoever can “votes with his feet,” simply fleeing from this mass violence and destruction.

I see before me today not only members of the Senate but also a group of Representatives. Thus, I am speaking for the first time to participants in your country’s legislative process whose influence in recent years has spread far beyond the limits of American history.

In virtually every respect, our Russian historical experience has been almost the opposite of yours. The innumerable events that have befallen us in the twentieth century have enriched our Russian experience in an unfortunate way, and now they seem to confront you from the future. It is that much more crucial that we persistently and sincerely try to convey our respective experience to one another. One of today’s most terrible dangers is precisely that the destinies of the world are entangled as never before, so that events or mistakes in one part of the world are immediately felt in all the others. At the same time, the exchange of information and of opinions between populations is blocked by iron barriers on the one side, while on the other it is distorted by distance, paucity of information, narrowness of outlook, or deliberate misrepresentation by observers and commentators.

In my few addresses in your country I have attempted to break through that wall of disastrous unawareness or nonchalant superiority. I have tried to convey to your countrymen the constrained breathing of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe in

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