“Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.” —Shelley The Book-of-the-Month Club, now in its 60th year, is an American success story in the grand manner—its financial success demonstrated by listing on the New York Stock Exchange and later acquisition by Time, Inc., its...
228 search results for: Solzhenitsyn
Small Is Beautiful Versus Big Is Best
The phrase “Small is beautiful” was coined, or at least popularized, by the economist E.F. Schumacher, who chose it for the title of his ground-breaking international best-seller, published in 1973, that exploded like a beneficent bomb, demolishing, or at least throwing into serious question, many of the presumptions of laissez-faire economics. The subtitle of Schumacher’s...
On Russophilia
Professor Ewa Thompson’s belief that unless the Russian Federation breaks up, it will remain a tyranny regardless of appearances (“Russophilia,” October 1994) is absolutely correct. The West’s cool response to this prospect is another example of our hypocrisy, as we profess to want freedom and self-determination for all people and yet hide our eyes from...
Nest of Vipers
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir; Pantheon, New York. It may hurt, but it is useful to know that in matters of foreign translations available at our publishers and bookstores, we live in a well-guarded ghetto. There are protective turrets in the ghetto’s wall, called Sartre, Beauvoir, Gunter Grass, Hein rich B6ll,...
The Numbers Don’t Support Scapegoating the Unvaccinated
If you’re tired of the pandemic and just want to go back to normal, David Frum at The Atlantic has news for you: It’s all the stupid people who refuse to take the vaccine that are prolonging our COVID misery. Oh, wait, that’s not it exactly. In actuality, it’s all Trump’s fault, Frum, once a leading voice of...
Criticism Lite
Any reader familiar with Martin Amis’ novels—especially his most recent, Money: A Suicide Note (1984)—will not be surprised by the relentlessly contemptuous tone of The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, a collection of his essays and articles on America and Americans. While Amis confesses at the outset that he “feel[s] fractionally American” (his...
New Thoughts on the French Revolution
François Mitterrand’s socialist administration has become so scandal-ridden and financially precarious that the year-long celebration of the revolution’s bicentennial is now nothing but a hypocritical farce. Yet Mitterrand’s reference to 1789 is an ideological obligation, since the “leftist myth” is the number one legitimizing factor that makes the regime credible in the eyes of a...
The Soft Revolution
Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher Sentinel-Penguin Books 256 pp., $14.69 Rod Dreher is not the first to argue that America, and much of the West, has undergone a radical transformation in the post-World War II era. More specifically, we are moving at an ever-accelerating pace toward “soft totalitarianism,”...
Viktor’s Spetsnaz, John’s Southwestern
Last September, some readers may recall, my letter was devoted to Viktor Suvorov, the pseudonymous writer and former GRU officer who now lives in England under yet another assumed name. It has taken me nearly a year to track down the author of Spetsnaz. Soon after our conversation begins, he recites in Russian: In ’41...
The Art of Revolution
Most Americans don’t know much about art, but they do know what they don’t like, namely blasphemy, pornography, and perversion. When they began to realize, in the course of 1989, that their own government, through the National Endowment for the Arts, was funding exhibitions of homosexual photographs and crucifixes in urine, they blew off enough...
America Through the Looking Glass
Not so long ago anticommunist conservatives used to rail against the mirror fallacy, the leftist assumption that the Soviet Union could be studied in Western terms. If only we could strengthen the hand of the doves and “responsible” elements, we could keep the country from falling into the hands of the hard-liners and hawks—the Soviet...
Annus Felix
The Independent Orders of Zhukov, Lenin, and October Revolution Red Banner Operational Purpose Division of Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia – yes, my friends, there is such a thing – has just been given back its old name. Now it will again be called the Felix Dzerzhinsky Independent Orders of...
Underground Man
Was it fair of Solzhenitsyn to call Peter the Great “a mediocre man, if not a barbarian”? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that history didn’t begin with the Cold War, and that long before Solzhenitsyn, renowned novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed reservations of his own about the historical impact of Russia’s most...
Wolfs Fang, Fox’s Tail
“War is war. Guns are not just for decoration.” —V.I. Lenin By March 1920, Russia’s whites—an odd and disparate conglomeration of monarchists, anti-Bolshevik socialists, jaded liberals, reactionary clerics, frightened nobles, disinherited landowners, and loyalist army officers and soldiers—had turned what looked like certain victory over the Reds into an ignominious defeat....
Environmentalism: Abuse of a Just Cause
While addressing the 20th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past February, I confessed unease. A recovering “environmentalist,” addressing CPAC seemed equivalent to a recovering alcoholic witnessing before Alcoholics Anonymous. My story starts with the acknowledgment that the environment is a just cause; the world deserves wise stewardship, and there are some people who...
Pastor to the Pariahs
Dramatic conversions happen. F.F. Bruce, the noted New Testament scholar, is not alone in insisting that no one can understand Paul of Tarsus without considering his experience on the road to Damascus. And whether you believe, as Christians do, that he there met the resurrected Christ or not, all admit that he was not the...
Bulgarian Death Squad
Georgi Markov: The Truth That Killed; Ticknor & Fields; New York. Claire Sterling: The Time of the Assassins: Anatomy of an Investigation; Holt, Reinhart & Winston; New York. In 1962 a one-time engineer, Georgi Markov, rose meteroically to the upper reaches of the Bulgarian literary elite upon the publication of a novel entitled Men, which...
Protestant Polities, Religion, and American Public Life
“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.” —Walter Savage Landor When English Protestants fled their native land during Mary’s reign, many of them ended up in John Calvin’s Geneva. Additional refugees found a home in other Reformed cities in southwestern Germany. Lutheran lands, by...
Eugenio Corti
The fame of Italian writer Eugenio Corti hinges on two works: I piu non ritornano: Diario di ventotto giorni in una sacca sul fronte russo, inverno 1942-43 (Most Do Not Return: Diary of Twenty Days in a Pocket on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-43) first published in 1947, and his great 1,280-page novel Il Cavallo...
Vol. 1 No. 7 July 1999
The crisis in Kosovo continues to illuminate the glaring gap between the quality of reporting in America and in the rest of the world. In Western Europe, in particular, the tragedy in the Balkans has come to be seen as the defining moment of our civilization and of its chances for survival in the coming...
The Unnatural History of Giant Ideology
Born in a Parisian coffeehouse during the first year of the 19th century, Ideology has grown gigantic in our time. Infant Ideology was consecrated to an educational reform; the colossus Ideology that now bestrides the world is engaged successfully in the extirpation of culture. There comes to my mind often, when someone innocently utters such...
Big Surprise
“When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we have taken a great step forward.” —unnamed African government minister Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom...
Hooked on Socialism
“In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.” —Tocqueville Norman Podhoretz, in the March 11, 1987, Washington Post, describes Sidney Hook as “one of the most courageous intellectuals of the twentieth century.” While this particular description may more aptly be used for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others who have fought for...
The “Suffering Love” of Patriots
The Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, himself no lackey of the Soviet regime, once attacked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for having crossed the line where “war against communism became war against . . . Russia.” In Rasputin’s eyes, the prophetic exile had stained Russia’s reputation—not merely that of the communist regime—in his relentless assaults on Soviet power. The...
Muffled Voices
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
The End of American Exceptionalism?
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have written a book entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt on August 29, with the headline “Restoring American Exceptionalism.” In the excerpt, Cheney sought to identify his views on foreign policy with those of Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. That...
On Russia
I agree with Professor W. Bruce Lincoln (“The Burden of Russian History,” March 1994) that Russia’s economic and political system is prone to break society into two parts: “them,” those responsible for making decisions and managing the country, and “us,” the simple people deadly indifferent to everything that doesn’t touch them immediately—i.e., high politics. I...
Polemics & Exchanges: May 2024
Chronicles contributors and readers tussle over Japanese culture, slavery, and NATO!
The Loss and Recovery of Truth
“Philosophy of history is a concept coined by Voltaire,” Gerhart Niemeyer said to me in the spring of 1977, repeating the first sentence of his lecture, “The Loss and Recovery of History,” delivered at a Hillsdale College seminar a few weeks before and later published in Imprimis (October 1977). He went on to say that...
Spetsnaz
This month I am reporting from London on the recent publication here of what is undoubtedly one of the most important books ever written on the subject of totalitarian expansionism. I offer this judgment because, although the accident of birth and intellectual curiosity have made Soviet Russia a subject of special interest for me, I...
Reading and Weeping
“If Stephen King, John Grisham, and Michael Crichton got together, they’d become one of the top three publishers overnight” —Morgan Entrekin, quoted in The New Yorker Tony Outhwaite’s article pretty much says it all, a whole lot of it anyway, about the present state of American publishing. And he’s not only right...
Robert Conquest Demolished Myths About Communism
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Robert Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukraine famine of the 1930s documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, has died at 98, having outlived the...
The Age of Reason and the Age of Fear
There are uncanny similarities between the 18th and the 21st centuries. The whole concept of liberty, equality and fraternity in the last two decades of the 18th century was as much based on a lie as it is in the first two decades of the 21st.
Russophilia
The deluge of statements, articles, and books on Russia in these turbulent (for Russia) times comes as no surprise. What surprises is the ingratiating and monotonously uncritical terms of discourse in which American opinions about Russia are couched. Many of these terms date back to the Soviet era. No country in Europe has ever generated...
Diversities True and False
Within the literature and the arts, it is the left that is the least diverse, and the most inward-looking and intolerant of different perspectives.
Death of a Nation
Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life. This fact seems to be very clear to the current leadership in Russia, particularly to President Vladimir Putin, in restoring and reunifying a country rent by three generations...
Writers’ Unions
“PEN international is working for your release,” my lawyer told me. In the bare, mean interview room of the Belgrade District Prison he smiled at me, and I smiled back, because the mikes could not pick that up. There were no TV cameras there, yet, to monitor our winks and nods—the language of slaves, as...
The Russian Demon
In the year 1818, Aleksandr Pushkin penned these lines in his well-known verse “To Chaadaev,” addressed to his friend Peter Chaadaev, one of the leading Russian liberals of the period: Comrade, believe: joy’s star will leap Upon our sight, a radiant token; Russia will rouse from her long sleep; And where autocracy lies, broken. Our...
Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right
Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization. If I understand correctly, the Antichrist Right would describe Christianity much as Christianity defines evil: a shadowy, parasitic negation that possesses no...
Flies Trapped in Honey
Nineteen ninety-one was the year of revolutions, the greatest, perhaps, since 1848. Many who observed the events from safe seats on this side of the Atlantic must have recalled Churchill’s great Fulton speech, in which he described the “Iron Curtain” that had “descended across the continent,” cutting off “all the capitals of the ancient states...
Constructive Criticism — Sometimes
Sidney Hook: Marxism and Beyond; Rowman and Littlefield; Totowa, NJ. Sidney Hook’s latest book is largely a collection of previously printed articles and reviews; but it is nevertheless another interesting contribution to American intellectual life and a worthy companion to such works as Political Power and Personal Freedom. Hook remains an astute observer and an...
The Relevance of Russian Tradition
My first exposure to Alexander Dugin came via YouTube, when I discovered Vladimir Pozner’s 2014 interview with the controversial theorist. Marred somewhat by cultural relativism, Dugin’s critique of Anglo-American empire nonetheless contained more depth than a year’s supply of the Washington Post. Civilization cannot exist without a willingness to use lethal force on its behalf,...
Flies Trapped in Honey
Nineteen ninety-one was the year of revolutions, the greatest, perhaps, since 1848. Many who observed the events from safe seats on this side of the Atlantic must have recalled Churchill’s great Fulton speech, in which he described the “Iron Curtain” that had “descended across the continent,” cutting off “all the capitals of the ancient states...
Child Abuse, the State, and the Russian Family
It was another episode in a series of shocking crimes against children. Little Sasha, just three years old, was pulled from the frigid waters of the Pekhorka River in January 2009. He was bound to a car battery with adhesive tape, his body battered and bearing the marks of cigarette burns. It was the second...
Knuckling Under & Soaring Free
Border Crossing: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature 1917-1934 by Carol Avlns; University of California Press; Berkeley. Poems by Anna Akhmatova, Selected and translated by Lyn Coffin; W. W. Norton; New York. In Border Crossings Carol Avins, associate professor of Slavic language at Northwestern University, grapples with a question that has long aggravated...
Who Won the Cold War?
In his Foreword to Witness, Whittaker Chambers, writing in the “form of a letter to my children,” tries to explain the appeal of communism: I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. You will ask: Why, then, do men become Communists? How did it happen that you, our gentle and...
Feeling Like Russians Again
“The status of the American Negro is that of an oppressed national minority, and only a Soviet system can solve the question of such minorities,” William Z. Foster, long-time chairman of the Communist Party, U.S.A., wrote in his 1932 book, Toward Soviet America. Accordingly, the right of self-determination will apply to Negroes in the American...
Learning Goodness
From the July 1988 issue of Chronicles. If is ironic that the thoughts of this essay, extracted from a commencement address I gave at Claremont McKenna College in the spring of 1987, celebrate an old Stanford University tradition of submerging all students in the classical thought of the West as a precondition to graduation, no...
The Necessity of Christianity
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence. And it’s a good...
Polemics & Exchanges
Letters to the editor on the subject of post-war Germany, "effeminate cruelty," George Santayana, and the competing influences on human behavior of genes and culture.