Solzhenitsyn Quotes

“The Elm Log
By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

We were sawing firewood when we picked up an elm log and gave a cry of amazement. It was a full year since we had chopped down the trunk, dragged it along behind a tractor and sawn it up into logs, which we had then thrown on to barges and wagons, rolled into stacks and piled up on the ground - and yet this elm log had still not given up! A fresh green shoot had sprouted from it with a promise of a thick, leafy branch, or even a whole new elm tree.

We placed the log on the sawing-horse, as though on an executioner's block, but we could not bring ourselves to bite into it with our saw. How could we? That log cherished life as dearly as we did; indeed, its urge to live was even stronger than ours.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Stories and Prose Poems

“Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspiring retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Here’s the sort of people they were. A letter from her fifteen-year-old
daughter came to Yelizaveta Tsvetkova in the Kazan Prison for long-term
prisoners: “Mama! Tell me, write to me — are you guilty or not? I hope you
weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the Komsomol, and I won’t forgive
them because of you. But if you are guilty—I won’t write you any more and
will hate you.” And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp
gravelike cell with its dim little lamp: How could her daughter live without
the Komsomol? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better
that she should hate me. And she wrote: “I am guilty. . . . Enter the
Komsomol!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“Creo que con lo expuesto aquí queda demostrado que en el exterminio de millones de hombres, y en su destierro al Gulag, hubo una coherencia fría y meditada y un incansable tesón.
Que en nuestro país las cárceles nunca estuvieron vacías, sino repletas o incluso atiborradas.
Que mientras vosotros andabais gratamente ocupados con los inofensivos secretos del átomo, estudiabais la influencia de Heidegger en Sartre, coleccionabais reproducciones de Picasso, viajabais en coche-cama a los balnearios o terminabais de edificar vuestra dacha en las afueras de Moscú, los "cuervos" recorrían incansablemente las calles y la Seguridad del Estado llamaba, con los nudillos o el timbre, a las puertas.
Y creo que con lo expuesto queda demostrado también que los Órganos jamás vivieron de la sopa boba.”
― Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, ARCHIPIELAGO GULAG I

“This is the origin of the central idea of August, 1914 which, moreover, coincides with the theme of the military propaganda of Kaiser Germany. Once he took this line, Solzhenitsyn continued to harp on it, vilifying all things Russian. However, the description of fighting in East Prussia in August, 1914, as given in Guchkov's and Solzhenitsyn's books, was a far cry from the actual facts. It is important to keep in mind that Western propaganda has gone to great lengths to present Solzhenitsyn as an authority on the events which he describes supposedly on the basis of his own experience.”
― Nikolai N. Yakovlev, Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies

“And what was Solzhenitsyn doing at a time when the Soviet army - from soldier to general - and the entire Soviet people were carrying out their duty at the cost of their lives, this man who, according to the anti-communist yardstick, is a "true Russian patriot"? As soon as the Red Army came to the place where the military campaigns against the USSR had been masterminded, Solzhenitsyn could contain himself no longer. He saw the destruction of those whom he had always worshiped - the Prussian militarists, and he began spreading slanderous rumors aimed at undermining the morale of Soviet troops. Under war-time laws, he was removed from the army. Millions of soldiers went on to destroy the fascist beast, while Solzhenitsyn was shipped to the rear and to prison.”
― Nikolai N. Yakovlev, Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies

“The ideas and notions of the 'dissidents' collapse as soon as they come in contact with facts; moreover, they do not accord with the views held by historians in the West today. On the other hand, they fit in well with anti-communist propaganda of the cheapest kind designed for people who do not know any better. And such ideas and notions can be used by reactionary forces in the West, not for the purpose of policy planning (the real worth of the 'dissidents' is well known among government circles in the West), but in their 'psychological warfare' whose only weapons are lies and slander. That is why the 'dissidents' are given not just crocodile tears over the fate of the 'fighters' against communism, but also financial handouts. Solzhenitsyn had, in 1973, 1.5 million dollars on his bank accounts in Switzerland. Each one of these dollars is covered with dirt.”
― Nikolai N. Yakovlev, Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies

“Obviously there's no logic. But maybe there needn't be any, Ludmila Afanasyevna. After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic? Or for that matter by economics? Or physiology?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“Why is it that there's such rank injustice in fortune itself? There are people whose lives run smooth as silk from beginning to end, I know are, while others' are a complete muck-up. And they say a man's life depends on himself. It doesn't depend on him a bit.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“...she really might have been ready, there and then, in that little corner, at the finest age of their lives, to help him understand what men live by”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“Solzhenitsyn's August, 1914 is a nostalgic lament over the possibilities which in his opinion were so carelessly let go by the Russian big capital and military. The book would most certainly evoke memories in those who lived through the events it describes. August, 1914 is a belated indictment of the autocratic regime from the position of the bourgeoisie. The fervent speeches which the author put into the mouths of his heroes are in effect a tedious paraphrase of the harsh denunciation of autocracy made by the most ruthless spokesman of Russian capitalism who sought to establish a dictatorship of their own.”
― Nikolai N. Yakovlev, Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies

“Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers — he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.”
― Clive James, At the Pillars of Hercules

“Tolstoy's novels are about the planet Earth and Solzhenitsyn's are about Pluto. Tolstoy is writing about a society and Solzhenitsyn is writing about the lack of one... surely there is something wilfully unhistorical about being disappointed that Pierre Bezhukov or Andrey Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostov find no equivalents in Cancer Ward. Characterization in such wealthy detail has become, in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, a thing of the past, and to expect it is like expecting the fur-lined brocades and gold-threaded silks of the Florentine Renaissance to crop up in Goya's visions of the horrors of war. Solzhenitsyn's contemporary novels- I mean the novels set in the Soviet Union- are not really concerned with society. They are concerned with what happens after society has been destroyed.”
― Clive James, Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays