Sohlzenitsyn

September 5 I footnoted the following suggestion in another post:

Yesterday, came a link to a 1978 commencement speech at Harvard by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn .  I printed out the 16 pages, read them, went to the  “Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address” from October 26, 2020, and also looked up Solzhenitsyn’s wiki-bio.  This is not light reading.  Respectively, these are 16, 17 and 31 pages.  At the end the 1978 speech is a link to Solzhenitsyn’s own personal reflection on his 1978 speech, written in Fall 1978. Here is the official brief biography of Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, was 59 when he gave the speech at Harvard; and it was in the second year of President Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

I took a special interest in this commentary because in the same 24 hour period the link was forwarded to me from an unlikely source, the Department of Justice made a major announcement relating to Russian disinformation intended to interfere with the United States election and functioning.  The news release is here, and highly publicized in U.S. media including my own local paper, the Minnesota Star Tribune September 4&5: MN StarTribune Sep 4&5 2024.  There was no direct connection indicated within the DOJ communication; but the topics were so directly related that it wasn’t a wild leap to connect the two. (Heather Cox Richardson on the Department of Justice announcement Sep. 6 2024.)

I asked the person who forwarded the Solzhenitsyn link to me, who forwarded it to him?  No answer.

I printed out and read all of the articles, totaling 51 pages, and observed that there was a great deal of content to discuss from all sorts of points of view.

Without arguing the substance of the speech, which was powerful, I just want to give it some context, since it was given at a particular point in history, by a Russian, to an American audience at Harvard, and ultimately worldwide.

As noted above, the speech was given in the spring of 1978, which was the beginning of the second year of President Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Three years earlier the Vietnam war ended.  A year before, President Nixon had resigned, replaced by Gerald Ford, who in turn had replaced Nixon’s vice-president who himself had resigned in disgrace.  Ford pardoned Nixon.  The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent political times in the U.S.

In Jimmy Carter’s recap of his life, written when he turned 90, he remarks that the beginning of the movement which ultimately became today’s White Christian Nationalist group began to sprout about 1979.  Carter was one of the most active Christians ever to be President, but he kept the wall between church and state.

The other actor at the time was Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union, which directly affected him, of course, since that is where he grew up.

I simply looked up the assorted leaders of Russia.  The names will probably ring a bell.  Lenin (1922-24); Stalin (1924-53); Malenkov (six months, 1953); Kruschev (1953-64); Brezhnev (1964-82 – the President of USSR in 1978); Andropov (1982-84); Chernenko (1984-85); Gorbachev (1985-91, in whose time the USSR collapsed); Yeltsin (1991-99); Putin (2002-2008); Medvedev (2008-12); Putin 2012-present,

Solzhenitsyn’s reference points pre-dated 1978.  His unknown “wall”, like our own, was the future beyond 1978.  He died in 2008.  I wonder what his thoughts were in the days after 1978.

In the 2020 commentary on the 1978 speech by Romanian Sergiu Klainerman, Princeton, I took particular interest in his reference to “Woke”, a word I’d not heard until very recent years, and now has a derisive connotation.  You can look up its definition.  What I notice is there is a fence of sorts to keep Woke within specific limits.  For instance excessive wealth and concentration of power within certain elites, and the preeminence of Capitalism, however defined, are not Woke, but it seems to me are no different than diversity, equity and inclusion….

History is complicated.  The speech and additions is well worth reading, reflecting and discussing.