Speeches given to the Americans and to the British from June 30, 1975 to March 24, 1976.

After his expulsion from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on a memoir that would acknowledge the courageous efforts of the people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism, the very publication of Invisible Allies would have put these friends in jeopardy. Now we are finally granted an intimate account of the extensive, ever-shifting network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's works were kept safe, circulated in samizdat, and "exported" via illicit channels. These imperiled conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of the regime that brought terror to every part of their lives. The circle included scholars and fellow writers and artists, but also such unlikely operatives as an elderly babushka who picked up and delivered manuscripts in her shopping bag. With tenderness, respect, and humor, Solzhenitsyn tells us of the fates of these partners in intrigue: the women who typed distribution copies of his works late into the night under the noses of prying neighbors; the correspondents and diplomats who covertly carried the microfilmed texts across borders; the farflung friends who hid various drafts of Solzhenitsyn's works anywhere they could--under an apple tree, beneath the bathtub, in a mathematics professor's loft with her canoe. In this group of deftly drawn portraits, Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the anonymous heroes who evaded the KGB to bring The Gulag Archipelago and his many other works to the world.

Authored by two eminent Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn scholars, The Soul and Barbed Wire is the first and only book to offer both a detailed biography and a comprehensive appraisal of the literary achievement of the Nobel prize–winning author who became one of the Soviet regime's most formidable foes. The book begins with a detailed biographical survey that traces Solzhenitsyn's evolution from an ardent Communist and loyal Soviet front-line officer into a devastating critic of all ideological distortions of authentic human values and a historian of the many-faceted events that led to, and the tragedy set loose by, the Russian Revolution. This biographical section goes on to portray the writer's strenuous efforts to convey this message to the West during his years of exile, and to his countrymen after his return to Russia. The bulk of the book, however, consists of sharply focused essays on a large number of Solzhenitsyn's writings. Ericson and Klimoff comment on virtually all his works of fiction as well as on a generous selection of texts belonging to historical or journalistic genres. Because the volume assumes no prior knowledge of its subject, it will prove particularly helpful to those who are coming to Solzhenitsyn for the first time, while its well-nigh encyclopedic inclusiveness should appeal even to the most seasoned readers. Drawing upon the best available Solzhenitsyn scholarship, the authors strive to present a balanced and accurate appraisal of the remarkable life and hugely influential works that have often been misunderstood and not infrequently been misrepresented.

The subject of Detente, Democracy and Dictatorship has been with us since the breakdown of the Cold War and the termination of the Soviet system, indeed, if not since the origins of Bolshevism. No more vigorous critic of the uneasy co-existence of democracy and dictatorship exists than the greatest writer that the Soviet era of Russian history produced, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This third edition is based on major addresses, especially aimed at Americans, delivered in 1975 in Washington, D.C. and New York, and again, in 1978, at Harvard University in Cambridge, all on the subject of detente, democracy and dictatorship. It also includes Solzhenitsyn's final 2007 interview with the German publication Der Spiegel. These major statements are brilliant and forthright comment on the risks of confusing ideology with diplomacy. But more than that, they summarize the Soviet debacle, the theoretical underpinnings, and distill Solzhenitsyn's multi-volumed masterpiece, the Gulag Archipelago. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. He is a Nobel-Prize winner in literature and was an elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1994. Among his works are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward, First Circle, The Russian Question, and Gulag Archipelago. Daniel J. Mahoney is professor of political science at Assumption College and the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and Chairman, Transaction Publishers. He has written widely on political and social theory. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York, and recognized as a major voice on historical issues of ideology and democracy.

"Anyone not hopelessly blinded by his own illusions must recognize that the West today finds itself in a crisis, perhaps even in mortal danger .... All of America's mistakes and misconceptions about Russia might have been purely academic in the past, but not in the swift-moving world of today." These two sentences epitomize the argument in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's powerful new book. He analyzes in detail the persistent misconceptions of Russian history by American historians, diplomats, and journalists and their confusion of "the Russian people" with the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn is convinced that these misguided views have led to disastrous mistakes in foreign policy from which Americans must rescue themselves. Few American scholars or statesmen emerge unscathed in Solzhenitsyn's portrait of true Soviet policy and its worldwide intent--a version in striking contrast to the commonly accepted Western analyses. He counsels against any optimism about ďtente or the possibility of accommodation among the Soviet leadership. The viewpoint of The Mortal Danger is bitter and explosive but it originates in a mind which has experienced Soviet Russia from the depths of its harsh interior--and has no illusions about its leadership.-- Back cover.

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat . . . the Nobel laureate found . . . ‘a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.’” —Kirkus Reviews This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away—the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its mainstream media on the other. Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from recent émigrés who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and Gorbachev’s protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too—the immense artistic quandary of fashioning The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.

In this examination of Solzhenitsyn and his work, Lee Congdon explores the consequences of the atheistic socialism that drove the Russian revolutionary movement. Beginning with a description of the post-revolutionary Russia into which Solzhenitsyn was born, Congdon addresses the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, the origins of the concentration camp system, the Bolsheviks' war on Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church, Solzhenitsyn's arrest near the war's end, his time in the labor camps, his struggle with cancer, his exile and increasing alienation from the Western way of life, and his return home. He concludes with a reminder of Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West—that it was on a path parallel to that which Russia had followed into the abyss.