Looking to Solzhenitsyn for clues about
the present

When I traveled and did business in Russia for a decade, starting in the early 2000s, I traveled to many cities. I know this all seems to unreal, and so far away. I visited the (still) closed city of Sarov for business, several times. We often walked by the house where Solzhenitsyn lived when he worked in Sarov on their fusion weapon design - his biggest claim to fame other than his books exposing the gulags. Curiously, they have a bronze plaque in front of the house announcing that Solzhenitsyn had lived there when he developed their first "hydrogen bomb", the next step after atomic bombs, even though they exiled him for his politics. On on trip, I visited Tyumen, a city of about 700,000 people on the Tura River, 1,300 miles east of Moscow. One evening, sitting in a sidewalk cafe with a local businessman named Alexi, I noticed a bronze plaque on a low granite marker across the large city street. I asked what it was, and Alexi explained that it was to remember the thousands who had been executed on that site during Stalin's time. He pointed to a building about 25 yards to the right of the marker, and the side of the building had an ordinary door and window at ground level, 50 ft back from the street on the side of the building facing the marker....it edged a kind of tiny wide sidewalk area with a couple of trees, almost a small park. He said that people accused of political crimes were brought to that door, taken inside to a small office, and informed of their crimes. They were then taken outside about 25 yds away, to the edge of the sidewalk away from us, shot in the head and thrown down the steep hillside behind the marker. I forget the correct numbers of dead, but I think it was several thousand. And apparently none of them really fought back, they just accepted their charges and execution without resistance. I crossed the street, and looked in the window (now a small museum) at a simple wooden desk and chair where the political officer sat to tell the accused of their death sentences. I then walked over to the steep hillside and looked down on tangled weeds and grass where the bodies had been dumped. No signs of the carnage remain but the small office and the marker. Chilling. Communist governments murdered between 100 and 150 million people in the 20th century for political reasons. Do we imagine that it could "never happen here"? Will we fight back?

In his earthshaking commencement address in Harvard Yard in 1978, Solzhenitsyn referenced the brilliant Soviet mathematician Igor Shafarevich's analysis of all socialist movements throughout history- 'The Socialist Phenomenon'- which was the essay that tore the bricks out of the foundation from underneath Soviet Socialism. It is an eighty-odd page essay which simply concludes that Chiliastic (millenarian) Socialism- is now and always has been- a Death Cult. Never yet refuted.

For many decades people have suffered from 'normalization bias'. I've told them you cannot coexist with people who intend to either rule your every waking and sleeping moment, or kill you. There is no compromise. Waiting until they come for you is waiting too long. You people need to wake up. And loads of CPA and other leftard organizations, along with loads of bureaucrats and other gov employees need to have terminal accidents, accidentally, of course, after a fair 5-min trial. Leaving them above ground means they come for you or your descendants at a moment of their choosing, when they 'feel' they have the best shot at success. That's not always an optimum time for you. Remember: Joseph McCarthy was right. Stop worrying about what they plan to do to us and start seriously thinking about what we're going to do to them.

The entire West could have learned so much from Solzhenitsyn but instead he was shunned. ...Liberty's loss.