World: Solzhenitsyn on Communism

Advice to the West, in an "hour of extremity"

Some Soviet dissidents still argue that their country's Marxist-Leninist system can be reformed from within. Not Alexander Solzhenitsyn: he has never swerved from his belief in the inherent evil of Communism. Last week, the Nobel-prizewinning novelist composed this essay for TIME in response to the crisis in East-West relations created by the Soviet conquest of Afghanistan. Solzhenitsyn argues that Afghanistan is merely the latest demonstration of the U.S.S.R.s insatiable desire for world conquest. As in his grim 1978 Harvard commencement address, he chides the...

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