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 West for weakness. But the West may yet prevail, he says, if it will recognize that Communism and the people oppressed by it are not one and the same.
Many Americans will find Solzhenitsyn's views too harsh, his vision too chilling. But the reflections of Russia's greatest living writer on today's crisis merit wide attention.
The West began its perilous miscalculation of Communism in 1918: from the very beginning the Western powers failed to see the deadly threat that it represented. In Russia at that time, all previously warring factions—from the government forces to the Constitutional Democrats and the right-wing Socialists—united against Communism. Though the peasants and workers were not formally allied with these groups, and were not coordinated, thousands of peasant revolts and dozens of worker uprisings reflected the masses' opposition to Communism. A Red Army was mobilized by executing tens of thousands of men who tried to evade Bolshevik conscription. But this Russian national resistance to Communism received scant support from the Western powers.
The most fantastically rosy notions about the Communist regime circulated in the West, and so-called progressive public opinion greeted it with joy, in spite of the fact that by 1921, 30 Russian provinces were undergoing a Cambodia-like genocide. (In Lenin's lifetime, no fewer innocent civilians perished than under Hitler, and yet today American schoolchildren, who invariably regard Hitler as the greatest villain in history, look upon Lenin as Russia's benefactor.) The Western powers vied with one another to give economic and diplomatic support to the Soviet regime, which could not have survived without this aid. Europe took no notice of the fact that some 6 million people in the Ukraine and the Kuban River basin had died of hunger.