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Translation: Unknown
Copyright: A. Solzhenitsyn 1975/1976/1979
OCR: EEN, 08/14/2002
Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in
Washington, D.C., on June 30, delivered a dramatic
warning to all the world - and to Americans in
particular. The Nobel Prize winning author, in his
first major public address since his expulsion
from the Soviet Union in 1974, stripped bare the
crimes and excesses of the Communist masters in
his native land. And he denounced the West for a
"senseless process of endless concessions to
aggressors" in the Kremlin. The text of the
90-minute address that follows is the translation
approved by the author, reprinted with permission
of the AFL-CIO, which invited him to speak.
Most of those present here today are workers.
Creative workers. And I myself, having spent many
years of my life as a stone cutter, as a
foundryman, as a manual worker, in the name of all
who have shared this forced labor with me, like
the two Gulag prisoners whom you just saw, and on
behalf of those who are doing forced labor in our
country, I can start my speech today with the
greeting "Brothers!" "Brothers in Labor."
And not to forget, also, the many honored
guests present here tonight, let me add: "Ladies
and Gentlemen."
"Workers of the world unite!" Who of us has
not heard this slogan, which has been sounding
through the world for 125 years? Today you can
find it in any Soviet pamphlet as well as in every
issue of Pravda. But never have the leaders of the
Communist revolution in the Soviet Union made
application of these words sincerely and in their
full meaning. When many lies have accumulated over
the decades, we forget the radical and basic lie
which is not on the leaves of the tree, but at its
very roots.
Now, it's almost impossible to remember or to
believe.. For instance, I recently published - had
reprinted - a pamphlet from the year 1918. This
was a precise record of a meeting of all
representatives of the Petrograd factories, that
being the city known in our country as the "cradle
of the Revolution."
I repeat, this was March 1918 - only four
months after the October Revolution - and all the
representatives of the Petrograd factories were
cursing the Communists, who had deceived them in
all of their promises. What is more, not only had
they abandoned Petrograd to cold and hunger,
themselves having fled from Petrograd to Moscow,
but had given orders to machine-gun the crowds
of workers in the courtyards of the factories who
were demanding the election of independent factory
committees.
Let me remind you, this was March 1918.
Scarcely anyone now can recall the crushing of
the Petrograd strikes in 1921, or the shooting of
workers in Kolpino in the same year.
Among the leadership, the Central Committee
of the Communist Party, at the beginning of the
Revolution, all were emigre intellectuals who had
returned, after the uprisings had already broken
out in Russia, in order to carry through the
Communist Revolution. One of them was a genuine
worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the
last day of his life. This was Alexander
Shliapnikov. Who knows that name today? Precisely
because he expressed the true interests of the
workers within the Communist leadership. In the
years before the Revolution it was Shliapnikov who
ran the whole Communist Party in Russia - not
Lenin, who was an emigre. In 1921, he headed the
Workers' Opposition which was charging the
Communist leadership with betraying the workers'
interests, with crushing and oppressing the
proletariat and transforming itself into a
bureaucracy.
Shliapnikov disappeared from sight. He was
arrested somewhat later and since he firmly stood
his ground he was shot in prison and his name is
perhaps unknown to most people here today. But I
remind you: before the Revolution the head of the
Communist Party of Russia was Shliapnikov - not
Lenin.
Since that time, the working class has never
been able to stand up for its rights, and in
distinction from all the western countries our
working class only receives what they hand out to
it. It only gets handouts. It cannot defend its
simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike
for pay or for better living conditions is viewed
as counter-revolutionary. Thanks to the closed
nature of the Soviet system, you have probably
never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in
Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and
Alexandrovo, or of the major workers' uprising in
Novocherkassk in 1962 - this in the time of
Khrushchev, after the thaw.
This story will shortly be published in
detail in your country in Gulag Archipelago,
volume 3. It is a story of how workers went in a
peaceful demonstration to the Party City Committee,
carrying portraits of Lenin, to request a change
in economic conditions. They fired at them with
machine guns and dispersed the crowds with tanks.
No family dared even to collect its wounded and
dead, but all were taken away in secret by the
authorities.
Precisely to those present here I don't have
to explain that in our country, since the
Revolution, there's never been such a thing as a
free trade union.
The leaders of the British trade unions are
free to play the unworthy game of visiting
Russia's so-called trade unions and receiving
visits in return. But the AFL-CIO has never given
in to these illusions.
The American workers' movement has never
allowed itself to be blinded and to mistake
slavery for freedom. And I, today, on behalf of
all of our oppressed people, thank you for this!
When liberal thinkers and wise men of the
West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word
"liberty," were swearing that in the Soviet Union
there were no concentration camps at all, the
American Federation of Labor, published in 1947, a
map of our concentration camps, and on behalf of
all of the prisoners of those times, I want to
thank the American workers' movement for this.
But just as we feel ourselves your allies
here, there also exists another alliance - at
first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but
if you think about it, in fact, one which is
well-grounded and easy to understand this is the
alliance between our Communist leaders and your
capitalists.
This alliance is not new. The very famous
Armand Hammer, who is flourishing here today, laid
the basis for this when he made the first
exploratory trip into Russia, still in Lenin's
time, in the very first years of the Revolution.
He was extremely successful in this intelligence
mission and since that time for all these 50
years, we observe continuous and steady support by
the businessmen of the West of the Soviet
Communist leaders.
Their clumsy and awkward economy, which could
never overcome its own difficulties by itself, is
continually getting material and technological
assistance. The major construction projects in the
initial five-year plan were built exclusively with
American technology and materials. Even Stalin
recognized that two-thirds of what was needed was
obtained from the West. And if today the Soviet
Union has powerful military and police forces - in
a country which is by contemporary standards poor
- they are used to crush our movement for freedom
in the Soviet Union - and we have western capital
to thank for this also.
Let me remind you of a recent incident which
some of you may have seen in the newspapers,
although others might have missed it: Certain of
your businessmen, on their own initiative,
established an exhibition of criminological
technology in Moscow. This was the most recent and
elaborate technology, which here, in your country,
is used to catch criminals, to bug them, to spy on
them, to photograph them, to tail them, to
identify criminals. This was taken to Moscow to an
exhibition in order that the Soviet KGB agents
could study it, as if not understanding what sort
of criminals, who would be hunted by the KGB.
The Soviet government was extremely
interested in this technology, and decided to
purchase it. And your businessmen were quite
willing to sell it. Only when a few sober voices
here raised an uproar against it was this deal
blocked. Only for this reason it didn't take
place. But you have to realize how clever the KGB
is. This technology didn't have to stay two or
three weeks in a Soviet building under Soviet
guard. Two or three nights were enough for the KGB
there to look through it and copy it. And if today,
persons are being hunted down by the best and most
advanced technology, for this, I can also thank
your western capitalists.
This is something which is almost
incomprehensible to the human mind: that burning
greed for profit which goes beyond all reason, all
self-control, all conscience, only to get money.
I must say that Lenin foretold this whole
process. Lenin, who spent most of his life in the
West and not in Russia, who knew the West much
better than Russia, always wrote and said that the
western capitalists would do anything to
strengthen the economy of the USSR. They will
compete with each other to sell us goods cheaper
and sell them quicker, so that the Soviets will
buy from one rather than from the other. He said:
They will bring it themselves without thinking
about their future. And, in a difficult moment, at
a party meeting in Moscow, he said: "Comrades,
don't panic, when things go very hard for us, we
will give a rope to the bourgeoisie, and the
bourgeoisie will hang itself."
Then, Karl Radek, whom you may have heard of,
who was a very resourceful wit, said: "Vladimir
Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope
to hang the whole bourgeoisie?"
Lenin effortlessly replied, "They'll supply
us with it."
Through the decades of the 1920s, the 1930s,
the 1940s, the 1950s, the whole Soviet press
wrote: Western capitalism, your end is near.
But it was as if the capitalists had not
heard, could not understand, could not believe
this.
Nikita Khrushchev came here and said, "We
will bury you!" They didn't believe that, either.
They took it as a joke.
Now, of course, they have become more clever
in our country. Now they don't say "we are going
to bury you" anymore, now they say "detente."
Nothing has changed in Communist ideology.
The goals are the same as they were, but instead
of the artless Khrushchev, who couldn't hold his
tongue, now they say "detente."
In order to understand this, I will take the
liberty of making a short historic survey - the
history of such relations, which in different
periods have been called "trade," "stabilization
of the situation," "recognition of realities," and
now "detente." These relations 'now are at least
40 years old.
Let me remind you with what sort of system
they started.
The system was installed by armed uprising.
It dispersed the Constituent Assembly.
It capitulated to Germany - the common enemy.
It introduced execution without trial.
It crushed workers' strikes.
It plundered the villagers to such an
unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted,
and when this happened it crushed the peasants in
the bloodiest possible way.
It shattered the Church.
It reduced 20 provinces of our country to a
condition of famine.
This was in 1921, the famous Volga famine. A
very typical Communist technique: To seize power
without thinking of the fact that the productive
forces will collapse, that the fields will not be
sown, the factories will stop, that the country
will decline into poverty and famine - but when
poverty and hunger come, then they request the
humanitarian world to help them.
We see this in North Vietnam today, perhaps
Portugal is approaching this also. And the same
thing happened in Russia in 1921. When the three-
year civil war, started by the Communists - and
"civil war" was a slogan of the Communists, civil
war was Lenin's purpose; read Lenin, this was his
aim and his slogan - when they had ruined Russia
by this civil war, then they asked America,
"America, feed our hungry." And indeed, generous
and magnanimous America did feed our hungry.
The so-called American Relief Administration
was set up, headed by your future President Hoover,
and indeed many millions of Russian lives were
saved by this organization of yours.
But what sort of gratitude did you receive
for this? In the USSR not only did they try to
erase this whole event from the popular memory -
it's almost impossible today in the Soviet press
to find any reference to the American Relief
Administration - but they even denounce it as a
clever spy organization, a clever scheme of
American imperialism to set up a spy network in
Russia. I repeat, it was a system that introduced
concentration camps for the first time in the
history of the world.
A system that, in the 20th Century, was the
first to introduce the use of hostages, that is to
say, not to seize the person whom they were
seeking, but rather a member of his family or
someone at random, and shoot that person.
This system of hostages and persecution of
the family exists to this day. It is still the
most powerful weapon of persecution, because the
bravest person, who is not afraid for himself,
still shivers at the threat to his family.
It is a system which was the first - long
before Hitler - to employ false registration, that
is, to say: "Such and such people have to come in
to register." People would comply and then they
were taken away to be annihilated.
We didn't have gas chambers in those days. We
used barges. A hundred or a thousand persons were
put into a barge and then it was sunk.
It was a system which deceived the workers in
all of its decrees - the decree on land, the
decree on peace, the decree on factories, the
decree on freedom of the press.
It was a system which exterminated all
additional parties, and let me make it clear to
you that it not only disbanded the party itself,
but destroyed its members. All members of every
other party were exterminated. It was a system
which carried out genocide of the peasantry; 15
million peasants were sent off to extermination.
It was a system which introduced serfdom, the
so-called "passport system."
It was a system which, in time of peace,
artificially created a famine, causing 6 million
persons to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
They died on the very edge of Europe. And ...
alfa-art