These two crises, the political crisis of today’s world and the oncoming spiritual crisis, are occurring at the same time. It is our generation that will have to confront them. The leadership of your country, which is entering the third century of existence as a nation, will perhaps have to bear a burden greater than ever before in American history. Your leaders will need profound intuition, spiritual foresight, high qualities of mind and soul. May God grant that in those times you will have at the helm personalities as great as those who created your country.
In recent weeks, I have traveled through various states, and I am aware that the two cities in which I have made my addresses—Washington and New York—do not reflect your country as a whole with its tremendous diversity and possibilities. Just as old St. Petersburg did not express the whole of Russia, just as Moscow does not reflect the Soviet Union of today, and just as Paris more than once abused its claim to represent all of France.
I was profoundly impressed by my contact with those places which are, and have always been, the wellsprings of your history. It makes one think that the men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of “good” and “evil.” Their practical policies were checked against that moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most farsighted and the most salutary. This is true even though in the short term one may wonder: Why all this morality? Let’s just get on with the immediate job.
The leaders who created your country never said: “Let slavery reign right next door, and we will enter into détente with it as long as it doesn’t come here.”
I have traveled enough through the different states of your country and in its various regions to have became convinced that the American heartland is healthy, strong, and broad in its outlook. I am convinced that these healthy, generous, and inexhaustible forces will help you to elevate the whole style of your government leadership.
Yet, when one travels in your country and sees your free and independent life, all the dangers which I talked about today seem imaginary. I’ve talked to people, and I see this is so. In your wide-open spaces even I get a little infected, the dangers seem somehow unreal. On this continent it is hard to believe all the things which are happening in the world. But, ladies and gentlemen, this carefree life cannot continue in your country any more than in ours. The destinies of our two countries are going to be extremely difficult, and it is better to prepare for this beforehand.
I understand, I sense that you’re tired. But you have not yet really suffered the terrible trials of the twentieth century which have rained down on the old continent. You’re tired, but not as tired as we are, crushed for sixty years. You’re tired, but the Communists who want to destroy your system are not; they’re not tired at all.
I understand that this is the most unfavorable time to come to this country and to make this sort of address. But if it were a better, more appropriate time, there would be no need for me to speak.
Precisely because this is the worst possible time I have come to tell you about our experience over there. If our experience in the East could flow over to you by itself, it would be unnecessary for me to assume the unpleasant and inappropriate role of orator. I am a writer, and I would prefer to sit and write books.
But a concentration of world evil is taking place, full of hatred for humanity. It is fully determined to destroy your society. Must you wait until it comes to smash through your borders, until the young men of America have to fall defending the borders of their continent?
After my first address, as always, there were some superficial comments in the newspapers which did not really get to its essence. One of them asserted that I had come here with an appeal to the United States to liberate us from Communism. Anyone who has followed what I have said and written these many years, first in the Soviet Union and now in the West, will know that I’ve always said the exact opposite. I have appealed to my own countrymen—those whose courage has failed at difficult moments, and who have looked imploringly to the West—and urged them: “Don’t wait for assistance, and don’t ask for it; we must stand on our own feet. The West has enough troubles without us. If they support us, they have our heartfelt thanks. But to plead for help, to appeal for it—never.”
I said the last time that two processes are occurring in the world today. One is a process of spiritual liberation in the U.S.S.R. and in the other Communist countries. The second is the assistance being extended by the West to the Communist rulers, a process of concessions, of détente, of yielding whole countries. And I only said: “Remember, we have to pull ourselves up by our own efforts—but if you do defend us, you defend your own future.”
We are slaves there from birth. We are born slaves. I’m not young any more, and I myself was born a slave; this is even more true for those who are younger. We are slaves, but we are striving for freedom. You, however, were born free. So why do you let yourselves be used by slavery? Why do you help our slaveowners?
In my last address I only requested one thing and I make the same request now: when they bury us in the ground alive—I compared the forthcoming European agreement with a mass grave for all the countries of Eastern Europe—as you know, this is a very unpleasant sensation: your mouth gets filled with earth while you’re still alive—please do not send them shovels. Please do not send them the latest earth-moving equipment.
By a peculiar coincidence, the very day when I was giving my address in Washington, Mikhail Suslov was talking with your senators in the Kremlin. And he said, “In fact, the significance of our trade is more political than economic. We can get along without your trade.” That’s a lie. The whole existence of our slaveowners from beginning to end relies on Western economic assistance. As I said the last time, beginning with the first spare parts used to reconstruct our factories in the 1920’s, from the construction in Magnitostroy, Dneprostroy, the automobile and tractor factories built during the first five-year plans, on into the postwar years and to this day, what they need from you is economically absolutely indispensable—not politically, but economically indispensable—to the Soviet system. The Soviet economy has an extremely low level of efficiency. What is done here by a few people, by a few machines, in our country takes tremendous crowds of workers and enormous amounts of material. Therefore, the Soviet economy cannot deal with every problem at once: war, space (which is part of the war effort), heavy industry, light industry, and at the same time the need to feed and clothe its own population. The forces of the entire Soviet economy are concentrated on war, where you don’t help them. But everything lacking, everything needed to fill the gaps, everything necessary to feed the people, or for other types of industry, they get from you. So indirectly you are helping their military preparations. You are helping the Soviet police state.
I’ll give you an example of the clumsiness of the Soviet economy: What kind of country is it, what kind of great power, with tremendous military potential, that conquers outer space but has nothing to sell? All heavy equipment, all complex and delicate technology, is purchased abroad. Then it must be an agricultural country? Not at all; it also has to buy grain. What then can we sell? What kind of economy is it? Can we sell anything which has been created by socialism? No! Only that which God put in the Russian ground at the very beginning, that’s what we squander and that’s what we sell. When all this comes to an end, there won’t be anything left to sell.
The president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, has quite rightly said that it is not loans which the United States gives to the Soviet Union, it is economic assistance, foreign aid, given at a lower interest level than what American workers can get for their home mortgages. That is direct aid.
But this is not all. I said in my last address, and would like to repeat, that we have to look at every event from the other point of view—from the point of view of the Soviet Union. Our country takes your assistance, but i
n the schools they teach and in the newspapers they write and in lectures they say: “Look at the Western world, it’s beginning to rot. Look at the economy of the Western world, it’s coming to an end. The great predictions of Marx, Engels, and Lenin are coming true. Capitalism is breathing its last. It’s already dead. And our socialist economy is flourishing. It has demonstrated once and for all the triumph of Communism.” I think, ladies and gentlemen, and I particularly address those of you who have a socialist outlook, that we should at least permit this socialist economy to prove its superiority. Let’s allow it to show that it is advanced, that it is omnipotent, that it has defeated you, that it has overtaken you. Let us not interfere with it. Let us stop selling to it and giving it loans. If it’s all that powerful, then let it stand on its own feet for ten or fifteen years. Then we will see what it looks like. I can tell you what it will look like. I am being quite serious now. When the Soviet economy will no longer be able to deal with everything, it will have to reduce its military preparations. It will have to abandon the useless space effort and it will have to feed and clothe its own people. And the system will be forced to relax.
Thus, all I ask you is that as long as this Soviet economy is so proud, so flourishing, and yours is so rotten and so moribund—stop helping it. When has a cripple ever helped along an athlete?
Another distortion appeared in your press with respect to my last address. Someone wrote that “one more advocate of the Cold War has come here. One more person has arrived to call on us to resume the Cold War.” That is a misunderstanding. The Cold War—the war of hatred—is still going on, but only on the Communist side. What is the Cold War? It’s a war of abuse and they still abuse you. They trade with you, they sign agreements and treaties, but they still abuse you, they still curse you. In sources which you can read, and even more in those which are unavailable to you, and which you don’t hear of, in the depths of the Soviet Union, the Cold War has never stopped, not for one second. They never call you anything but “American imperialists.” One day, if they want, all the Soviet newspapers could say that America wants to subjugate the world and our people would have nowhere to get any other information. Do I call upon you to return to the Cold War? By no means, God forbid! What for? The only thing I’m asking you to do is to give the Soviet economy a chance to develop. Do not bury us in the ground, just let the Soviet economy develop, and then let’s see.
But can the free and varied Western system follow such a policy? Can all the Western countries together say: It’s true, let us stop competing. Let us stop playing up to them. Let us stop elbowing each other and clamoring, “Me, me, let me have a concession, please give it to me” … It’s very possible that this cannot be done. And if this sort of unity cannot be achieved in the West, if, in the frenzied competition of one company with another, they will continue to rush in loans and advanced technology, if they will present earth-moving equipment to our gravediggers, then I’m afraid that Lenin will turn out to have been right. He said: “The bourgeoisie will sell us rope, and then we will let the bourgeoisie hang itself.”
In ancient times trade used to begin with the meeting of two persons who had come out of a forest or had arrived by sea. They would show one another that they didn’t have a stone or club in their hand, that they were unarmed; as a sign of this, each extended an open hand. This was the beginning of the handclasp. Today’s word “détente” literally means a reduction in the tension of a taut rope. (What an ominous coincidence: a rope again!)
So “détente” means a relaxation of tension. But I would say that what we need instead is an image of the open hand. Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States should be such that there would be no deceit in the question of armaments, that there would be no concentration camps, no psychiatric wards for healthy people. Relations should be such that the throats of our women would no longer be constricted with tears, that there would be an end to the incessant ideological warfare waged against you, and that an address such as mine today would in no way be an exception.
People would simply be able to come to you from the Soviet Union, from China, and from other Communist countries and would be able to talk freely, without any tutoring from the KGB, without any special approval from the Central Committee of the party. Rather, they would simply come of their own accord and would tell you the truth about what is going on in these countries.
This would be, I say, a period in which we would be able to present “open hands” to each other.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn delivered this speech in New York City at a luncheon which was given in his honor by the AFL-CIO and hosted by Lane Kirkland, the union’s secretary-treasurer.
[JULY 15, 1975]
GENTLEMEN:
HERE, IN THE Senate Office Building I must begin by saying that I have not forgotten the high, indeed the exceptional, honor paid me by the United States Senate in twice endeavoring to declare me an honorary citizen of the United States.
I take this to mean that you had in mind not only myself as an individual but also the millions of my fellow countrymen who have been deprived of rights, and even those in the other Communist countries, those millions who have never been able, and are still unable, to express their opinions in the press, in parliaments, or at international conferences.
As I convey to you my gratitude for the decisions of the United States Senate concerning myself, I am all the more conscious of my responsibility as a spokesman for those others, a responsibility almost too massive for the shoulders of a single human being. But I have never lost sight of the suffering, the striving and the hopes of those voiceless millions, and have had no aim in life other than to give them expression, and this lends me strength for my public appearances in this country and for my appearance before you today. For the time being, there are few people in the Communist countries who speak out publicly, but millions understand the loathsome nature of the system and feel a revulsion toward it. Whoever can “votes with his feet,” simply fleeing from this mass violence and destruction.
I see before me today not only members of the Senate but also a group of Representatives. Thus, I am speaking for the first time to participants in your country’s legislative process whose influence in recent years has spread far beyond the limits of American history.
In virtually every respect, our Russian historical experience has been almost the opposite of yours. The innumerable events that have befallen us in the twentieth century have enriched our Russian experience in an unfortunate way, and now they seem to confront you from the future. It is that much more crucial that we persistently and sincerely try to convey our respective experience to one another. One of today’s most terrible dangers is precisely that the destinies of the world are entangled as never before, so that events or mistakes in one part of the world are immediately felt in all the others. At the same time, the exchange of information and of opinions between populations is blocked by iron barriers on the one side, while on the other it is distorted by distance, paucity of information, narrowness of outlook, or deliberate misrepresentation by observers and commentators.
In my few addresses in your country I have attempted to break through that wall of disastrous unawareness or nonchalant superiority. I have tried to convey to your countrymen the constrained breathing of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe in these weeks when an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels will inter in a common grave bodies that are still breathing. I have tried to explain to Americans that 1973, the tender dawn of détente, was precisely the year when the starvation rations in Soviet prisons and concentration camps were reduced even further. And in recent months, when more and more Western speechmakers have pointed to the beneficial consequences of détente, the Soviet Union has adopted a novel and important improvement in its system of punishment: to retain their glorious supremacy in the invention of forced-labor camps, Soviet prison specialists have now established a new form of solitary confinement—forced labor in solitary cells. That means cold, hunger, lack of fresh a
ir, insufficient light, and impossible work norms; the failure to fulfill these norms is punished by confinement under even more brutal conditions.
Alas, such is human nature that we never feel the sufferings of others, and they never darken our temporary well-being, until they become our own. I am not certain that in my addresses here I have succeeded in conveying the breath of that terrible reality to a complacently prosperous American society. But I have done what I could and what I consider my duty. So much the worse if the justice of my warnings becomes evident only some years hence.
Your country has just recently passed through the extended ordeal of Vietnam, which exhausted and divided your society. I can say with certainty that this ordeal was the least of a long chain of similar trials which awaits you in the near future.
Whether or not the United States so desires, it has risen to the peak of world history and carries the burden of leadership for at least half the world. The United States has not had a thousand-year preparation for this task. Perhaps the two hundred years of your existence has not been time enough to produce a sense of national awareness. Meanwhile, the load of obligations and responsibilities has fallen on you unbidden.
That is why, members of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, each one of you is not just an ordinary member of an ordinary parliament—you have been elevated to a particularly high position in the contemporary world. I would like to convey to you how we, the subjects of Communist states, look upon your words, deeds, proposals, and enactments, which are made known to the world through the media. We sometimes greet them with passionate approval, at other times with horror and despair. But we never have a chance to respond aloud.
Perhaps some of you, in your minds, still consider yourselves to represent only your state or party. But, from over there, from afar, we do not perceive these differences. We do not look upon you as Democrats or Republicans, or as representatives of the Eastern Seaboard or the West Coast or the Midwest; we see you as statesmen, each of whom will play a direct and decisive role in the further course of world history, as it proceeds toward tragedy or salvation.
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