Free Republic

Alexander Solzhenitzen's middle son talks about his father. The format of the interview is similar to Levin https://youtu.be/p1OYMYpj3Lo

Joseph Stalin’s firearms registration and confiscation was a tremendous success for the Socialist state. Under the Tsar, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. That all changed when Stalin and the communists took control. Stalin was able to control, starve, punish and imprison a defenseless people… after he took their guns. (Zinnfigur) This video is a shocking reminder on how Stalin was able to control, starve, punish and imprison a defenseless people. It’s no secret that Democrats are hoping to repeat this history here in the United States. The Boston Mayor’s Office is pushing a new...

Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away: A writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the pavement of a foreign capital, then rust-colored stains have forever bespattered the writer’s face. And if on some fateful night a trusting Friend is strangled in his sleep—then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly proclaim the advantages...

Five years ago today, August 3, 2008, one of my heroes died. I never met him, but I think I know him. Of one thing I’m certain, the influence exerted on me by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is incalculable. It’s difficult to explain the personal impact of Solzhenitsyn. He was such a massive figure in the public eye and provoked controversy (the good kind) throughout the course of his life. He was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk in southern Russia. Toward the end of WW II, in 1945, while serving as a captain in the Red Army, he was arrested...

In the Russian Arctic lies buried an unfinished railway built by prisoners of Stalin's gulags. For decades, no-one talked about it. But one woman is now telling the story of the thousands who suffered there—and there is talk of bringing back to life the abandoned railway itself. … Lyudmila (Lipatova) and I had uncovered a tiny section of one of Joseph Stalin's cruelest and most ambitious projects—the Trans-Polar Main Line. It was (Stalin's) attempt to conquer the Arctic—part of what he called his Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. The scheme was supposed to link the eastern and western...

Chrystia Freeland has called the US prison system an "American Gulag Archipelago." The Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters made her comment during today's Dylan Ratigan show on MSNBC. The context was a discussion of the recent WikiLeaks document dump about Gitmo, but Freeland was clearly speaking of the domestic US prison system, not our military prisons. Ratigan picked up on her theme, saying we could cut our prison costs in half if marijuana were legalized. View video after the jump [with apologies for mediocre quality]. Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein#ixzz1KZr0yJV6

In 1949 a publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences carried an item about a bizarre incident that occurred during excavations near the Kolyma River in the gold-mining region of northeastern Siberia. A subterranean stream was discovered, frozen long ago, containing fish and salamanders tens of thousands of years old. They were so well preserved that the men who discovered the stream broke open the ice and ate them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, managed somehow to read that piece.

ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, whose famous novel The Gulag Archipelago exposed the horrors of the Soviet prison camp system, has been accused of being a KGB informer who betrayed friends to the hated spy agency. The popular newspaper website, pravda.ru, accuses Russia’s Nobel laureate of informing on several acquaintances who were then condemned to the very death camps he described in his book. Solzhenitsyn’s son yesterday issued a furious denial of the story, claiming his 84-year-old father was the victim of a "smear campaign". The newspaper alleged that after serving as an artillery officer in the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn confessed to...

A discredited decades-long KGB smear campaign alleging that Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an informer against his fellow gulag prisoners has resurfaced in Pravda.ru and drawn the wrath of the author's son, Stephan. Solzhenitsyn wrote his classic 1974 expose of the vast ring of Soviet slave labor camps he called the "Gulag Archipelago." The book, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West, created an international sensation. It revealed for all the world to see the horrors visited upon dissidents imprisoned within the gulag and earned the author the undying hatred of his former Soviet slave masters....