detente, the accolades have rained down unceasingly remained revolutionary socialists, he is contemptuous is even a re-writing of Russian history.
erty and becomes a place that enjoyed great freedom' To believe the press, a latter-day God named Solzhenitsyn arrived via television last Monday night. Since his 'Panorama' appearance, in which he repeated his paranoic vision of the West endlessly yielding ground to the Soviet Union in the name of But who is Solzhenitsyn? What does he represent? At one time he was a great writer, the genius of a generation of dissidents whose novels - particularly The First Circle and Cancer Ward — did an enormous service to the world working clas in explaining the hideous reality of Stalinist Russia. But in Solzhenitsyn's earlier books there also burnt the belief that the liberation of mankind was only possible with socialism, and the road to it lay in a return to the traditions of Lenin In a sense, the Stalinist bureaucracy scored its greatest victory when it sueceeded in turning his voice into a stalking horse for the right wing of the ruling class of Western imperialism, who see in detente the imminent collapse of the West.
For that is what Solzhenitsyn has become. That is why he is now feted by im portant sections of the capitalist class, as well as becoming an icon for reactionary buffoons like Lord George-Brown. It is a development that is matched by an increasing intellectual arrogance on his part — only I know and understand what is happening'. Even in relation to others who have suffered the prison camps but Not only is experience the only source of valid comment on this monstrous system, he seems to be saying, but only the conclusions I draw are true. There Suddenly pre-revolutionary Russia loses its famines, oppression and absence of the most elementary needs of life and libThis is a sad and terrible degeneration — and one for which the Soviet bureaucracy has much to answer. Heroically there is still another voice coming out of the labour camps, one tnat still argues for revolutionary socianism. It is not soiznenitsyn but those exiles like Leonid Plyusch who defiantly reaffirm their commitment to bulaing communism in the soviet omon, wao polt the way torward today.