9.19.2012 SOLZHENITSYN II

-in materialistic
(markedly more concerned with material things than with spiritual, intellectual or cultural values)
dialectics
(the arguments or bases of dialectical materialism, including the elevation of matter over mind and a constantly changing reality with a material basis)
(note: does this mean there are no eternal values, no objective 'right' and 'wrong'?...no authoritative God?...they all seem to connect up like pearls in a necklace.)
..what matters is not what we do but what people will say about it
(oh, so people replace God as the judge..huh..interesting.)
..and so that they cannot say anything bad, we'll keep our mouths shut about all that goes on
(huh..sounds alot like our current american environment of 'political correctness'...whatever that means...so whatever gets said that is not acceptable to 'whoever' (no reason given..no ability to actually talk and each side share what they actually believe and why..just 'shame' the person into silence and, hopefully, apology, just scream at them, vilify them, shout them down...don't ever try to understand them...because you are RIGHT..whoever you are and WHATEVER you believe...and so the group splinters into a million SEPARATE pieces so there can be no unity or community with one another...because everyone is a little god over everyone else. so that's why we can practice genocide of more millions of (in our case totally helpless, innocent, voiceless) human beings...huh..very interesting..

sol...camp experience tells me that the rougher you are with stoolies, the safer you are. you must never appear to acquiesce.

sol in reasoning with tvar about being openly on the attack..after the writers union put him out 11.12. 1969 (see last item under solzhentsyn I)...'my sacrifice would go for nothing now, but in the future it would have it's effect..

sol to writers' union...'at this time of crisis you are incapable of offering our grievously sick society anything constructive and good, anything but your malevolent vigilance..you hold tight and don't let it go..

269..what lydia chukovskaya once said about political protests was right:
if i don't do it, i can't write about the things that matter. until i pull this arrow out of my breast, i can think of nothing else! i (sol) felt just the same. when all around were so faint hearted, what sort of man would i be if i left (the writers' union) without slamming the door?

272..sol to tvar who was angry with how he left..he writes
'...this is a different age-not that in which you had the misfortune to live the greater part of your literary life-and different skills are needed. mine are those of katorga and the camps. i can say without affectation that i belong to the russian convict world no less, and owe no less to it, than i do to russian literature. i got my education there, and it will last forever. when i am considering any step of importance to my future, i listen above all to the voices of my comrades in katorga, some of them already dead, of disease or a bullet and i hear clearly how they would behave in my place.

...by writing this letter(to the union on leaving)
1. i have shown that i shall resist to the last, that when i say 'i will lay down my life' i am not joking; that i shall continue returning blow for blow and perhaps hit still harder. so that if they are wise, they will think twice before touching me again. in this stance i shall be able to defend myself irrespective of the attitude of the literary community.
2. i have used an opportunity that was there for a day and will not recur: i was already released from the rules and terminology of the writers' union, yet i still had the right to appeal to it: and the secretariat was a very convenient addressee.
3. i feel that my whole life is a process of rising gradually from my knees, a gradual transition from enforced dumbness to free speech, so that my letter to the congress and this present letter, have been moments of high delight, of spiritual emancipation...

298.1..i (sol) should not think much of the author of gulag if he preserved a diplomatic silence about its continuation into the present. for our intelligentsia the internment of zhores medvedev in the loony bin held grater dangers and raised larger issues than what had happened to czechoslovakia. it was a noose around our own throats. so i decided to write something i began my first drafts very menacingly
WARNING! (to all of them all the torturers. i am very apt to be carried away at first, but then i recover my self-control.)
during my time in the camps i had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else:
the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.
(people in the west simply will not understand this, and are forever hoping to mollify them with concessions.) as soon as i rubbed the sleep out of my eyes in the morning i longed to get to my novel, but the urge to rewrite my warning just once more would be too strong for me, i was so worked up about it by the fifth draft it had become rather milder:
the way we live
the way we live, without any warrant for arrest or any medical justification, four militiamen and two doctors come to a healthy man's house, the doctors declare that he is crazy, the militia major shouts, 'we are the organs of coercion. get up! they twist his arms, handcuff him and drive him off to the madhouse.

this cannot happen tomorrow to any one of us. it has just happened to zhores medvedev, a geneticist and publicist, a man of subtle, precise and brilliant intellect and warm heart (i know personally of his disinterested help to ordinary citizens in sickness or near death.) it is precisely because of the diversity of his gifts that he is charged with abnormality: 'a split personality!' it is precisely his sensitivity to injustice, to stupidity, that is presented as a sick deviation: 'poor adaptation to the social environment!'
once you think in any but the approved way, that means you're abnormal!
while well adjusted people must all think alike.
and there is no redress:
even the appeals of our best scientist and writers bounce back like peas off a wall.

if only this were the first case! but this devious suppression of people
without searching for any guilt,
when the real reason is too shameful to state,
is becoming a fashion.
some of the victims are widely known,
many more are unknown.
servile psychiatrists,
breakers of the hippocratic oath,
see social concern,
excessive ardor,
excessive coolness,
brilliant or abundant gifts,
as so many symptoms of mental illness.

yet elementary prudence ought to act as a restraint. after all, chaadayev had not a finger laid on him, and even so we have been cursing his persecutors for over a century.
it is time to think clearly:
the incarceration of free thinking people in madhouses is spiritual murder,
it is a variation on the gas chamber,
but is even more cruel:
the torments of those done to death in this way are more heartless and protracted.
like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten and all those involved in them will be condemned in perpetuity, during their lives and after their deaths.
the lawless, the evildoers, must remember that there is a limit beyond with a man becomes a cannibal!
it is shortsighted to think that one can live by constantly relying of force alone,
constantly ignoring the protests of conscience.

313.last..knots
..'but still, it seemed a senseless undertaking: twenty knots, each taking a year, meant 20 years. but 'august 1914 had been two years in the writing. at that rate, might it take forty? of fifty? (note at back of book..'the term 'knot' is derived from the mathematical concept of 'nodal point'
(note: in looking up this i could make no connection at all to sol's use in literature..)
it suggests a point in history where the complex and interrelated issues of the time find their sharpest focus and where the essential (and otherwise frequently hidden) forces of the historical process are revealed.  august 1914 is subtitled 'knot 1'; the following two knots will be october 1916 and march 1917.

322.2...'it can easily happen in a war of mines and countermines that the tunnelers collide head on. if i had got as far as my aunt's, the KGB party would have arrived while i was with her. but i got too much sun on the way, and when i was nearly there..i turned back, severely sunburned. my KGB 'admirerers' made a rewarding call on my aunt, obtained from her family records and stories, and departed rejoicing. by the standards of the twenties and thirties, the accusations were lethal-all the things that my mother and i had always concealed, when we had spent our lives cowering and trembling in half flattened hovels. another of their sapping operations, however, was thwarted. because of my sudden return-again we see the rules of subterranean warfare in operation- i had asked a friend of mine (gorlov) to fetch a spare part for my car from rozhdestvo. he might have gone any other day, but he had a chance to go as soon as i got back from the south, on 11 august, and was just in time to discover nine KBG men behaving as though they owned my little dacha. if i hadn't come back from the south, their operation would have gone back from the south, their operation would have gone off without a hitch...(as a result sol wrote an open letter to andropov, the head of the KBG, which appears below.)

document 17...'for many years, i have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees:
the inspection of all my correspondence,
the confiscation of half of it,
the tracking down of my correspondents,
their persecution at work and by state agencies,
the spying around my house,
the shadowing of visitors,
the tapping of telephone conversations,
the drilling of holes in ceilings,
the placing of recording apparatus in my city apartment and at my cottage, and
a persistent slander campaign against me from the platforms of lecture halls when they are put at the disposal of officials from your ministry.

but after the raid yesterday,i will no longer be silent. my cottage at rozhdestvo, in the naro-fominsk rayon, was unoccupied, and the eavesdroppers were counting on my absence. i, however had come back to moscow after being taken ill suddenly and had asked my friend aleksandr gorlov to get a spare part for the car from my cottage. but it turned out the house was unlocked and voices could be heard from within, gorlov stepped inside and demanded the intruders' documents. in that small structure, where three or four can barely turn around, there were about ten of them in plain clothes. at a command from the senior officer-
take him into the wood and silence him!
-gorlov was grabbed, knocked to the floor, dragged face down into the wollds and beaten viciously. while this was going on, others took a roundabout route trough the bushes, carrying parcels, documents and other objects (including perhaps some of the apparatus they had brought before) to their cars. however, gorlov fought back vigorously and yelled, summoning witnesses. neighbors from other lots came running in response to his shouts, barred the intruders' way to the highway and demanded their identification documents. then one of the intruders presented a red identification card and the neighbors let them pass. gorlov, with a battered face and his suit in ribbons, was taken to a car.
fine methods you have, he said to his escorts.
we are on an operation and on an operation WE CAN DO ANYTHING.

the one who, according to papers he had shown neighbors, was a captain, and according to his own statement called ivanov, drove gorlov first to the naro-fominsk police station. the local officers greeted 'ivanov' with deference. 'ivanov' then demanded from gorlov(!) a written explanation of what had happened. although he had been severely beaten, gorlov put in writing the purpose of his trip and all the circumstances. after that the senior intruder demanded that gorlov should sign an undertaking not to give the matter any publicity. gorlov flatly refused. then they set off for moscow, and on the road, the senior intruder gave gorlov, word for word, the following warning:
if sol finds out what took place at the dacha, you're finished.
your career (gorlov is a candidate of technical sciences, has presented his doctoral dissertation, and works in the design and technical research institute of the state construction administration) will go no further;
you will not be able to defend any dissertation.
this will affect your family, your children, and if necessary, we will put you inside.

those who know how we live know the full feasibility of these threats. but gorlov did not give in to them, refused to sign the pledge and is now threatened with reprisals.

i demand from you, citizen minister, the public identification of all the intruders,
their punishment as criminals and
a public explanation of this incident.
otherwise i can only conclude that they were sent by you.
13 august 1971                                                                                                          a. solzhenitsyn

324.last...'another shock: the oak and the calf, the book you have..was going around moscow! i was flabbergasted! because of course, in this book everything is wide open, people and things are given their own names:
what could possibly be more dangerous?
we had kept it safe and secret;
how had it broken loose?
where?
through whom?
why?
we mounted an investigation, checked all our copies: we had to go outside moscow and physically verify that all copies were in place, had not been moved and could not have been photographed. there was suspicion and doubt all around, all was chaos and confusion.

then we took up the search from the other end of the trail.
who had heard of the book being read?
who had read it for himself?
what did the copy look like?
at whose apartment had people read it?
 address and telephone number? (there was no avoiding the excited mentioning of titles over the telephone-the lubyanka had no doubt noticed and their posse would sweep out to head us off at any minute!)
let's get there fast!
 right, then.
give it to me straight-better come clean before the KBG roll up.
they come clean, they name names, they put a typed copy in front of me.
but it's not one of ours!
ours, of course, had all turned out to be in place.
not one of ours-so it was a copy of a copy!
what if there were four or five like it?
but it was not even a photocopy of one of ours
someone had typed an accurate copy, and it even had my latest amendments written in by hand.
obviously someone close to me,
someone in the know,
had cribbed from me as i went along,
looked over my shoulder.
but who?
better phone the man who brought it here.
not at home.
we sat and waited, to keep out of sight a bit.
a few hours later our man came along and sheepishly named his source.
one of those we trusted most!
we had only lent it to her to read herself.
but she had surreptitiously copied it.
(for history's sake?
to make sure it survived?
or simply because she had a mania for copying things?)
she had lent it only to him (he was an intimate friend).
but he had brought it to these other people, by way of thanks for some small favor.
and they had called a very dear lady friend to share their happiness.
and she had gushed over the telephone to her bosom friend.
at this fourth remove we had got wind of it.
moscow is big, but no one is far away.
we called up the culprit.
we arranged to meet her.
sobbing, she confessed.
she was struck off our list for the future.
i confiscated the booty.
in the few hours all this took, there were signs that the geebees were getting excited.
KGB  cars with four toughs in each darkened interior went out on the prowl.
lick your chops, comrades!
you're just half an hour late! (they had no idea what all the fuss was about. what had we been looking for? what had they missed?)

in december 1969 something very similar happened with prussian nights.
again the rumor was all over moscow:
it was going the rounds.
impossible-but there it was.
on that occasion, too, i rushed from one apartment to another, tracked down the copy and seized it.
again, it was not one of our own copies!
but an exact reproduction!
cribbed!
(note: to pilfer or steal, especially to plagiarize another's writings or ideas)
by someone close to us!
by whom?
i uncovered the trail.
a friend had had it for a few days and lent it out.
and the other people had tapped out a copy.
and kept it secret for four years!
but once i had been expelled from the writers' union, why not let samizdat have it?
i stamped it out in moscow by one means or another.
the manuscript ceased to circulate.

such are the quiet weeks that make up our quiet years, the peaceful times in which there are no events of note, while the main forces are stationary and 'nothing happens'.

for how many years can i go on like this? so far there have been 27 of them, since my first poems in the sharashka, when i first tarted hiding and burning.

327.2...(after tvardovsky's funeral sol wrote for samizdat 'there are many ways of killing a poet' on 27 december 1971) 'it is not from this letter, but earlier, from the appearance of august 1914, that we must date the schism among my readers,
the steady loss of supporters,
with more leaving me than remained behind.
i was received with 'hurrahs' as long as i appeared to be against stalinist abuses only; thus far the entire soviet public was with me.  in my first works i was concealing my features from the police censorship-but, by the same token, from the public at large.
with each subsequent step i inevitably revealed more and more of myself;
the time had come to speak more precisely,
to go even deeper.
and in doing so i should inevitably lose the reading public,
lose my contemporaries in hope of winning posterity.
it was painful, though, to lose support even among those closest to me.)

...'outwardly all is calm, there is no harassment,
but under the skin there is this cancer of slander...
thus public opinion the country over was fully prepared for any reprisal against me.
still, we are no longer in that era when you could crush someone without it becoming known!

interview with correspondents of the new york times and the washington post- moscow, 30 march 1972
512.4...'fame is a heavy burden..it consumes a lot of time to little purpose.
it consumes a lot of time to little purpose.
at least they do not drag me along to meetings, as they do others;
i am thankful that they have expelled me.
it was good to work when nobody knew me, nobody exercised his pen making up fairy tales about me..

what is the plan?
the plan consists in driving me out of this life or out of the country,
tossing me into a ditch
or sending me to siberia,
or having me 'dissolve in an alien fog',
as they frankly write.
how confident they are that the censor's pets have more right to russia than others who were also born there...
they do not want to know the complexity and richness of history in all its diversity.
they care only about silencing all voices that are unpleasant to their ears or spoil their peace of mind today, and they do not think about the future...

513.1...'the study of russian history, which has now taken me back to the last years of the last century,
has shown me how precious peaceful solutions are for our country,
how important it is that authority, however autocratic and unlimited it may be, should listen benevolently to society,
and that society should understand the real position of the authorities;
how important it is that the country be led not by force and coercion, but by RIGHTEOUSNESS.
i think that these studies of mine helped me to recognize in tvar's activity precisely that conciliatory line.
alas, even the gentlest admonitory voice is intolerable,
and to be silenced.
how reasonably,
with what good will,
did sakharov and grigorenko speak out here recently:
neither of them was given a hearing- they were told to get lost, to shut up..

there we see the pettiness, the ignoble narrow mindedness of those who are leading the campaign against me. it honestly does not enter their heads that a writer who thinks differently from the majority of his society is an enrichment to that society, not the shame and ruination of it...

342.last  these vague promptings are sometimes traceable to actual events, though we cannot always make the connection at the time. we felt that we had reached a new low, sunk to new, suffocating depths of civic failure: more people were arrested, others were threatened, and yet others were renouncing all and leaving the country. sinyavsky came to say goodbye (and to introduce himself at the same time), and i was chilled and saddened to think that fewer and fewer were willing to endure russia's destiny with her, lead where it might. the authorities had calculated that this 'third emigration' would 'ease the pressure on the boiler', and they were proved right...there were fewer and fewer voices capable of protest left in the land. early in summer maksimov was expelled from the writers' union, and in july he wrote me a justifiably bitter letter: where was the solidarity of writers the world over' which i had so extolled in my nobel lecture and why did he, maksimov, not see me among his defenders?

i did not defend him for the same reason that i had not defended all the others:
licensing myself to work on the his story of the revolution,
i had absolved myself of all other duties.
to this day i am not ashamed of such periods of deliberate silence:
an artist has no other recourse if he does not want to overheat himself with ephemeral concerns and boil dry.
(note: the dynamic sol speaks of here is so real, so true and leads to the appearance of inconsistency or hypocrisy at times...each of us HAS TO to certain things..even though all around us are a host of legitimate claims!!! very, very frustrating in my life and yet EACH OF US HAS TO DO CERTAIN THINGS..)

344.2 the one worrying thing was that i might not be given time to carry out the whole scheme. i felt as though i was about to fill a space in the world that was meant for me and had long awaited me, a mold, as it were, made for me alone, but discerned by me only this very moment. i was a molten substance, impatient, unendurably impatient, to pour into my mold, to fill it full, without air bubbles or cracks, before i cooled and stiffened.

it had happened so often:
before the next step,
next breakthrough,
assault,
'cascade',
i concentrate solely on the affair in hand, on these last brief moments;
and the rest of my life,
the time that lies beyond these critical moments,
is completely forgotten,
it ceases to exist.
all i want is to come through this next crisis,
to survive...
and the future will look after itself.

the first blow in the cascade of blows was sol's letter to the minister of the interior, document 25,,
'four months ago i applied for a residence permit so that i might live with my family. after your lengthy meditation on a matter which might seem to need none, i have now been informed that my request has been rejected by the militia and by you personally. i would express my inability to understand what human or legal considerations could induce you to prevent a husband from living with his wife, or a father with his two small sons, if i did not know from long experience that neither human nor legal considerations have any existence in our political system.

the demeaning, compulsory 'passport system',
in which his place of residence may not be chosen by the individual but is chosen for him by the authorities,
in which the right to move from city to city and especially from country to city,
must be earned as a favor,
probably does not exist even in the colonial countries of the world today.
and yet for the last 42 years, millions of my compatriots have suffered and are still suffering daily under that system.
with the present wide ranging discussion about the freedom of emigration for thousands, one cannot but be struck by the fact that millions lack the right to pick their place of residence and occupation even within their own country!
that lack of rights has been further aggravated by a law passed in 1973..that prevents a peasant from leaving his collective farm even temporarily for seasonal work without permission.

however, i take this opportuuity to remind you that serfdom in our country was abolished 112 years ago. and we are told that the october revolution wiped out its last remnants.

presumably i, like any other citizen of this country, am neither a serf nor a slave and should be free to live wherever i find it necessary, and no one, not even the highest leadership, has a serf owner's right to separate me from my family.
21 august 1973                                                                                                  solzhenitsyn

516.1 (the next blow, an interview with associated press and le monde-moscow 23 august 1973 it is too lengthy to quote..several snippets..
...tsar nicholas I never pronounced himself proprietor of pushkin's poetry.
nor, under alexanderII, wer the novels of tolstoy, turgenev or goncharov state property.
alexander KK never told chekhov where to publish his works.
the merchants and financiers of so  called capitalism have never seen any chance of trading in creations of the intellect or works of art unless the author himself has given them such rights.
..if, under the first socialist state, mean mercantile brains think that a product of spiritual creativity,
a product newly sprung from the soul or mind of its creator,
automatically becomes a commodity and the property of the ministry of foreign trade,
then such notions can provoke nothing but utter contempt.

what do you have to say about the decision to deprive zhores medvedev of soviet citizenship?
this is not a unique case, and a pattern is beginning to emerge.
1. citizenship in our country is not a natural inalienable right of every human being born on its soil, but  a kind of coupon which is held by an exclusive clique of people who have done nothing at all to prove that they have more right than others to the russian soil. and this clique, if it doesn't approve of some citizen's convictions, can by a simple declaration deprive him of his homeland. i leave it to you to find a word for such a social system.
2. in cases when they've missed their chance to get rid of a person with behind the scenes methods (as they would with someone less well known), they find that the least painful thing is to fling him out to the west, preferably with his voluntary consent to what is represented as a temporary assignment abroad or a departure with no arrangements for return.
3. we must, alas, admit that they are not mistaken in their calculations. the environment in our country resembles a dense and viscous medium:
it is incredibly difficult to make even the smallest movements because it immediately draws some part of the environment after it...

...attacks on sakharov in the soviet press?
..tass in its reply to sak says that
even the sharpest criticism in our country is regarded as something useful.
this is a blatant lie.
no serious criticism whatever,
on any level whatever,
however constructive it may be,
is permitted in our country from ANYBODY,
except a small circle of people  who have reached their positions by obediently taking orders for years,
which of course has done little to develop their critical faculties...
check for yourselves:
during the last 10, 20 or 30 years,
has RATIONAL ARGUMENT ever been used against any dissident?
no, never, because no such arguments exist.
they always reply with curses and slander...

..social situation in the USSR today?
the world, used by now to the idea that nothing can eve be discovered about us anyway,
overlooks even the most obvious and open piece of information:
that in this impressive country with its most advanced socialist structure
THERE HAS BEEN NOT A SINGLE AMNESTY FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS FOR HALF A CENTURY!...
what jamming of radio broadcasts means is impossible to explain to those who haven't experienced it themselves,
who haven't lived under it for years.
every day they spit into your eyes and ears.
it is an insult to human beings,
it degrades them to the level of robots,
no matter whether they jam with a 'total blackout' of the wave band,
or with the 'rusty saw',
or with vulgar music.
it means that grown persons are reduced to infants:
swallow what your mother has chewed up for you.
even the most benevolent broadcasts during the most friendly visits are jammed just as uncompromisingly;
there must not be the slightest deviation in the evaluation of events,
in the nuances,
in the accents.
everybody has to assimilate and remember an event in precisely the same way.
and many facts about the world must not be made known to our population at all.
moscow and leningrad have paradoxically become the most uninformed metropolises in the world:
their inhabitants ask people who come in from the countryside what news there is. 
out in the country-for financial reasons (our population has to pay very dearly for these jamming SERVICES)- jamming is weaker.
but according to the observations of people from various places, jamming has been intensified.

...this series of sacrificial decisions by single individuals is a beacon to our future.

there is one psychological peculiarity in human beings that always surprises me. in times of prosperity and ease, a man will shy from the least little worry on the periphery of his existence,
try not to know about the sufferings of others of intimate importance to him,
just to prolong his present well being.
yet a man who is approaching the last frontier,
who is already a naked beggar deprived of all that may be though to beautify life,
can suddenly find in himself the strength
to dig in his heels
and refuse to take the final step,
can surrender his life but not his principles!
note:(MAY WE IN THE WEST PLEAD WITH GOD FOR TROUBLES SO WE TO MAY BE RELEASE FROM THE HORROR OF PROSPERITY AND EASE!)

because of the first quality,
man has never been able to hold on to one single plateau he has attained.
thanks to the second quality,
mankind has pulled itself out of all  kinds of bottomless pits...