This book contains the texts of speeches given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the United States and Britain after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974. The first two in this review will be were given to the AFL-CIO. Solzhenitsyn condemned the Soviet Union and “…its intolerable policy of repression, yet also sharply criticizes those complacent Westerners who support their government’s misguided policy of detente and timidly fear to take up the obligations that freedom-hungry people expect from the leading democracies of the world. ‘Interfere more and more, he pleads…We beg you to come and interfere’.” As an aside from the speeches, Ronald Reagan was campaigning against Gerald Ford for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1974-1975 with warnings about detente with the Soviets. Solzhenitsyn said in one of his AFL-CIO speeches that the USSR was “the concentration of world evil.” Detente with the Soviets did not end until Reagan replaced Carter and declared the USSR to be “The Evil Empire.” 

Solzhenitsyn begins his first speech to the labor leaders with a short history of the Russian Revolution and tells them “…only four months after the October Revolution…all the representatives of the Petrograd factories were denouncing the Communists who had deceived them…” The Communists had fled from Petrograd to Moscow, and had given orders to open fire on the crowds of factory workers demanding election of independent officers. A lathe operator named Alexander Shliapnikov led the Communists before the Revolution: Lenin wasn’t even in the country. Shliapnikov charged in 1921 that the Communist leadership had betrayed the interests of the workers, and he disappeared.

Solzhenitsyn thanked the AFL for publishing a map of Soviet concentration camps to counteract charges by Liberals in the U.S. who were claiming the camps did not exist. He points out that Liberals weren’t the only group supporting the Communists. Capitalists were encouraging business dealings with the Soviets, which of course gave badly needed economic support. He mentions Armand Hammer by name. Some American businessmen arrange an exhibit of criminological technology in Moscow. The KGB purchased the equipment, copied it, and used it to spy on citizens. Solzhenitsyn tells a story about Lenin predicting that Western Capitalists would compete with each other to sell the Soviets everything they needed without any concern for the future. He predicts that “…when the bourgeoisie a rope and the bourgeoisie will hang itself.” Lenin is asked where they would get enough rope for that, he replied, “They will sell it to us themselves.”

Solzhenitsyn reminded the union leaders that when the Soviet Union was in the grips of famine in the 1920s that the Americans responded to pleas for help by feeding the hungry. The American Relief Administration (ARA) set up by the future President Hoover fed millions of Russians. The Soviets later purged all public records of the ARA except for a declaration that the organization was a spy network. The people who were saved by the ARA weren’t safe for long. The speech mentions fifteen million peasants shipped off to their deaths and the six million people who died from an artificially created famine in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. It was also 1933 that President Roosevelt “…decided that this system was worthy of diplomatic recognition, of friendship, and of assistance.” By 1937 Stalin was having more than forty thousand people executed each month. Roosevelt in Teheran made a toast and said, “I do not doubt that the three of us (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) are leading our peoples in accordance with their desires and their aims.” It was at Yalta that “…the occupation of Mongolia, Moldavia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was silently recognized…After that, almost nothing was done to protect Eastern Europe, and seven or eight more countries were surrendered.” Solzhenitsyn declared that the United States helps the most unselfishly, and is cursed in reply, “Yankee Go Home.” He mentioned that food and clothes collected throughout the United States by “Soviet-American friendship societies” were distributed “among the privileged circles,” and average citizens never knew of the generosity.

There is an interesting story about a Soviet citizen who had visited the United States and commented on return that the country had wonderful roads. The KGB arrested him and demanded a sentence of ten years. The judge replied, “I don’t object, but there is not enough evidence. Couldn’t you find something else against him?” The judge was exiled.

Solzhenitsyn warns, “The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.” This is where he pleads, “Interfere…We beg you to come and interfere.”

The second speech was also given to the AFLCIO a few days after the first. He gives a Russian proverb as an early warning in this speech, “When it happens to you, you’ll know it’s true. He also lists several of the predictions made by Marxists that were to lead to their overall victory, but many did not come true. They said the conditions of the working class in the West would deteriorate steadily and become unbearable. The Communist revolution would begin in advanced industrial countries, and capitalism would be overthrown. It was also said that war only existed because of Capitalism. Of course none of that was true or would become true. It is true that there were wide attempts to ignore the tanks when they roared into Budapest and Czechoslovakia. It is true that Lenin hated even the slightest deviation from his ideas. Speeches about open dialogue translated to machine guns and revolvers. The Bolsheviks pursued power under the slogan, “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.” “But when…they got 25 percent of the vote…they dispersed the Constituent Assembly.”

The Communists advocated ware as an instrument for achieving their goals, but they became peace advocates after America developed and used the atomic bomb. They publically advocate detente when they feel it is to their advantage. They say in closed lectures, “…capitalism must be destroyed.” (Detene means two persons meeting and showing with an open hand that they don’t have a stone or club. Detente “…literally means a reduction in the tension of a taut rope.)