Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. Today’s piece has Bill extolling the anti-communist power of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and noting the loudest critics have the most to lose by its widespread publication.
The new volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn raises policy questions for the West which, if we answer them wrongly, will bring down upon us that curse of history reserved for those despicable men who, though knowing everything they needed to know, declined to act, thus contributing to a crucifixion. Solzhenitsyn is only an individual, but there was never in human history a clearer identification of an individual and a class. Martin Luther King as representative of the American Negro pales alongside the authority of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as representative of the 200 million people of Russia who have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of the creed-ridden tormentors of that wretched country.
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