Paradise Lost

If there is an intellectual equivalent to the labor of cleansing the Augean Stables, it is the task of writing about the Soviet Union. Perhaps one reason we hear so much about South Africa, Chile, Spain, et al. is that their crimes are so tiny—the death of a couple of Basque terrorists is easy to write about because it is easy to comprehend. But what can you say about the death of a country? How can you cope with a regime that is more brutal than Hitler’s, holds sway over more people, and has lasted five times as long? There are two possible methods. One can tackle the statistics directly—so many murders, so many arrests. Or one can try to creep into the minds of the victims, the anonymous souls behind the statistics. The first is the method of The Gulag Archipelago; the second, of Lev Navrozov’s Welcome to Soviet America.

Lev Navrozov is a Russian author who, since his escape from the Soviet Union five years ago, has produced countless books, articles, and speeches on the subject of Russia’s woes and America’s stupidity. Welcome to Soviet America is his first work for the stage; it is also his first work to fuse the two themes—for the premise of this grim Slavic fantasy is that American shortsightedness and naïveté have finally culminated in the establishment of a Communist American state.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If there is an intellectual equivalent to the labor of cleansing the Augean Stables, it is the task of writing about the Soviet Union. Perhaps one reason we hear so much about South Africa, Chile, Spain, et al. is that their crimes are so tiny—the death of a couple of Basque terrorists is easy to write about because it is easy to comprehend. But what can you say about the death of a country? How can you cope with a regime that is more brutal than Hitler’s, holds sway over more people, and has lasted five times as long? There are two possible methods. One can tackle the statistics directly—so many murders, so many arrests. Or one can try to creep into the minds of the victims, the anonymous souls behind the statistics. The first is the method of The Gulag Archipelago; the second, of Lev Navrozov’s Welcome to Soviet America.

Lev Navrozov is a Russian author who, since his escape from the Soviet Union five years ago, has produced countless books, articles, and speeches on the subject of Russia’s woes and America’s stupidity. Welcome to Soviet America is his first work for the stage; it is also his first work to fuse the two themes—for the premise of this grim Slavic fantasy is that American shortsightedness and naïveté have finally culminated in the establishment of a Communist American state.