Our Own Democracy

This article was adapted from Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, translated by Alexis Klimoff, to be published in November. Copyright © 1991 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Rebuilding Russia was, of course, written before the coup.

THERE IS no escaping the fact that our country has cruelly forfeited the entire twentieth century: all our much-trumpeted achievements have turned out to be illusory. From a flourishing condition we have been hurled back to a state of semi-barbarity, and we are sitting amid the wreckage.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Mr. Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This article was adapted from Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, translated by Alexis Klimoff, to be published in November. Copyright © 1991 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Rebuilding Russia was, of course, written before the coup.

THERE IS no escaping the fact that our country has cruelly forfeited the entire twentieth century: all our much-trumpeted achievements have turned out to be illusory. From a flourishing condition we have been hurled back to a state of semi-barbarity, and we are sitting amid the wreckage.