HISTORY
Solzhenitsyn on World Communism
The book begins with an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn speech titled “America, We Beg You to Interfere,” which he delivered on June 30, 1975 at a meeting of the AFL-CIO. For perspective, Mr. Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. In 1974 he was exiled from the Soviet Union because the authorities, upon reviewing a portion of his unpublished manuscript for the Gulag Archipelago, decided he was a threat. Simultaneously, he was too high profile to kill, even though they had tried to poison him a few years earlier.
In this speech to the AFL-CIO in Washington DC, he talks about the beginnings of the Communist party. Right from the start, he said, the party had never been on the side of the manipulated workers.
After the Revolution, when Alexander Shliapnikov, head of the Communist party, charged the Communist leadership with betraying the workers’ interests, Lenin had him shot. The working class was trampled. Workers who attempted peaceful demonstrations were killed. There was no free trade and from the beginning there had never been such a thing as a free trade union, Solzhenitsyn said in 1975.
He next proceeded to shed light on the Communist-Capitalist alliance. The Arm & Hammer laid…
