LENIN IN ZURICH, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (Bodley Head). £3.75. Sozhenitsyn’s latest book consists of chapters extracted from his panoramic history of the Russian Revolution. The first is the is the missing chapter 22 of August 1914. The rest comes from the still-to-be-published parts two and three, October 1916 and March 1917. ‘Lenin in Zurich” parallels … Read more
MY COUNTRY AND THE WORLD, by Andrei Sakharov. 109 pages (Collins Harvill) £2.25. Academician Sakharov’s latest book shows very clearly how his political views have changed as a result of the experiences suffered for his role as the Soviet Union’s number one dissident. In the summer of 1968, Sakharov first published his ideas on the … Read more
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, Volume II, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 712 pages (Collins and Harvill Press). £4.95. This is an agonising heavy book to read which leaves the reader cold and empty inside. The great pen of Alexander Solzhenitsyn paints a picture of a different planet, a strange world of ragged “zeks” (camp slang for prisoners) their … Read more
TO DEFEND THESE RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE SOVIET UNION. By Valery Chalidze, translated by Guy Daniels 340pp (Collins and Harvill) 4 pounds Valery Chalidze was a founder member of the Soviet Human Rights Committee together with the Nobel Prize winner, Andrei Sakharov. Chalidze was the legal expert of the group. His political weapons … Read more
SAKHAROV SPEAKS. Edited and with a foreword by Harrison E. Salisbury. 245 pages. (Collins and Harvill Press £3.00. This collection of Andrei Sakharov’s writings is a product of a great deal of work between the Academician himself and the well-known American journalist, Harrison Salisbury. Nearly half the book is taken up with Sakharov’s famous essay, … Read more
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 1918 – 1956. by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 660 pages. (Collins & Havill Press). £3. A leading dissident authoress, Lydia Chukovskaya, was recently expelled from the Soviet writers’ union. At the end of a two-hour meeting to condemn her works, she was allowed to speak and told the literary bureaucrats that Russian literature … Read more