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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn SPECIAL REPORT AMERICA, WE EG YOU TO INTERFER by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ARTHUR R/\OTKE PRESIDENT lhe Cincinnati Air Conditioning Co. • CHURCH LEAGUE OF AMERICA 422 NORTH PROSPECT STREET WHEATON, ILLINOIS 60187 AUGUST 1975 . First Printing August 1975 Second Printing October 1975 INTRODUCTION The Church League of America believes it is imperative that the two major addresses which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made re­ cently in Washington, D.C., and in New York City under the spon­ sorship of AFL-CIO be distributed as widely as possible across the nation and be digested by every American who has one grain of common sense left in his brain, and one spark of patriotism left in his soul, that each one communicate these two messages to every­ one who lives within the same block in his community, and get others to do the same, so that Solzhenitsyn:'s warnings may be spread to millions across America. This warning must shake our nation out of its lethargy until its teeth rattle and bring about a change in our present disastrous national policy of detente; and give hope to the millions of enslaved behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains as America rises and says: "We oppose Communism in all of its forms and devices and will not give one cent or one speck of technological know-how to any Communist nation from this momenton. We will re-assume the anti-Communist leadership of the Free World re­ gardless of the hypocritical critics, the cowards and the mentally sick intelligensia!" 'America, We Beg You to Interfere' by Aleksandr I. Solzhe-nitsyn Most of those present here today are workers. Petrograd to cold and hunger, themselves having fled Creative workers. And I myself, having spent many from Petrograd to Moscow, but had given orders to years of my life as a stone cutter, as a foundryman, machine gun the crowds of workers in the courtyards as a manual worker, in the name of all who have of the factories who were demanding the election of shared this forced labor with me, like the two Gulag independent factory committees. prisoners whom you just saw, and on behalf of those Let me remind you, this was March 1918. Scarcely who are doing forced labor in our country, I can start anyone now can recall the crushing of the Petrograd my speech today with the greeting: "Brothers!" strikes in 1921 , or the shooting of workers in Kolpino "Brothers in Labor." in the same year. And not to forget, also, the many honored guests Among the leadership, the Central Committee of present here tonight, let me add: "Ladies and Gentle­ the Communist Party, at the beginning of the Revolu­ men." tion, all were emigre intellectuals who had returned, "Workers of the world unite!" Who of us has not after the uprisings had already broken out in Russia, heard this slogan, which has been sounding through in order to carry through the Communist Revolution. the world for 125 years? Today you can find it in any One of them was a genuine worker, a highly skilled Soviet pamphlet as well as in every issue of Pravda. lathe operator until the last day of his life. This was But never have the leaders of the Communist revolu­ Alexander Shliapnikov. Who knows that name today? tion in the Soviet Union made application of these Precisely because he expressed the true interests of the words sincerely and in their full meaning. When many workers within the Communist leadership. In the lies have accumulated over the decades, we forget the years before the Revolution it was Shliapnikov who radical and basic lie which is not on the leaves of the ran the whole Communist Party in Russia-not Lenin, tree, but at its very roots. who was an emigre. In 1921, he headed the Workers' Now, it's almost impossible to remember or to be­ Opposition which was charging the Communist lead­ lieve . For instance, I recently published-had ership with betraying the workers' interests, with reprinted-a pamphlet from the year 1918. This was crushing and oppressing the proletariat and trans­ a precise record of a meeting of all representatives of forming itself into a bureaucracy. the Petrograd factories, that being the city known in Shliapnikov disappeared from sight. He was ar­ our country as the "cradle of the Revolution." rested somewhat later and since he firmly stood his I repeat, this was March 1918-only four months ground he was shot in prison and hi s name is perhaps after the October Revolution-and all the representa­ unknown to most people here today. But I remind tives of the Petrograd factories were cursing the Com­ you: before the Revolution the head of the Com­ munists, who had deceived them in all of their prom­ munist Party of Russia was Shliapnikov-not Lenin. ises. What is more, not only had they abandoned Since that time, the working class has never been able to stand up for its rights, and in distinction from all the western countries our working class only re­ THIS ARTICLE is thr appror·rd lran.<ialion of Alri<Jaudr 1. So l­ zhwitsyn.'s sperch at a dinner given in his honor by the AFL-CIO ceives what they hand out to it. It only gets handouts. in Washington., D.C., June 30, 1975. It cannot defend its simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike for pay or for better living conditions the Party City Committee, carrying portraits of Lenin, is viewed as counter-revolutionary. Thanks to the to request a change in economic conditions. They closed nature of the Soviet system, you have probadly fired at them with machine guns and dispersed the never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in Ivanovo, crowds with tanks. No family dared even to collect or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and Alexan­ its wounded and dead, but all were taken away in drovo, or of the major workers' uprising in Novo­ secret by the authorities. cherkassk in 1962-this in the time of Khrushchev, Precisely to those present here I don't have to ex­ after the thaw. plain that in our country, since the Revolution, there's This story will shortly be published in detail in your never been such a thing as a free trade union. country in Gulag Archipelago, volume 3. It is a story The leaders of the British trade unions are free to of how workers went in a peaceful demonstration to play the unworthy game of visiting Russia's so-called 'We Need Echoes of His Voice' When we think of the historic struggles and Jawed thoughts from hand-to-hand in the shadows of conflicts of this century, we naturally think of famous tyranny. leaders: men who governed nations, commanded arm­ But if they remain invisible to us, we can hear them ies and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, now, for there has come forth from under the rubble or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated of oppression a voice that demands to be heard, a liberty. voice that will not be denied. Yet, today, in this grave hour in human history, We heed this voice not because it speaks for the when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls are more powerful, more brutal and more lethal than truth and courage into the teeth of total power when ever before, the single figure who has raised highest it would be so much easier and more comfortable to the flame of liberty heads no state, commands no submit and to embrace the lies by which that power army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see. lives. But there is a movement-a hidden movement of What is the strength of this voice? How has it human beings who have no offices and have no head­ broken through to us when others have been stilled? quarters, who are not represented in the great halls Its strength is art. where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is not a crusader. He is not more for the right to speak, to think and to be them­ a politician. He is not a general. He is an artist. selves than any of us here are likely to risk in our Solzhenitsyn's art illuminates the truth. It is, in a entire lifetime. sense, subversive: Subversive of hypocrisy, subversive Where are the members of this invisible movement? of delusion, subversive of the Big Lie. As we prepare tonight to honor the presence of one of No man in modern times and very few in all of them among us, let us give some thought to the rest: history have demonstrated as drastically as Aleksandr to the millions who are trapped in Soviet slave labor Solzhenitsyn the power of the pen coupled with cour­ camps; to the countless thousands drugged and strait­ age to free men's minds. jacketed in so-called "insane asylums;" to the multi­ tudes of voiceless workers who slave in the factories We need that power today desperately. We need it of the commissars; to all those who strain for bits and to teach the new and the forgetful generations in our pieces of truth through the jammed frequencies of midst what it means not to be free. Freedom is not an forbidden broadcasts, and who record and pass out- abstraction; neither is the absence of freedom. Sol­ zhenitsyn has helped us to see that, thanks to his art and his courage.
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