Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.
He had been the President of the Soviet Union which was all of a sudden 15 different nations. He resigned immediately.
Very few countries make such overt recognition of the arts and their cultural heritage a part of their constitutions. Even nations which are fanatic about their cultures such as France do not have such overt constitutional provisions.
Kiev is the largest city and capital of Ukraine.
One of the worst problems facing Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the health care system. There was not yet a private sector to replace the Communist system and the health care system broke down and the lifespan of the average Russian actually went down significantly during that period. As an example, there was no way to purchase and import pharmaceuticals nor distribute the ones that were available.
What is particularly interesting about this quotation is that at the time, this was a common concern by political and social thinkers of the West. Here however, we learn that there was apparently the same concern and problem ongoing in the Muslim Middle East.
This and other statements he made about the breakup of the Russian empire, together with his actons reagading foreign affairs, led many Western observers to think that Putin was trying to build up Russia to be amajor World Power as it was relatively recently. Also see Quotation 644183 under Related Quotes foir a more explicit statement,
This was more than a decade after the fal of the Soviet Union.
Historically Ukraine has been not only a part of Russia but a key part. The first Russian leader who unified the Russian nation and fought off the Mongols and Roman Catholic Western invaders came from the Ukraine. The origin of the Russian Orthodox Church was in the Ukraine. And the people of the Ukraine played a central and pivotal role in the Russian Revolution. And in World War II, despite a minoirty of Ukrainian nationalists who fought with the Nazis, the Ukraine bore much of the brunt of the German onslaught and the 22 million Russians who were killed, and yet fought so well that the Nazis were defeated. Many of the great Russian Heroes have been from the Ukraine. From the Russian point of view, Ukraine, was noi less a part of Russia than Florida, Iowa or Nebraska were to the United States.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of human rights abuses, the Gulag concentration camp system and political repression in the Soviet Union.
