National Review Cover Story on Harvard Address

Today marks exactly 40 years to the day that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered his famous Harvard address.  In Chapter 4 of his memoirs of the West, Between Two Millstones—forthcoming in English this October—Solzhenitsyn reflects on the controversy spawned by his speech.  Those reflections are excerpted in the new issue of National Review.

“Before my Harvard speech, I naïvely believed that I had found myself in a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that society. It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out “Live not by lies!” in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out “Live not by lies!” in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.”