Warning to the West re-issued today

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Warning to the West, a collection of famous speeches given by Solzhenitsyn in the USA and UK in 1975 and 1976, has just been re-issued by our friends at Vintage/Penguin, with a new introduction by the author’s middle son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. UK/Commonwealth readers can buy paperback or e-book from Penguin or wherever books are sold. For USA readers, paperback is most easily obtained from Amazon.

While my father’s direst predictions failed to come to pass, is it not in part because the very urgency of his clarion call for the West to stand and fight (or at least not to aid Communist oppression – ‘when they bury us in the ground alive, please do not send them shovels’, he wryly remarks) laid the groundwork for the coming rise of leaders such as John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, whose moral clarity about Communist savagery tipped the scales at last toward the cause of freedom? Surely, solzhenitsyn’s exhortation for a moral component in politics, for a repudiation of all violence (not only of war), and for a balance of the spiritual and material, gives us much yet to ponder – even in a world dramatically transformed by the courage he enjoined and exemplified.
— Ignat Solzhenitsyn