I agree with you. It’s annoying when anyone does that. I have friends who have never been more than tourists in Europe expound on the virtues of this socialist European program or that. Because, obviously, America just sucks. One such self-defined “Pinko-commie” friend has now been forced to actually live in Italy for over a year. She’s counting the hours until she gets out of “this God forsaken mess” (and she has thousands to go). If only more of these people were forced to walk the walk.

I have mixed feelings about Solzhenitsyn. For exposing the horror of the Soviet Union to its apologists in the West, he will always be a hero. But, he did not oppose the Soviet Union for its tyranny. He was perfectly fine with tyranny – as long as it was the “right kind” of tyranny. He loved Putin. Russians, like middle-easterners have long had a strongman complex. Solzhenitsyn takes a much more rosy view of Czarist Russia than the documented reality. There is also a disturbingly strong vein of racism and nationalism in Russian culture and Solzhenitsyn did not escape it. Like Russia at the turn of the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn was untouched by the Age of Enlightenment. IMO.

However, being told by Russians that they understand every country and every system better just because of their experience in the Soviet Union is equally annoying. The problem with Solzhenitsyn was that he, too, spoke much and at great length on the horrors of the Western system and the faults of liberalism and individual freedom without really bothering to understand what any of it meant.

Btw, not to blow my own trumpet – heh – but I did a piece on him as well: http://umbrellog3.blogspot.com/2008/08/some-people-change-world-sort-of.html
All more or less rational comments apreciated.

I was, in fact, born in Moscow and I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you how irritated my family was when we arrived in the U.S. from Soviet Russia to be lectured by leftist Americans on the glory of life in the Soviet Union. We were told that communism was great and that we just “didn’t get it”. None of these bleeding hearts of delicate sensibility so much as set foot in a communist country before telling me.

I think the break in communication may be that Helen thinks the Russians were lecturing the Americans on American culture and not calling them naive because they were extolling the “virtues” of communism (by whatever name it’s going lately – they’ve been rebranding it for years).

I have a co-worker that reminds me of our Fred here. He’s a Syrian expat, lives with his Ukrainian girlfriend in Brooklyn. Once I chanced on him at the watercooler (no, really) preaching to everyone willing to listen the glories of Soviet life. “The State provided every working guy with a car. Poverty was eliminated. Doctors were considered as working class as machine operator, and the cost of healthcare was so low, everyone can afford it. If you were an honest working man, you were able to take your family on any expensive vacation abroad – because the State valued your work!”
When I asked him did he just recited his opium dream to us (and mentioned that I’ve lived in the Socialist Paradise for 30 years), he said he knows better anyway, coz he read it in “authoritative sources”.

Well, “naive” is a mild word to describe him, isn’t it?

D’oh.

Should be:

If you are very bookish, this kind of thing is exciting. I have read a ton of his stuff and always enjoyed it, though much of it is pompous windbaggery, it is usually interesting.

And, on the main topic, Solzhenitsyn was a hero. If he can be criticized, that means he was human, big deal. He stood up to tyrants, he told the truth when it was life-threatening to tell the truth, he made a record of crimes that many people did not want to admit had happened. God rest his soul.

Though my story is of course merely anecdotal, I have been in the company of many Ukranians socially and noticed this, my stereotype, perhaps. But the writer A.S. has this trait, from what I have seen of his pronouncements while living in the U.S.

George Steiner, incomparable windbag ,taken down by Chicago Boy Joseph Epstein.If the link doesn’t work, Google it.

http://www.amazon.com/Two-Hundred-Years-Together-Part/dp/5969703729/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217847921&sr=1-2