researching this now post in progress
It's
coming back to me now. When 'Gulag' was released in English in the seventies, I
was in Texas, going to college. The subject matter, of a man living twelve
years in a Russian prison and writing about it, fascinated me; but the people around
me embracing AS and other Russian 'dissidents' were political, right wing extremists.
Hmm maybe a preemptive measure by Russia- oh I don't know what I'm talking about
really.
I
worked on a daily newspaper editorial page staff at the time and these new neo right wing kids would show up, guys in tight ties, girls also buttoned up, handing in their guest viewpoints, with mesmerized zombie eyes
because Russian dissidents were somehow connected to god. Hmm, same zombie like mesmerized
eyes of my Trump supporting neighbors who believe Donald Trump was sent by God. However it originated, the religious right wing passion that immediately attached to the dissident and 'Gulag' book caused me to look the other way.
Now I think it's interesting that author AS was anti totalitarian, anti Stalin, yet today to me the right wing Trumpsters are behaving like Stalinist revolutionaries, they just don’t know it as most trumpsters barely went to school. [read previous and upcoming posts here at City of Angels Blog as this Trump / Stalin irony, to me, needs more investigating. ]
From Boston Review U.S. Christians who pray for Putin March 2022
The first in the U.S. evangelical right to recognize Solzhenitsyn’s political utility was North Carolina’s white supremacist senator Jesse Helms. Helms was at the time involved in supporting Rhodesia’s ruling white minority as a bulwark against communism. Intrigued by a 1973 report from the World Anti-Communist League, Helms pursued the dissident writer, inviting him to North Carolina and proposing that Congress grant him honorary U.S. citizenship. When Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to the United States in 1975, Helms dispatched his own translator as interpreter and escort. The Nobel laureate’s first stop was the senator’s suburban Virginia home, where the two compared notes on their respective Christian faiths and the paramount necessity of religious freedom to all other human freedoms.
The U.S.S.R’s defectors and escapees had helped shape U.S. definitions of freedom since the onset of the Cold War, but Solzhenitsyn was unique. Born the year after the October Revolution into a propertied and educated family whose land was collectivized, Solzhenitsyn later wrote that he began to lose faith in the Soviet system after witnessing Red Army war crimes while serving as an artillery officer during World War II. Letters critical of Stalin landed him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in 1945. In a politically tinged decision, the Nobel committee awarded him its prize for literature in 1970, and Soviet authorities handed the West a cause célèbre when they denounced the writer as a dupe of Western reactionaries. In 1972 he announced his faith in an open letter addressed to the Moscow Patriarch. Two years later, after the first volume of his massive, quasi-historical The Gulag Archipelago (1974) was published in the West, he was deported.
Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to speak to the AFL-CIO during the same trip came from its conservative leader, George Meany. Meany’s enthusiasm for the dissident writer derived from the labor leader’s Catholic sexual conservatism, his support for the Vietnam War, and his decades dedicated to purging left tendencies in the U.S. labor movement.
Solzhenitsyn’s visit was a success, and his message was passed among evangelical champions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Evangelical periodicals lauded his denunciations of U.S. moral degeneracy alongside Soviet criminality. He was soon swept up into the pantheon of Christian intellectuals claimed by evangelical activists dedicated to the suffering church in Russia.
--ke
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