Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Criticism Of The Soviet Union

981 Words2 Pages

Jada Cheng
Mrs. Miller
English II
April 3, 2017
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
After World War two the world thought that human enslavement was over, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was just the beginning for the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks were controlling its people by punishing them with hard grueling labor. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one of many that were placed into the labors. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in a small town called Kislovodsk in Russia. He was a writer, educator, and a famous critic to the USSR (Soviet Union). He spent eleven years in the Gulag labor camp system and exile. During those years, he wrote about his experiences and thoughts on his communist country. With his writings, it exposed the horrors that majority of the citizens suffered when forced into the many labor camps that gave Russia the industrial power. Also, he spoke publicly and …show more content…

It started with his most famous book, The Gulag Archipelago which,“...brought attention to the entire Soviet forced labor penal system.” (gulaghistory.org) The book gave a glimpse of what the Soviet government hid from the world. Since the book’s publication, many of the world’s leaders and advocates pressured the Soviet Union to change their ways. Another way that he exploited the government was that he spoke about how the government was controlling and restrictive. In one of his lectures, he said, “...living in a strained world where it is not allowed to blend spiritually; the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to jump over from one half to the other.” (Solzhenitsyn) In this quote, he talks about how ideas and thoughts are not freely shared. This exploitation gave the world a better understanding on the need to change the Soviet Union. The attention that Solzhenitsyn brought along with him led to a start of change in the Soviet Union, which eventually end the brutal treatments of the Russian

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