Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) was a dissident (vocal critic) in the communist Soviet Union. He was arrested sent to prison and labor camps for writing a letter that criticized Joseph Stalin. His additional writing won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union (ordered out of the country) in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994, after communism fell there.

Solzhenitsyn said, "At the height of Stalin's terror in 1937-38 ... more than 40,000 persons were shot per month .... Over there people are groaning and dying and in psychiatric hospitals. Doctors are making their evening rounds, injecting people with drugs which destroy their brain cells. ... You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock'.... Lenin's teachings are that anyone is considered to be a fool who doesn't take what's lying in front of him. If you can take it, take it. If you can attack, attack. But if there's a wall, then go back. And the Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt and laugh at persons who continually give in to them."

Solzhenitsyn warned the United States, "America ... they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country ... I call upon you: ordinary working men of America ... do not let yourselves become weak."