Written in Holznacht (Basel highlands). At the end of September 1975, representatives of Eastern-European émigré communities gathered in Strasbourg for a “Conference of Enslaved Peoples of Europe”, timing it to a session of the European Parliament in order to attract more attention to the problems faced by their peoples. It was at their request that this appeal was written. It was quoted in UPI news reports of 5 October 1975 from Strasbourg. The original Russian text was first published in Vestnik RKhD, no. 116 (1975): 252. The below 2023 English translation by Ignat Solzhenitsyn is the first complete rendering of this text into English.

To the Conference of Peoples Enslaved by Communism · Strasbourg, 27 September 1975

I send my friendly encouragement of your attempt to communicate a united voice of Eastern Europe in the parliamentary center of its Western counterpart, holding on, for now, to its flimsy freedom. The unity of the peoples of Eastern Europe may well be the last hope of this continent. Not yet collapsed, the Western world takes no notice, in its hardened haughtiness, as it descends and descends the rungs of genuine power and intellectual influence, and devolves into a provincial corner of the planet. By now the voices of East Asia are joining those of Eastern Europe—but the world that has not tasted the depths of suffering remains deaf, though only until the blows of destruction strike it down outright.

You and I know that Communism is not someone’s national invention but an organic gangrene that is overwhelming all humankind. But still today, through a heedless and ignorant substitution of the word “Russian” for the word “Soviet”, the crimes and impending plots of world Communism are attributed to the people that has suffered from it earlier and longer than anyone else, and that has lost, together with the other peoples of the USSR, its close brothers in woe, sixty-six million people to Communist violence. (Not counting another forty-four million from a careless waging of war, according to Professor Kurganov.) Taught by our torments, let us not allow our separate national grievances to exceed our awareness of unity! Having suffered our fill of savage violence, let none of us ever apply it to our neighbors; let us seek a way of interaction higher than what is practiced in our modern world: not of mutual tolerance, but—of mutual magnanimity.

I wish you success in this gathering of oppressed nations, and that you might expand the number of those you represent in future. Even just the émigrés from enslaved countries number in the millions. By uniting with each other in utter trust, by not allowing ourselves to be lulled to indifference by the sluggish safety of emigration, by never forgetting our brothers back home—we can form a voice and a force influencing the course of world events.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Translated from the Russian by Ignat Solzhenitsyn, © 2023 Ignat Solzhenitsyn