Trepanier Interviews Mahoney about BTM-2
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Over at VoegelinView, Lee Trepanier Interviews Daniel Mahoney about BTM-2, recently out from Notre Dame Press.
“Over time, Solzhenitsyn painfully discovered that the majority of America’s elite was more anti-Russian than anti-Soviet, and sometimes virulently so. He felt the need to defend the honor of historic Russia, to remain what he had always been, a passionate but moderate and self-critical patriot, even as he continued to fight an inhuman Communist ideology that threatened the whole of humankind. Despite his almost heroic efforts in this regard, including a masterful essay in Foreign Affairs in 1980 entitled “How Misconceptions About Russia Threaten America,” he increasingly acknowledged the failure of his effort to get the West to see that the embattled and oppressed Russia was an indispensable ally in the common struggle against totalitarianism. He lamented the fact that American military strategists targeted Russian cities more than military and political installations.
In Russia today, many patriots, including not a few in Putin’s broad coalition, don’t want anything bad said about the Soviet Union. They conflate it with the very Russia it mutilated for seventy years. Not surprisingly, the Communists and super-patriots in contemporary Russia continue to despise Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, under Putin, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona’s Home, and the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago continue to be taught in Russian high schools. Let it continue to be so.”