Buy new:

$11.59

List Price: $16.00 Details

Save: $4.41 (28%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime & FREE Returns

FREE delivery: Friday, Aug 20 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Details

Fastest delivery: Thursday, Aug 19 Details

In Stock.

$$11.59 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from	Amazon.com
Sold by	Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers on Amazon

$15.18
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: TheWorldShop - Ships from Overseas

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 3 images

Follow the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Warning to the West Paperback – September 1, 1986

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Author)

220 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$8.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$273.03

—

$195.95

Paperback

"Please retry"

$11.59

$11.21

$12.17

Kindle
$0.00 Read with Kindle Unlimited to also enjoy access to over 1 million more titles $8.99 to buy
Hardcover
$273.03

4 Used from $195.95 2 Collectible from $280.25
Paperback
$11.59

12 Used from $12.17 15 New from $11.21

Enhance your purchase

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974: on June 30 and July 9 to trade-union leaders of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., and in New York City, and on July 15 to the United States Congress; and also the texts of his BBC interview and radio speech, which sparked widespread public controversy when they were aired in London in March 1976.

Solzhenitsyn's outspoken criticism of the West's growing weakness and complacency and his belief that Russia's growing strength will enable her to establish supremacy over the West without risk of a nucelar holocaust are expressed with the moral authority of a great novelist and historian.

"Solzhenitsyn mounts a public indictment of the supine inattention of the West that rings like the blows of the hammer with which Luther nailed his manifesto to the doors at Wittenberg."--Times Literary Supplement

Print length

160 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 1, 1986
Dimensions

4.95 x 0.45 x 8.03 inches
ISBN-10

0374513341
ISBN-13

978-0374513344
See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
1,535
Paperback
in Russian Literature
48 offers from $12.53
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
3,077
Paperback
21 offers from $18.25
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
2,139
Paperback
57 offers from $6.82
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
528
Paperback
58 offers from $12.04
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
769
Paperback
34 offers from $11.28
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
313
Paperback
40 offers from $8.61

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
313
Paperback
40 offers from $8.61
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
3,077
Paperback
21 offers from $18.25
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
2,139
Paperback
57 offers from $6.82
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
528
Paperback
58 offers from $12.04
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
1,535
Paperback
in Russian Literature
48 offers from $12.53
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
287
Paperback
48 offers from $10.25

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In February 1945, while he was captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent internal exile, which was cut short by Khrushchev's reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to Central Russia in 1956. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962―which remained his only full-length work to have appeared in his homeland until 1990―Solzhenitsyn was by 1969 expelled from the Writers' Union. The publication in the West of his other novels and, in particular, of The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation from the authorities. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. Solzhenitsyn and his wife and children moved to the United States in 1976. In September 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him; Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill and Wang; First edition (September 1, 1986)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374513341
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374513344
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.95 x 0.45 x 8.03 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #122,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #99 in Fascism (Books)
- #229 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #246 in Russian History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
220 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		85%
4 star		11%
3 star		2%
2 star		1%
1 star		1%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

‘It’s amazing. The whole world can read, yet somehow no one wants to understand’

Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2020

Verified Purchase

“In 1914, at the beginning of our ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the size and range of which of which no one at that time could grasp. For four years Europe destroyed herself as never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up at the very edge of Europe, a yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.’’

(Solzhenitsyn never forgets the importance of 1914. Interestingly, the Bible students (Jehovah’s Witnesses) had been warning about 1914 for decades!)

“We contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today.’’

(Seeing his past, in Soviet Russia, enables his vision of our present!)

“And what we see is always the same as it was then:

adults differing to the opinion of their children;
the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas;
professors scared of being unfashionable;
journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily;
universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists;
people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them;
the majority passively obsessed with a feeling of doom;
feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have been paralyzed;
spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval.’’

Man, what a warning! This in 1976. Absolutely, astoundingly, astonishingly - prescient!

What else did he say?

“It is astonishing that Communism has been writing about itself in the most open way, in black and white, for 125 years. The ‘Communist Manifesto’, for instance, which everyone knows by name, and which almost no one ever takes time to read, contains even more terrible things than what has actually been done. It is perfectly amazing. The whole world can read, yet somehow no one wants to understand.’’

‘None want to comprehend’. So true. Sad.

Continues . . .

“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology is reduced to crude economic processes. This whole created being — man — is reduced to matter.’’

Solzhenitsyn nails it. The real issue for human politics, human psychology, human society in only this — What is a human? Created in ‘image of God’ or just bag of random chemicals? Contains divine purpose or just mindless reactions?

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be a class matter. Depending upon circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, could be good or bad. It all depends on class ideology.’’

This sounds so . . . so . . . current.

“In addition to the grave political situation today, we are are also witnessing the emergence of a crisis of unknown nature, one completely new, and entirely non-political. We are approaching a major turning point in world history. I could only compare it with the turning from the Middle Ages to the modern era, a shift in our civilization. It is a juncture at which settled concepts suddenly become hazy, at which our familiar and commonly used words lose their meaning.’’

I’d read this years ago. Didn’t really see/feel the impact. I do now.

“These two crises, the political crises and the oncoming spiritual crises, are occurring at the same time. It is our generation that will have to confront them.’’

Recalls Jesus’ warning: “Truly I say to you that this generation will by no means pass away until all these things happen.’’

Many now puzzled, confused, troubled by upheaval, conflict and dissolution they see. What’s going on? How did this happen?

Solzhenitsyn answers . . .

“What happens to a society in which both these losses — the loss of courage and the loss of reason — intersect? This is the picture I found the West presents today.’’

What would he say now?

“Of course there is a perfectly simple explanation for this process. It is not the superficial one, that man is irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but a purely human one. Once it was proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead man was the crowning glory of the universe, and man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the supreme imperatives of the universe.’’

This is Rousseau’s influence in a nutshell.

“Consequently, the only good in the world — the only thing needed to be done — was that which satisfies our feelings.’’

Who can doubt his insight?

He also presents a historical argument . . .

“There is another myth, namely that socialism represents a sort of ultra-modern structure, an alter to dying capitalism. And yet it existed ages and ages before capitalism. . . . Socialist systems, made up the greatest portion of history of mankind in the ancient East, in China, and were repeated in the bloody experiments of the reformation. . . . Socialist doctrines came as a reaction — Plato’s reaction against Athenian democracy, Gnostics reaction against Christianity — against the dynamic world of individualism and as a return to the impersonal, stagnate system of antiquity.’’

Fascinating!

Last page . . .

“We have become hopelessly enmeshed in our slavish worship of all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable, all that is material — we worship things, we worship products.’’

Who can deny it?

“Will we ever succeed in shaking off this burden, in giving free rein to the spirit that was breathed into us ant birth, that spirit which distinguishes us from the animal world?’’

This is a short work,146 small pages. Consists of three speeches in America during 1975 and two in England in 1976. Nevertheless, as these slices show - powerful, striking, cutting.

But, the intervening decades have confirmed his warning. Especially the last decade has seen a sad completion of the picture he drew. Now in vivid color and tremendous detail. Not a pretty picture.

What’s to come?

Seems clear why he’s ignored, rejected. He focused on the danger of the material, physical when divorced from the religious, spiritual.

But, what other answer is there?

No photographs

No bibliography

No index

29 people found this helpful

Helpful

Everyman

The clock of history

Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2015

Verified Purchase

For most of my sixty years I have been a voracious reader, and this is quite likely the most profound, most prescient book I have ever read. As Mr. Solzhenitsyn so eloquently puts it, "...several hours have struck simultaneously on the clock of history." I believe this should be a "must read" for anyone who thinks they know what freedom is, or would like to learn of life without it.

86 people found this helpful

Helpful

jack n.

We were warned, but we didn't listen.

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

Sasha tried to tell us, but we were too smart for him. And now? The commies are laughing at us from their graves.

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

Silverstein

A warning the West should still heed

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book of Solzhenitsyn's speeches is a valuable critique of communism, even if it obscures or avoids some aspects of its fundamental nature that would explain why communism "became" genocidal instead of "liberating." Solzhenitsyn, speaking as a betrayed socialist who spent over a decade in a gulag (bolo prison camp where gentiles, dissidents, and socialists were sent to be worked to death), speaks at length of the dangers of communism as a movement that initially presented itself as a quest for social justice but quickly revealed itself to be the most bloodthirsty totalitarian system in history. The fact that Solzhenitsyn omits the defining aspect of communism is both a testament to the remaining power of the bloodthirsty radicals today and the reason that most gentiles who study Marxism and communism fail to understand the difference between communism and other forms of socialism and the attendant dangers of sacrificing individual rights for what might appear to be the greater good.

Warning to the West is important because because it warns of the danger of "progressive" elites that back and organize causes that appeal to workers or the downtrodden for their own murderous agendas -- agendas that might never become clear, even as the blood flows once they achieve state power. This is especially important as an appeal to the socialism-inspired American labor movement (first speech), which itself has dallied with and is prone to Marxist radicalism. The message is clear: socialism and the labor revolution might have noble ideals, but can be corrupted and turned into the exact opposite of what one thought he was revolting for. Solzhenitsyn's case to Labor is all the more compelling because he still believes in socialism as social justice, and views the AFL-CIO as a legitimate American organization dedicated to workers' rights that could be compromised by treacherous elites seeking global domination through labor rebellions.

Solzhenitsyn treats at length the ruthless suppression of labor and the genocide of the Russian people by those who organized the revolution and then colonized Stalin's administration, running the firing squads, death camps, rape/ethnic cleansing campaigns, torture and other unspeakable horrors. He describes the hypocrisy of a labor revolution that disbanded the soviets and executed or jailed labor leaders. He speaks of the betrayal of Russians by the West and the de-ethnicized communism of the 1970s -- the prison empire that pretends to make peace with the US while secretly plotting global domination.

What Solzhenitsyn fails to treat, however, is the fundamental nature of the Russian holocaust that might explain what actually happened and why the children and grandchildren of the bolos are still so dangerous today. The Bolsheviks' pretense of fomenting a labor revolution, then simultaneously ruthlessly suppressing labor while exterminating thousands of gentiles per month (directly under Lenin, and then as Stalin's willing executioners) is left as a mystery for the reader. Why would a wealthy European ethnic elite that hated Russians fund and organize revolutions in Russia, China and other states, purportedly on behalf of workers? Why choose those states when most Marxist leaders believed that Marxist socialism could only be achieved in enlightened and sophisticated states like Germany? Why fill the public's head with slogans about social justice, economic inequality, and the like, and then turn around and systematically butcher 50 million of them in a manner that terrified Hitler enough to become what he did? How would this supremacist European ethnic elite benefit from establishing totalitarian prisons across the globe that were beholden to it? Did it plan to turn the world into a global slave camp that served its lust for total power? These questions and others go completely unanswered.

Solzhenitsyn instead reserves himself to discussing communism like a virus staged to spread globally -- something born of good intentions that became the fulfillment of man's darkest desires once catalyzed through the labor struggle and plotting to infect the West, spreading like wildfire through labor discontentment. Labor should be careful, he warns, because those that pretend to help the labor struggle here might simply be using and corrupting it, planning to betray the worker and conscript him in (what Chomsky would call) a labor army.

However, a clue to Solzhenitsyn's reluctance to address the fundamental essence of communism can be found in another of his works --which for some reason has yet to be fully published in English -- wherein he states that the fact that the Russian holocaust is not recognized for what it was serves as proof that its perpetrators are controlling the media. Because it was not safe to publicly state that the perpetrators were already in the US and were well on their way to establishing global economic dominance by the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn must speak in guarded terms about what was safe to say -- that communism, not the elite who started it -- was a global threat to labor and humanity. Thus, the global enemy is the Trojan Horse of Marxism, not the global crony-capitalist elite that owns every printing press churning out copies of The Communist Manifesto, every newspaper reporting on "income inequality" and every television network subverting western culture.

Warning to the West is the most that Solzhenitsyn could say then -- or sadly, even now were he still alive -- and still reasonably expect for his words to be printed. Ironically, since 1976, when the last of these speeches was given, communism as a global force has not spread as Solzhenitsyn had feared, but has actually virtually disappeared from public consciousness. The word "communism" now seems irrelevant, antiquated. We speak of Marxist radicals in BLM, the ACLU, the American labor movement, and in bloody conflicts across the developing world. The Bolshevik elite in Russia has distilled down to six oligarchic families that control most of Eastern Europe's wealth. The descendants of the Bolsheviks in US and other western states control approximately 90% of the wealth in the West, including the media and every major corporation. The American communist elite now call themselves neocons and agitate not for supremacy over a global prison state, but supremacy over "democratized" consumerist states where the western oligarchs -- Soros, Bloomberg, Adelson, et al. -- own everything and work to eliminate borders, culture, Christianity, and languages. They still fund subversion and Marxist insurrection, but neoliberalism, not communism, conquered the world.

219 people found this helpful

Helpful

B.K. Wunder

Absolutely brilliant - DO NOT MISS THIS!!!

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2017

Verified Purchase

Absolutely brilliant. Should be required reading in every middle school, high school and university.

37 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

kj

A must read it's a shame Amazon pulled the plug ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2018

Verified Purchase

A must read it's a shame Amazon pulled the plug on 200 years together seems they want to control what us adults can and cannot read - found it elsewhere

27 people found this helpful

Lee

Everyone in the West urgently needs to read this book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 15, 2020

Verified Purchase

It is an eye opening account of the dangers of communism from the horses mouth, someone sentenced to hard labour in the gulags of communist Russia for criticising communism. The youth of the West in particular need to read this book so that we don't end up repeating very negative murderous and cruel history.

5 people found this helpful

Prof. L. P. Wessell

A challenge!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 20, 2014

Verified Purchase

The text is not long, yet how daring. Solzhenitsyn managed to alienate the American left, viz.,liberals, whose failure of insight into the nature of Communism deserved a "warning". I will not repeat the content, only suggest that readers immerse themselves a bit in the great man. One will begin to comprehend another mind-set differing from that of the "liberal" West. In 2007 Solzhenitsyn approved of Putin as leading Russia in the right direction, having denied such approval to Yeltsin. Why? Solzhenitsyn preferred a Russian culture founded in Orthodoxy, to the secularism of the West. Indeed, to understand Solzhenitsyn sheds some light on Russia of today.

29 people found this helpful

Chris X

He warned us..

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2019

Verified Purchase

Read this and then evaluate western society and the current state of western civilisation, it will all make sense.

7 people found this helpful

Skilak

A must

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 7, 2021

Verified Purchase

Well, something quite short but worth reading as you will find that there is still something you can learn about the west, and west is rather not proud of it.

See all reviews

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Buy new: $11.59

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

Warning to the West Paperback – September 1, 1986

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Buy new:

$11.59