Acton Institute Powerblog

Promoting free societies characterized by liberty & religious principles

Solzhenitsyn: Prophet to America

Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, eds. University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. 392 pages. English literature scholar Ed Ericson told a story about teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to American undergrads, who knew plenty about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other dehumanized minorities but next to nothing about the genocidal history of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes. Continue Reading...

The legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; The human cost of unemployment, Part I

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, John Couretas, Acton’s director of communications, talks with Daniel J. Mahoney, professor of political science at Assumption College, about the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in light of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir recently released in English, “Between Two Millstones Book I: Sketches of Exile,” the first of two books in which Solzhenitsyn recounts his exile in the West. Continue Reading...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dragon slayer

At City Journal, Solzhenitsyn scholar Daniel J. Mahoney offers “A Centennial Tribute” marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian author’s birth. Mahoney, who holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, describes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as “the century’s greatest critic of the totalitarian immolation of liberty and human dignity.” Continue Reading...

5 Facts about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The celebrated novelist and dissident is considered by many to be a key figure in the demise of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Continue Reading...

An Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn centenary

On this day in 1918, Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, to Taisia and Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, parents of peasant stock who had received a university education. Continue Reading...