"Aleksandr I.Solzhenitsyn. Words of Warning to the Western World " - читать интересную книгу автора

working class only receives what they hand out to
it. It only gets handouts. It cannot defend its
simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike
for pay or for better living conditions is viewed
as counter-revolutionary. Thanks to the closed
nature of the Soviet system, you have probably
never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in
Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and
Alexandrovo, or of the major workers' uprising in
Novocherkassk in 1962 - this in the time of
Khrushchev, after the thaw.
This story will shortly be published in
detail in your country in Gulag Archipelago,
volume 3. It is a story of how workers went in a
peaceful demonstration to the Party City Committee,
carrying portraits of Lenin, to request a change
in economic conditions. They fired at them with
machine guns and dispersed the crowds with tanks.
No family dared even to collect its wounded and
dead, but all were taken away in secret by the
authorities.
Precisely to those present here I don't have
to explain that in our country, since the
Revolution, there's never been such a thing as a
free trade union.
The leaders of the British trade unions are
free to play the unworthy game of visiting
Russia's so-called trade unions and receiving
visits in return. But the AFL-CIO has never given
in to these illusions.
The American workers' movement has never
allowed itself to be blinded and to mistake
slavery for freedom. And I, today, on behalf of
all of our oppressed people, thank you for this!
When liberal thinkers and wise men of the
West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word
"liberty," were swearing that in the Soviet Union
there were no concentration camps at all, the
American Federation of Labor, published in 1947, a
map of our concentration camps, and on behalf of
all of the prisoners of those times, I want to
thank the American workers' movement for this.
But just as we feel ourselves your allies
here, there also exists another alliance - at
first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but
if you think about it, in fact, one which is
well-grounded and easy to understand this is the
alliance between our Communist leaders and your
capitalists.
This alliance is not new. The very famous