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

everyone wanted Russia's defeat because it was a
conservative country. I want to remind you that in
1914 reproaches were directed at France and
England for having entered into an alliance with
such a conservative country as Russia.

The scope and the direction of my speech
today do not permit me to say more about
prerevolutionary Russia. I will just say that
information about pre-revolutionary Russia was
obtained by the West from persons who were either
not sufficiently competent or not sufficiently
conscientious. I will just cite for the sake of
comparison a number of figures which you can read
for yourself in Gulag Archipelago, volume 1, which
has been published in the United States, and
perhaps many of you may have read it. These are
the figures:
According to calculations by specialists,
based on the most precise objective statistics, in
prerevolutionary Russia, during the 80 years
before the revolution - years of the revolutionary
movement when there were attempts on the Tsar's
life, assassination of a Tsar, revolution - during
these years about 17 persons a year were executed.
The famous Spanish Inquisition, during the decades
when it was at the height of its persecution,
destroyed perhaps 10 persons a month. In the
Archipelago - I cite a book which was published by
the Cheka in 1920, proudly reporting on its
revolutionary work in 1918 and 1919 and
apologizing that its data were not quite complete
- in 1918 and 1919 the Cheka executed, without
trial, more than a thousand persons a month! This
was written by the Cheka itself, before it
understood how this would look to history.
At the height of Stalin's terror in 1937-38,
if we divide the number of persons executed by the
number of months, we get more than 40,000 persons
shot per month! Here are the figures: 17 a year,
10 a month, more than 1,000 a month, more than
40,000 a month! Thus, that which had made it
difficult for the democratic West to form an
alliance with pre-revolutionary Russia had, by
1941, grown to such an extent and still did not
prevent the entire united democracy of the world -
England, France, the United States, Canada,
Australia and small countries - from entering into
a military alliance with the Soviet Union. How is
this to be explained? How can we understand it?