On Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P.
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008Nobel Prize winning writer and former Soviet disident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died the other day at the venerable age of 89. To put Solzhenitsyn in perspective, over the course of his life he had survived Stalin’s Great Terror, combat in WWII, torture at the hands of the NKVD, slave labor, cancer, harrassment by the KGB and enforced exile to return in bittersweet triumph to his beloved Russia after the Soviet collapse. His last years were spent in ill-health, moving closer to Russian nationalist circles and celebrating Russia as an Orthodox civilization spiritually apart from the liberal West.
An uncompromising and fearless moral voice against Soviet tyranny, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, shook the Soviet Union’s ruling nomenklatura to the core. Along with the liberal physicist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn was the dissident that Soviet leaders most feared given his ability not only to condemn the system’s crimes but to articulate an alternative, Russophilic, 
nationalist political program that millions of Soviet citizens might find attractive. Solzhenitsyn was among the first to postulate an independent Ukraine in his writings and thought that a territorial reduction to the Russian core of the Soviet Union would lead to a healthy regeneration of Russian culture and values that had been so badly damaged by Communism.
Solzhenitsyn was not and never claimed to be an admirer of Western liberal democracy, of whose chances as a historical victor over Communism he deeply and incorrectly doubted. If he had any forerunners in modern Russian history, Solzhenitsyn probably would have sympathized with the Tsarist Prime Minister and conservative reformer Petr Stolypin who had said before his assassination, that ” ….what we want is a Great Russia”. Solzhenitsyn dwelt on Russianess and wrote in the language in a way that eschewed foreign influences and saw other, even deeply entwined, ethnic groups in Russia from Jews to Ukranians and Belarussians as “others”.
A man wrong on many smaller things, on what he had right Solzhenitsyn was a titan.
the world works. Unfortunately, these theories do not align with the planning processes we use in the defense industry. The first step in fixing our planning processes is to examine how science’s understanding of reality is changing.The authors of these works highlight aspects of how the world has changed. This forces us to change how we frame problems, how we organize to deal with them and even how to get the best out of our people. For instance, if one still saw the world as a hierarchy, then one looked for the “leadership” of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003. Yet if one saw the world as a network in which emergent intelligence is a key factor, then one quickly saw the networked insurgent entities as they evolved an emergent strategy in Iraq. Our ability to adjust to the rapidly changing future security environment will, to a large degree, depend on our ability to understand the world as it is rather than as we have been taught to understand it. Reading these 12 books should help.
by Howard Bloom and 
by Edward O. Wilson.
