Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

Not since Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the plan that was to raise Europe from the ashes has a commencement speaker stirred as much attention as has the exiled Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both speeches were delivered in Harvard Yard, something of a symbol of the Western spirit of inquiry and humanism. The two speeches were separated by 31 years—but also by an immeasurable philosophical abyss. Marshall in 1947 was calling on the U.S., the world's supreme democracy, to turn its resources and energies to the rescue of an exhausted, endangered...