NOMINEE: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
NOMINATED BY: Tom Wolfe, author
No individual in all of history,
completely on his own, using only the power of one, has changed
the lives of more people than Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. Lenin set the stage by creating the first
totalitarian socialist state system of concentration camps,
which exterminated 60 million Soviet citizens in 50 years.
Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in prison camps and three
years of internal exile and, in secret, wrote The Gulag
Archipelago, revealing for the first time the existence of this
chain ("archipelago") of death mills. The moment the manuscript
of the book's first volume was smuggled out of Russia and
published in France in 1973, it was as if a stake had been
driven through the heart of Marxism. It was only a matter of
time before the body and the tentacles rotted away, a process
that became obvious on Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall
came down. Only China and a few morbid extremities--Tibet,
Mongolia, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba--still hold on.
--Tom Wolfe, author
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