Shredding Freedom

“Grinding Svoboda” (A Word When Receiving the Freedom Foundation Prize ) was a public speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn , delivered at the Freedom Foundation Prize at the Hoover Institution on June 1, 1976. First published in English by the Hoover Institution in the book Solzhenitsyn speaks at the Hoover Institution ... (May-June 1976), in Russian in the journal Vestnik RHD (No. 118, 1976) ^[1] .

This speech contains Solzhenitsyn’s compressed thoughts expressed earlier in several journalistic works, in particular, in articles published in From From the Boulders (1974), as well as in essays and speeches made after the expulsion from the USSR. The main theme of the speech is a criticism of the degeneration (“shredding”, according to the author) of the modern Western democratic society, the negative aspects of “freedom”:

In such a situation as today, it is easiest to succumb to the declamation about the dark abysses of totalitarianism and the praise of the bright strongholds of western freedom. It is much more difficult, but more fruitful, to look critically at ourselves. If the area of ​​free social systems on Earth is narrowing and huge continents, which recently seemed to have received freedom, are drowning in the area of ​​tyranny, then not only totalitarianism is to blame, for which free systems are a function of natural growth, but, obviously, free systems themselves, something lost in their inner strength and stability. <...> I dare to draw your attention to some aspects of freedom, which is not fashionable to talk about, but because of this they do not cease to be, it means to influence. ^[2]