ABSTRACT
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great witness to Russian agonies and the thunderer against Western decadence, is a man of polarization. For Solzhenitsyn, the rise of Bolshevism was from the very outset an ''Invasion''. For Solzhenitsyn, there is only one way of reading history; and he goes to great and angry lengths to polemicize against the American historian Richard Pipes for having discerned traditional Russian traits within the Soviet system. One can hardly avoid thinking of de Custine when Solzhenitsyn, in his latest article in Foreign Affairs, posits an absolute opposition between all that is quintessentially Russian and the whole spirit and structure of the Soviet Union, indeed writing that the present holders of power over an honest, noble, deeply Christian and kindly native population are really a kind of foreign Occupation power. A century ago the Slavophiles despised everything that came from the West as unholy imports, as corrupting elements of the authentic Russian spirit.
