you're watching r.t. the main stories we're covering this human rights activists are accusing washington of double standards and u.s. is trying to reinforce itself as a champion of protecting freedoms other countries while failing millions of americans back. self-proclaimed republic of kosovo are set for its first parliamentary election really three years after splitting from serbia minority serbs among. the population holding altitude and gaining equality.

under the harsh winter ahead for the homeless group of volunteers maybe all that's keeping many in the russian capital another party has been calling to moscow. brings much needed food and medicine to people on the streets. up next lee with legendary russian writer alexander solzhenitsyn tells r.t. how she's keeping his ideas at the forefront of modern thinking. oh yeah no welcome to spotlight. today my guest is not.

in the truth essentially alexander solzhenitsyn was one of the most famous russian writers and communist regime he passed away in two thousand and eight at the age of eighty nine leaving behind a rich heritage novels and historical works after being ousted from the u.s.s.r. by the communist regime the true freedom loving patriot lived and worked abroad until finally returning to russia in one nine hundred ninety four his wife has always been his best friend and now off to the right says that she manages the foundation how is she promoting her husband's ideas today here's the president of the foundation not that it's a. novel but it's on the some of the gulag archipelago tells of the repressive machine russia communist leaders try to prevent the book from being published are

old but in nineteen seventy three the gulag archipelago was printed in paris the following year. to fund to help victims of the soviet regime and their families the u.s.s.r. . eighty years ago the soldiers from foundation moved to russia today they continue helping former political prisoner and developing ideas. the spello missiles units and i thank you so much for being with us today it's an honor. to the works of alexander solzhenitsyn i remember that when he was alive you plan to publish a complete thirty volume collected works by two thousand and ten which is this year actually. and this year is coming to an end was the progress that. well as usual we are late and we will not manage to publish the entire thirty volumes by the end of the year however we've just published another three volumes so you can find

fourteen volumes in bookstores already another two will be ready in a short while with those two the total amount will be sixteen which is after all more than a half there and they are the boy which require a lot of work on them and written comments so i'm hopeful that in three years it will finish in three years so there will still be the same. content of the collected works was prepared together by me and. it's done exactly as he wanted but there are only complete novels there. and it's the most complete edition. the complete works is something a bit different a complete works edition usually contains different versions of novels and unfinished works and there are quite a lot of them but this edition will contain only be items finished while alive you know the words one signed by the author and sent to the publishers right and the rest are just draft letters and the collected edition no there won't. publish them

because he wrote their interests and letters of course you're right he's written hundreds of thousands of various letters they're all interesting like his correspondence with. which is of high literally interest. and then there are individual letters he wrote responding to those people who wrote to him from around the world. some of them a brief correspondence of two or three letters are of immense interest to you. but you know as a rule letters a published sometime later not straight away but after both addressees die. was mentioned that alexander solzhenitsyn lived in exile for quite a while and while away from russia you organized the russian public phone days. political prisoners and their families. at the moment but this question should be addressed directly to me because i was its president since the

first day and i've been working there ever since for key established a foundation during his first days in exile even before his family joined him he donated to the foundation all the money he earned from their gulag archipelago publications in all the world's languages saying that she will never take a dollar or ruble for his book the foundation used to help the people because back then there still were many prisoners as you may remember but now that we don't have the gulag in the sense in which it is this today under lenient and later under stalin the system is no longer there but there are still many people who have been through. labor camps so we help those people now. they're very old many of them could not create a family because they had spent their best years in the labor camps that they are lonely and. they barely need our help they are the most vulnerable category of

people. this is an interesting subject. because how many of those people are. those people i'm sure you know. of course we know them personally dozens hundreds of thousands of them there are thousands of them of course but you see our foundation is private it's a foundation of one person we can't help all of them i do not know the total number we constantly help approximately twenty five hundred people we call pensioners after the name of the book is that we choose those who are in prison for a long time who are in a difficult situation or have no family and there are a lot of such people who make no difference between those who live in russia and abroad. mediately will help all those who were imprisoned by the soviet government will settle so it will help all ex prisoners who are now in ukraine cousin stan and

the baltic states so you help those abroad to yes abroad in the c.i.s. well let's see what people abroad know about alexander solzhenitsyn we have we have a poll that we conducted in the streets of washington given the name i like sound themselves yes. i do know what he wants because he was the president for a while he was a leader who helped open up russia to the west a peace activist. a writer and a. thought leader yes chris i know. he was the advocate the people that we need today people that suffer for our cause and we lost leaders like that we don't have there's also in prison in gulag and so on and suffered enormously being a jew and the rest and whatever else but he's a man that made history in the previous century and we have anyone this one no not

yet does he mean something she means something for you means everything i'm an advocate myself so for me it's who i look up to i do not in fact i'm bipolar just you know. see how differently people saying cool alexander solzhenitsyn was. we're not asking russians who folk know well as. i guess we could have received many similar answers do you know russians know solzhenitsyn and his legacy how important is it to them. think it's an option hopelessly i actually am not the right person to answer this question because i no longer consider myself a young person but i know to works by solzhenitsyn one day in the life of on denise rich and maturing this place they are now part of the school curriculum. children read them in the ninth tenth or eleventh grade it's up to the teacher to decide when the from this year and a bridge version of the gulag archipelago was introduced into the school program to

alexander solzhenitsyn asked me to prepare it a short version has existed for a long time in the us and other countries but the material for bridge meant and the way how it was done are different from what edward erickson did in the u.s. so from now on this book will be studied in comprehensive schools. while in specialist schools it's been studied for a long time already. have a look at a place for sure it's your bridge to the gulag archipelago five. to four times then a little more so this book is a five fold abridged version well four and a half. four hundred pages you see it greatly depends on the page size. and there are certain rules used by the publishers of books for children. margins and so ones that look at the. bridge in the book that it's too long

that it's for children holds no. chapters in the book as the law is the child the law as much yours becomes a man which they tell a historic documental and political story of course in but is. the incumbent in the m.g.b. they kid to be. those chapters you can follow the story of how it was established but they did was the same children and many adults don't need to know that now so such chapters could be significantly a bridged though not emitted entirely but there are many interesting chapter. about escapes for example they are very interesting and intriguing not only the same i had to bridge those two because they take far too many pieces i left in

several stories but in brief in case anyone is interested they can find a full version in any bookstore and the book sells well it is published by several publishers and they've been used agreement every year. when the book was added to the school program but i'm a potent commented on that business there is the quotation of what i mean without knowing what's in this book we can tell a complete idea about our country and we can barely think about the future and the quote. so do you think this book can really help you understand the country better but you so strong the thing is that at present teachers don't have any leverage to make students read books which they need that if they don't want to they won't read anything but they are no longer required to write essays they have the standard college admission test instead now so if a student doesn't read the book it won't help him says president of the sultan it's

an foundation not soldiering it's not like we'll be back shortly after a break so stay with us. thank. you.

just. download the official publication q i phone the i pod touch from the i.q. sample to. life on the. video on demand are teens mind bold colors and r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. on the t.v. dot com. welcome

back to spotlight time al going off and just a reminder that my guest in the studio today is president of the sultan it's a foundation solzhenitsyn. and this isn't a tsunami but we have started talking about the gulag archipelago it's part to do take into consideration that it's been

a long while since the book was written and you can keep a lot of documents and facts which alexander solzhenitsyn could not know of have been rebuilt four of them to this fact to folks who work you know that there is history and there is literature of the same things and of course. of course numerous the openness of the ready call changes which have taken place in russia over the past twenty years and many of ways to work quite unsuccessful so we can say that our reformers themselves produced their most aggressive openness so many of them think that again oleksandr soldier has absolutely wrong figures in his book and that he exaggerated them ten fold this is an outright lie nonsense alexander solzhenitsyn really did not have any official sources behave or inaccessible and continued to be so for many decades after that but when axes was opened the state

archives of the russian federation together was the who for institution of stanford university issued seven volumes of documents given by the m.g.b. and the interior ministry distributors do not contradict was destination's made by . sympathetic but he didn't that so off course i took it into consideration and i wrote about it. that you've asked me if the book can help children. were born so many years after it happened. i will repeat that it won't help those who won't read it. but to those who read it simply the book will definitely be a great help. if you were a school literature. working on a version of facebook for school would be more of history for literature for you if you stored it then yes it's undoubtedly literature there's no two ways about it and

that's the only reason why it's powerful as you were with a couple of the conclusions soldier comes to the end of the phone differ from what historians think now. for example nothing of the kind they differ from opinions of those critics who lie ps ideas client side with the ones of objective historians you won't be able to give me a strong example i will gladly argue with anyone and provide quotations and proof to missions that can differ but not figures now there are people who think that the fact that we had labor camps was for the better because without them we would have not built rockets and atomic bombs but my argument is that the tomic bomb was created by people who were withdrawn from the gulag at the very last moment and saved from death but if they had not been to the gulag they would have made it even better. a little work of alexander solzhenitsyn which i remember being published.

he says solzhenitsyn's reaction to perestroika the fact that. today. unfortunately and i mean it it's very relevant unfortunately you know none of what he feared was avoided none of his warnings were seated but the right so what we have now is twenty five million compatriots from russia in kazakhstan. and other places. and they're still barely treated in russia and he wrote about it but he wrote about the system of education we will lose several generations he wrote and we did land ownership elections he wrote on so many topics but things do not improve only get worse and make no headway that the article was not read by the government but people did read it at least twenty seven million copies of it were sold in the can someone the newspaper published by the way here. in

the i mean it was later it's not so important that time it was like a bomb you could see people read meat everywhere the newspapers editors called us environment and told us that within a week they got two thousand letters and they planned to publish several letters in every issue. of discussion they published six letters and then another six and that was all because going to stop it and there was no discussion i was later trying to get those facts with letters but there was a fire in the office and they were all lost. remember we can speak endlessly about his books. but i want to ask. we're stepping into the decade when the anniversary of the russian revolution will be marked in this country. to make the value of this book for a school program. in this book for children like

a piece of literature but history. they read will would be too much for schools even if it's a breached the school program cannot stretch to house everything if we give so much to soldiers. have to take away something else. again your for who else it's impossible children should know russian classical literature i hope they read tolstoy but they may just look through war and peace and skip past. but. when i went to school it was that way. about peace and. you know oh yes it must be the same everywhere the cold so i can see that the red wheel is read very little in russian but you but recently things have changed and it becomes popular and more people start reading it those of course who think about russia's fate and why we tend to have the same problems again and again. this. is indispensable for those cold war devote russia's future.

more of a fight for moral philosopher. he was a philosopher who fought and he was a fighter who used history philosophy and literature as his weapon so he was more of a philosopher if you ask me who told me it's it was i will say that he was a writer god gave him the turnt of writing first and foremost of course he was very interested in politics but he would not have written so many political essays and made so many public speeches had he lived in more peaceful times he used to say how many of us died in the gulag very few people survived and now i need to speak up in the name of all those writers this way hugh made so many public speeches but his dream was to write fiction and to devote all his time to literature you should so it was you who was the fighter in the family no he was the fighter let me to do

this you're full of energy you're still a fighter each of us is a fighter in a sense. for or against whichever way you like it. i fight for russia and the reason i'm fighting is because i want russia to preserve the unique and great things it has had. it hurts to see how much of that we're losing now. in one of the recent interviews given. you said i quote. worried immensely for the country and its future. what was his biggest worry before his death. no. actually he was an optimist and throughout life under any grave circumstances public or personal he saw the light of band of the tunnel and he believed in victory if i can say so he believed the hard times would pass. but in the last two years already and

a half he started losing his optimism he worried about this stratification of society it never led to anything good in any country when there is such a big gap between the rich and the poor the country is heading for a revolution. but our country will not be able to survive another revolution and bloodshed. fortunately we have avoided it in the late one nine hundred eighty s. and the early one nine hundred ninety s. but who knows what can happen oh internal state of mind and the state of education and health care is in a dire plight and the leaders agree with that and it will be hard to get out of this. and we may face many many problems on our way out. that's what ward. mark and its one hundredth anniversary.

and soon will be sixty years. like human rights commissioner raised the problem of. his words. until we do they. feel free to other nations. we must help reject our past but we have to say what kind of a past it is and realize that we have changed. do you agree that the problem of renouncing still exists. or should we close the topic and forget about it. by no means can we close this problem or forget about it. i fully agree with this alexander solzhenitsyn was talking about it from the very beginning of going back to us but history the biggest story he said that if we want to make progress instead of going round in circles we have to open a little knowledge to crimes that the previous regime committed but against the people of this country itself without it the us will just force the disease inside

and we will drop from within and it will undermine the health of the entire nation there is nothing to argue about i one hundred percent agree it's possible an expensive one but first the abyss namely thank you very much for being with us and just a reminder that my guest in the studio today was president of the sultan this new foundation and widow of writer and nobel prize winner tattersall's units and not by the cells in it and that's it for now from all of us here if you want to have your say on spotlight but if someone mark you think i should interview tomorrow to drop me a line that algren up at the t.v. dot parties and let's keep spotlight and she will be back with more first time comment on what's going on in and outside pressure until then stay in party and take care.

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