go to the grand imperial truly the george weston. you can go with her till the close of the show to see don't need to go publicly and run the sim the colonel was hotel as a retreat. eleven thirty pm saturday night here in moscow thanks to using us for your news this is a see these are all top stories rallies get out of control in moscow and st petersburg as demonstrators take to the streets in honor of a football field earlier in the week protesters clashed with riot police over a dozen were injured and many more detained it was all part of a commemoration march marking with. who was beaten up and shot dead during a mass. practice what you preach human rights activists are challenging washington to world up to its violations before making any promises. ethnic tension

looms over the first parliamentary election to the self-proclaimed republic of course of the serb minority says this quote is pointless as long as people divided from each other one final item of news back to the story we brought you a little bit earlier at the top of the hour about conflicting reports tonight of a gunman in a moscow restaurant well details still sketchy but the latest from police is that they now deny that a hostage situation to place is very true in the northeast of the capital nonetheless there are reports coming through that there was a conflict between the guests and three different wedding parties and it resulted in a fight leaving four people injured that's what we know this. morning or stories in thirty minutes time for you up next the widow of legendary russian writer alexander solzhenitsyn tells us see how she's keeping his ideas at the forefront of modern day thinking it's in our interview program spotlight that's coming up in.

oh yeah no welcome to the. i'm al green of and 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 his sister now often writes is that she manages the foundation how is she promoting her husband's ideas today here's the presidents are the foundation not the. novel but it's on the social need some of the gulag archipelago tells of the repressive machine russia communist leaders try to prevent the book from being published abroad but in nine hundred seventy three the gulag archipelago was printed in paris the following year. established a fund to help victims of the soviet regime and their families the u.s.s.r. . eighteen years ago the soldiers from the foundation moved to russia today they continue helping former political prisoners and developing ideas.

that's the time in the spello mess isn't it 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 come internet and what's 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 are there are the volumes 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 there will still be the same. content of the collected

works was prepared together by me and alexander solzhenitsyn it's done exactly as he wanted but there are only complete novels there but. the most complete edition of 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 the items finished while alive you know the words one side and sent to the publishers right and the rest are just drafts will there be letters in the collector's 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. who was mentioned. lived in quite a while and while away from russia you organized the russian public phone days. foundation occupy 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 he will never take a dollar or ruble for his book the foundation used to help people because back

then they 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 the system is no longer there but there are still many people who have been through. a 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. and subject. because many of those people are. 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 or 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. it will help all those who were imprisoned by the soviet government helping all ex prisoners who are now in ukraine because extern 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 if you have a name i like sound of something it said 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. it 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 that we have any one this one no not yet does he mean something she means something 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 think who are xander solzhenitsyn was. we're not asking russians who forgot i was. 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 hopeless and actually i'm 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 mature in 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 i should 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 it. sure it's your bridge to the gulag archipelago. four times then a little more so this book is a five fold abridged version well four and. five 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 for 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 laws matures the law becomes a man which they tell a historic documental and political story of course in but is. encouraged in the m.g.b.

the kid to be set around. those chapters you can follow the story of how it was established but they 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. but on 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 in 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 is the quotation still. 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 for you so strong the thing is that at present teachers don't have any leverage to make students read books which to me 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 she acted 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 a spotlight will be back shortly after a break so stay with us.

i. thank. just. the official allocation to your i pod touch from the i q saps to. life on the.

video. feeds now with the palm of your. t. dot com hungry for the full story we've got it for. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. welcome back to spotlight time i'll bring all of in just a reminder that my guest in the studio today is president of the solzhenitsyn foundation not out yet solzhenitsyn i. know it must be missiles and it's and we've started talking about the gulag archipelago that's parle stuff to do take into

consideration that it's been a long while since the book was written. a lot of documents and facts which alexander solzhenitsyn and could not have been revealed before the fact that this fact affect her work you know that there is history and there is literature of the same things. and of course. of course numerous. they're ready called changes which have taken place in russia over the past twenty years and many of the work quite unsuccessful so we can say that reformers themselves produce their most aggressive. so many of them think that xander 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 they have or inaccessible and continued to be so for many decades after but when axes was

opened the state archives of the russian federation together with 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 . putting it in the off course i took it into consideration and i wrote about it. you've asked me if the book can help children who 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 the book will definitely be a great help. if you were a school literature. version for school will be more of history for literature for 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 if you will with a couple of the conclusions soldier comes to. differ from what historians think now . for example nothing of the kind they differ from opinions of those critics who lie. ideas client side with the ones of objective historians you won't be. give me a strong example that 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 not build truck and atomic bombs but my argument is that the comic bone 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. to work. been published.

action to perestroika. mean you unfortunately and i mean it it's very relevant unfortunately you know none of what she feared was a voyage. of his warnings where she did it 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 here wrote about it. 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 stalled in the come some was coprime of the newspaper. published here. in the i

mean it was later it's not so important that time it was like a bomb you could see people written it 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. our international wide 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. i remember we can speak endlessly about his books. but i want to ask. the red. shirts 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. you thought of a bridge 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 needs to 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. what i went to school was that girls read about peace. but you know oh yes it must be the same everywhere so i can see that the red wheel is read very little in russia 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. the red wheel is indispensable for those cold

war devout russians 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 was told to me and was i will say that he was a writer god gave him the turned 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 to 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 that's why 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 the. quote. worried immensely for the country and its future. what was his biggest worry before his. no. actually he was an optimist and throughout life under any great circumstances public a personal he saw the light of the end 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 or even the huff 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 evolution. but our country will not be able to survive another revolution and bloodshed. so 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 of 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. story. mark and its one hundredth anniversary and soon it will be sixty

years. of rights commission raised the problem of. his words. until we do this feel free or equal to other nations. we must help project 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 gorbachev to destroy the big 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 be as well 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 agreement was supposed to be an expensive one but first though because 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 to 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 at al going off at how to teach dot hire you and let's keep spotlight and try to move me 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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