A Decline In Courage May Be The

My Wish For You... Is That Your Skeptic-eclectic Brain Be Flooded With The Light Of Truth.

Only The First Swath Cut By The Scythe Is Difficult.

The Clock Of Communism Has Stopped Striking. But Its Concrete Building Has Not Yet Come Crashing Down. For That Reason, Instead Of Freeing Ourselves, We Must Try To Save Ourselves From Being Crushed By Its Rubble.

Gorbachev's Administration Was Amazingly Politically Naïve, Inexperienced And Irresponsible Towards The Country. It Was Not Governance But A Thoughtless Renunciation Of Power. The Admiration Of The West In Return Only Strengthened His Conviction That His Approach Was Right. But Let Us Be Clear That It Was Mikhail Gorbachev, And Not Boris Yeltsin, As Is Now Widely Being Claimed, Who First Gave Freedom Of Speech And Movement To The Citizens Of Russia.

In The Camp, This Meant Committing My Verse-many Thousands Of Lines-to Memory. To Help Me With This I Improvised Decimal Counting Beads And, In Transit Prisons, Broke Up Matchsticks And Used The Fragments As Tallies. As I Approached The End Of My Sentences I Grew More Confident Of My Powers Of Memory, And Began Writing Down And Memorizing Prose-dialogue At First, But Then, Bit By Bit, Whole Densely Written Passages. My Memory Found Room For Them! It Worked. But More And More Of My Time-in The End As Much As One Week Every Month-went Into The Regular Repetition Of All I Had Memorized.