What was the content of Solzhenitsyn's critique of the West?

Question

Solzhenitsyn is a dissident writer in the former Soviet Union. He's famous for writing the *Gulag Archipelago*. I recall that he eventually managed to escape to the West, in fact to the USA where after taking a good look around he denounced the the West too. I'm curious though now about what exactly was the content of his critique. It must have stung, as he was dropped very quickly.

Answer 1

Solzhenitsyn's critique of the west would probably be summed up by his belief that "Men have forgotten God". He argues that the same secular, communistic ideals of his former situation in the USSR seeped over into the culture of the United States, and that our focus on consumerism and hedonism was just the other side of the coin that the USSR had played (materialism, secularism).

One of the reasons he was dropped by academics in the west was because of his outspoken traditionalism, and his controversial opinions on things like a positive view of Czarist Russia and Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik revolution, which was definitely (and still is) against the grain of academic thought.