Detente, Democracy and Dictatorship

The subject of Detente, Democracy and Dictatorship has been with us since the breakdown of the Cold War and the termination of the Soviet system, indeed, if not since the origins of Bolshevism. No more vigorous critic of the uneasy co-existence of democracy and dictatorship exists than the greatest writer that the Soviet era of Russian history produced, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

This third edition is based on major addresses, especially aimed at Americans, delivered in 1975 in Washington, D.C. and New York, and again, in 1978, at Harvard University in Cambridge, all on the subject of detente, democracy and dictatorship. It also includes Solzhenitsyn's final 2007 interview with the German publication Der Spiegel.

These major statements are brilliant and forthright comment on the risks of confusing ideology with diplomacy. But more than that, they summarize the Soviet debacle, the theoretical underpinnings, and distill Solzhenitsyn's multi-volumed masterpiece, the Gulag Archipelago.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. He is a Nobel-Prize winner in literature and was an elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1994. Among his works are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward, First Circle, The Russian Question, and Gulag Archipelago.

Daniel J. Mahoney is professor of political science at Assumption College and the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and Chairman, Transaction Publishers. He has written widely on political and social theory. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York, and recognized as a major voice on historical issues of ideology and democracy.