To Taste The Sea All One Needs

I Hope That No One Present Will Suspect Me Of Offering My Personal Criticism Of The Western System To Present Socialism As An Alternative. Having Experienced Applied Socialism In A Country Where The Alternative Has Been Realized, I Certainly Will Not Speak For It. The Well-known Soviet Mathematician Shafarevich, A Member Of The Soviet Academy Of Science, Has Written A Brilliant Book Under The Title Socialism; It Is A Profound Analysis Showing That Socialism Of Any Type And Shade Leads To A Total Destruction Of The Human Spirit And To A Leveling Of Mankind Into Death.

Shall I Describe The Happiness It Gave Me To Go Into The Classroom And Pick Up The Chalk? ... It Seemed To Me The Supreme, Heartbreaking Happiness To Enter A Classroom Carrying A Register As That Bell Rang, And Start A Lesson With The Mysterious Air Of One About To Unfold Wonders.

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.

When Russia Started To Regain Some Of Its Strength As An Economy And As A State, The West's Reaction - Perhaps A Subconscious One, Based On Erstwhile Fears - Was Panic.

The Perception Of The West As Mostly A "knight Of Democracy" Has Been Replaced With The Disappointed Belief That Pragmatism, Often Cynical And Selfish, Lies At The Core Of Western Policies. For Many Russians It Was A Grave Disillusion, A Crushing Of Ideals.