The Russian Dudes & Ramiro’s Musing
‘Gulag’ book, once banned, is now required reading
Aleksandr Sokurov The Knot. Conversations w/ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (Russian only)
The film, commissioned by a Russian TV channel and shot in 1999 consists of two parts of about 90 minutes each, thus the total comes to slightly over three hours. The first part s called The Knot (Uzel) while the second is entitled simply Dialogues. At the time of these interviews Solzhenitsyn is about eighty years of age, but his mind is remarkably agile and his judgement is swift; he has strong opinions on many issues. He talks a lot about writing and literature, about aspects of the Russian language, and about many of the most important Russian writers, from Gogol and Dostoyevski through Plekhanov and Karamzin, to present-day Valentin Rasputin or emigre Nabokov. (Dina review)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
Wall streets the biggest banks of America
(Next frame says : the wall streets helped the Bolsheviks in Russia.)
This image was posted by me at Facebook 
and tagged way too many friends as an experiment.
-Solzhenitsyn is dead, would you like to finish what he was about to say? Was my question.
Some who are used to being tagged participated, soon the emails flooded and objections were raised by some who do not know the workings of FB interface. (Click ‘remove’ ).
A spirited and amusing response came from Ramiro Martinez – here is a link to his blog.
Aterial Destination
Then I read something about Bolshviks and politburo stuff and suddenly I got shot back to the time when my older brothers and sisters were in college. And the Chicano Movimiento was goin on and there seemed to be a lot of fear in the air. At this time I was getting my ass kicked all over the neighborhood and learning how to fight. I never liked it. (More,here) .
Previous post on Ramiro here. 
Sample responses I received:
Matt Janovic
“Wall Street, the biggest banks in the world, are no different in the nature of their exploitation and oppression of the world than the Politburo, only they are winning.” ;0) Happy Labor day!
“Yeah, that’s true, the house of Morgan did initially help the Bolsheviks but it ended with the 1920 bombing on Wall Street, probably done by British intelligence, they didn’t want the US and the Bolshies hooking-up. Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) might have been involved in that operation.””
Alan Sondhiem
read pretty much all of Solzhentsyn and couldn’t comment – on one hand brilliant samizdat writer along the lines of dostoevsky of course and on the other problematic nationalist along the lines of dostoevsky of course..
He had a wide dark side : his nationalism…
Last time he came in France, it was to meet Philippe de Villiers, an exterme right leader, who is the political chief of the right wing of the french catholic-fundamentalist movement
William Dimitroff
One Day in the Life of Bernie Madoff
(I enjoyed reading the First Circle: it is often forgotten today.)
Thomas Odde
…dispensers of capital punishment.
Terry Wahl
“have all the altruism and national allegiance of a starving hyena…
Solzhenitzn was unique. One wants to dislike him for his politics, and to me there’s little reason to listen to him about politics. Yet the three main novels (Cancer Ward, First Circle, Ivan Denisovich) were all very fine indeed, and the Gulag Archipelago was an amazing achievement. Without it, we would have the same revelations from others, including more progressive voices, as with Medvedev’s Let History Judge. Perhaps nothing will have the daring of Kruschev’s own ‘secret speech.’ But it’s a remarkable book all the same.