Chapter 11: Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Brodsky, Gorbachev: Unaccepted by Society

The personalities of these four Soviet Nobel Prize winners, their fates connected with the two decades which finished the existence of the Soviet Union have little correlation with each other. A yesterday’s prisoner of the Stalin empire of terror, deprived of rights, and the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, whose opportunities for limitless absolute power objectively exceeded all thinkable prerogatives of His Majesty the Emperor; a poet, of Brezhnev’s dolce vita period, also without rights and without shelter, and a brilliant scientist and thinker, to whom eternally indebted are, among other people, the homespun national patriots, who hated him in his lifetime and got the enviable possibility to frighten the rest of the world by the image of the deadly weapon created by his genius…