>What is that quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn you have noted about the people giving up their rights and just asking to be fed?
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>It is a quote from The Brothers Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky :
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>In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us”

I knew you would come through with that. Admiration for Dostoyevsky is one of the few things we have in common.

There was a nice short piece in The New Yorker a few months ago about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalia. She sounds like quite a sparkplug. She said she mainly raised their three sons because Aleksandr Isayevich saw it that they could just grow up on their own. You can't beat the Russians for flinty realism.