Together with the loss of confidence in a
generally-accepted ideology, both in Russia
and the West there is a sense that civilization has come to a dead-end.
In Russia there is the feeling that Communism is finished as a power that can
inspire any but a small group of merciless fanatics, that it remains in power
solely by naked force—the army and secret
police. In the West, the failure of will which Solzhenitsyn has rightly
diagnosed is a direct result of the feeling that the West no longer has an
ideology worth dying for.
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