Letter From London

The Legacy Of The Late Alexander Solzhenitsyn

06//08/ 08

Euro Schengen Zone Makes Uk & IE The Final Frontier

In December 2007 the The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the Schengen zone. Now 400m indgenious Europeans can freely travel 4,000km (2,485 miles) from Lisbon in Portugal to Tallinn in Estonia to without hinderance from nationalist and political border controls."

The zone now cover 24 European nations, predominantly EU member states but also other countries such as Iceland and Norway. At first the demise of the border controls will apply to just land and sea borders, but in March 2008 airports will be be incorporated. Any non-EU national, who applies for a Schengen visa will now be free to s travel in all the countries include in the agreement.

The European Commission has spent 1Bn € on securing the EU's new eastern borders in Poland and Slovakia. The Schengen Agreement includes access to the the Schengen Information Service (SIS) - a database on Strasbourg which enables police from participating countries whether a person has been involved in any crime within the EU.

Breaking .........................

Alton Towers Crash

At least one person has been killed and 44 people have been injured after an accident involving a double decker bus and car on a bridge a mile from Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire.

After the collision the bus fell from the bridge onto the embankment of the river below.

10 ambulances, 5 NHS response cars and 2 air ambulances have been sent to the scene of the accident in Station Road, Alton.

No children are thought to have been on the bus at the time which was carrying seasonal workers , many from Eastern Europe and the Baltic who had been on a day trip to Alton Towers.

more to follow .............

EU Legislates To Make Cigarettes Fire Safe By 2011

All cigarettes sold in European Union member states will have to be "fire-safe" by 2011 according to the European Commission. New legislation by the commission will require the tobacco industry to use thicken layers of thickened paper around the cigarettes to slow down the burning process.

The new law is designed to combat around 11,000 fires which occur in the EU are attributable to discarded cigarettes and are estimated to be responsible for over 500 deaths annually. The are also the single most prominent cause of forest fires.

The European Committee for Standardisation is setting the technical specifications for the new cigarettes which will burnout within in a minute if they are not drawn. Some brands of the new cigarettes are already on sale in the Canada and the United States.

Amsterdams Cannabis Cafes To Weed Out Tobacco

For years the cannabis cafes of Amsterdam have extended a warm welcome to locals and tourists who want to buy some cannabis and roll a joint without fear of being arrested.

New laws introduced across Holland in July mean that smoking tobacco in all public places - including the Cannabis Cafes is now illegal. Under Dutch law the smoking of marijuana is illegal but it is tolerated at the cafes - though the number of licences for these establishments has been rationed this year.

So now visitors to the cafes risk being arrested if they roll a joint using standard tobacco - not the marijuana. The new law apparently is encouraging people to roll pure ' joints' which is not what the city authorities had intended when they started to reduced the number of cafes licensed to sell the cannabis.

Serbian Socialists To Support EU Membership

The Serbian Socialist Party once led by the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic is to join the coalition of its pro-European former rivals - the party leader Party leader Ivica Dacic has announced.

In May President Boris Tadic's pro-Western bloc won the greatest share of the vote but the alliance did not hold an overall majority. The conversion to pro European policies of Ivica Dacic's Socialist Party gives Boris Tadic the majority the pro european needs.

The Serbian State news agency Tanjug quoted Mr Dacic as saying: "The main board of the Serbian Socialist Party voted to form an alliance with the pro-European alliance." Sources in Belgrade say that the Socialists party will be given two ministerial post and possible the chair of the parliament speaker-even though they only won 12 seats out of 250 in May's elections.

President Tadic has said that his three-party coalition and the Socialists had buried past differences and he was confident of forming a new government soon. Mays elections were seen by polticians and commentators as a test of the support that President Tadic had for his policy of progressing the Serbian application to join the European Union.

The Radical Party and the Democratic Party of Serbia, who came second and third respectively in the elections, are refusing to back the application as long as the EU continues to support the Kosovo declaration of independence earlier this year. These parties had hoped that thre stance would be supported by the Socialist Party.

The Socialist Party, which governed the country when Milosevic was its leader , and instigator of numerous war crimes is viewed by Serbs as being responsible for the countrys ill favour on the world stage. As a consequence Its support has dwindled in recent years and their decision to support the EU application is part of their attempt to break away from this legacy. In recent years it has attempted to do this by raising the concerns of the poor and unemployed.

The death of a Nobel Prize-winning author who's works (notably ``One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) graphically detailed the horrors of Soviet Stalin era labour camps illustrates the complexity of Russian politics.

He was born in December 1918 - his father had been an officer in the Russian Imperial army of the defeated Tsar but died in a hunting accident when his mother pregnant. His mother briefly inherited his fathers farm before it was commandered by the new communist government and turned into a collective farm. In his early years he with three brothers and a sister lived in poverty and they were not allowed to talk, for fear of reprisals, about their fathers soldiering before the revolution. His mother died at the outbreak of WW2 during which time he served as the commander of a recognizance unit in the Red Army.

In Febuary 1945 in a letter to a friend he critised Stalin (who he described as the' whiskered' one) for the war tactics he was employing. He was arrested for founding a hostile organisation and after a being beaten by interrogators sent to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Six months a KGB tribunal found him in abscence of the offence and sentenced him to eight years in a labour camp followed by 'internal exile. He was imprisoned in several works camps.

In 1950 he was sent to a camp for political prisoners in Ekbastuz Kazakhstan. Whilst there he worked as a bricklayer and miner and his experiences where the ingredients of his later work 'A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1953, Solzhenitsyn sentence was commuted to internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan. A year later he was diagnosed as having cancer which though it early killed him went into remission when he was admitted to hospital. His experiences raised made him privately question the merits of Marxism and lean towards the comforts or religion.

After leaving hospital he was allowed to return Western Russia where he taught maths in a secondary school whilst secretly writing 'the Soul and Barbed Wire (The Gulag Archipelago) and 'A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich'. The latter was published in 1962, and sanctioned by then President Kruschhev who as a fervent critic of the former Stalinist era instructed that the book be studied in schools.

The publication of this book sparked political debate hitherto unknown under Soviet communism. This liberal window in post war communist Russia came to a close in 1964 when communist hardliners ousted Khrushchev from power who policies they felt had humiitated Communist Russia ever since the Cuban missile crisis.

The new regime under Leonid Brezhnev Alexander was effectively the old guard of Stalinism who were advocates of debating soceties and Solzhenitsyn fell out of favour. In 1965 the KGB confiscated many of his manuscripts. Overnight he became a dissident. In 1968 two of his works The First Circle and The Cancer Circle were smuggled out to the west and published. These works, coupled with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denitovich were to result in his nomination in 1970 for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He chose not to collect his prize for fear of not being able to return to Russia. In 1973 another work 'August 1914' (an account of Russia's involvement in the outbreak of WW1) was published in the west and once again he was visIted by the KGB who confiscated further manuscripts.

In late 1973 the first part of The Gulag Archipelago was published in France. The book which describes the arrest, methods of interrogation and judicial system that Gulag's victims endured from 1917 to the early sixties was in the west hijacked politically as an example of the present ills communism. The Soviet response to this reaction was to view Solzhenitsy as a national traitor and on Febuary 12th 1974 he was arrested for treason. The following day he was exiled to the West first. After a short stay in Sweden he moved to the United States. During his time in the US he critised the American pre-occupation with democracy and materialism.

After the fall of communism and during the Glasnos era of Gorbachev his exile was lifted and in 1994 he was welcomed back to Russia as a national hero.

Two ex presidents with vey differing poltical outlooks Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladmir Putin (a former KGB officer) paid tribute to his life. The latter praised Solzhenitsyn for giving ``an example of truly selfless devotion and of unselfish service to the people, the fatherland'' and for championing ``the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.'' The words of Putin may have been reciprocation for Solzhenitsyn comment in 2007 that Putin had restored Russia's authority in the world.

When a former KGB prisoner is rendered the honour of 'lying in state' in Moscow and given a miltiary gun salute at his funeral by a regime with a history aligned to the KGB qustions have to be asked. One can only conclude that legacy of Solzhenitsyn may be that Russian poltics however diverse are ironically united by a fundemental pride in nationalism.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn works were founded on his experiences of Stalinism which he felt betrayed soviet culture. They were not as the Russian authorities first thought and act of treason. Nor were they an endorsement of the Western society he was exiled to. He was simply an historian who fate determined through his vacation became part of history.