Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 (The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series)

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was July 1977. I was feeling smothered, bewildered: how were we to live in the West? The millstone of the KGB had never tired of crushing me, I was used to that, but now a second millstone, the millstone of the West, was descending upon me to grind me all over again (and not for the first time). How were we to live here? In every business, financial, and organizational matter in the West, I always find myself blundering, backed into a corner, pulling the short straw, everything in utter confusion, so that there are moments when I simply despair: it is as if I had lost all reason, no longer knew how to act, invariably misstepped! As sharp-eyed as my actions had been in the East, so blind were they in the West. How was I to find my way through this tangle of rules and laws? (Would not a Westerner suddenly dropped into the Soviet Union be just as helpless?)