Helen Kroger (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the request of Senator Mason, I move:

That the Senate—

  (a)   notes the 4th anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most influential Russian writer and dissident of the 20th century, who:

     (i)   was imprisoned, denied medical treatment and finally exiled from the Soviet Union for daring to expose the truth about the horrors of communism,

     (ii)   struggling against great obstacles managed to write and eventually publish The Gulag Archipelago, a classic of anti-totalitarian literature that drew the world's attention to the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union against its own people,

     (iii)   after his deportation from the Soviet Union in 1974, continued to remind the world about the importance of rights and liberties enjoyed in the West but denied to the citizens of the Soviet Union and other communist states, and

     (iv)   received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, as well as numerous other prizes and awards for his contribution to literature, and the fight for freedom and against tyranny and oppression; and

  (b)   conveys its remembrances to the people of Russia.

Question agreed to.