August has already begun, and nothing exploded, did not drown and banged the revolution and did not rob default. Only Solzhenitsyn died. The incontinence of the commentators of death throws the bile and tears of cheap grief into a public discussion. Everything is discussed, except what makes sense to discuss in connection with the death of the writer. Do Russia still need Solzhenitsyn? Does the country need spiritual leadership today? Or the era of the great " prophets " went completely?

“We are sitting in the basement of the Alan Hotel in Tskhinval.“ Interfax ”here, Ren -TV, 5 channel. Another part of journalists in the peacekeepers' basement. The city is fired tightly from howitzers and mortars. Cononades have not stopped. I saw a lot of wounded. Peacemakers comment briefly:“ This is a war, ” Russian journalist Mikhail Romanov writes . The assault on Tskhinvali began at 23.36 Moscow time.

From the editorial office: Today, the day before the official start of the Beijing Olympics, Vladimir Putin’s official visit to China begins. Leading American intellectual Sociologist Daniel Bell in a small note talks about how to understand the ideological component of Chinese changes, where China is moving, leaving behind its communist past.