When Alexander Solzhenistyn died in Moscow the other day it marked the passing of one of the most influential and independent minds of the 20th Century. Here was a man whose writings exposed the Soviet Union as the Goonacracy it was and lived to tell the tale. Born in 1918, he was the son of a prosperous Caucasus man who was an officer in the Imperial Army of the Tsars and who died before his birth, leaving his mother to raise him and his siblings in reduced circumstances. Their family lands were turned into a collective farm and Sholzhenitzen grew up in the Soviet system, becoming somewhat of a success story, obtaining an impressive education and showing a keen intellect.
Before he could get any sort of career going, World War 2 happened and he served as the commander of an artillery unit in the Red Army, seeing much action and being decorated for bravery twice. That outstanding service didn't prevent him from being sent to Siberia for 8 years for the crime of criticizing Josef Stalin's conduct of the war in a private letter to a friend. Well, it seems they sent the wrong guy to the Gulags since while he was there he composed the novels that would contribute mightily to the downfall of the Soviet Union. The first of them to be widely published, "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Desinovich," printed with the express permission of Nikita Kruschev in 1962, became an instant sensation and made Mr. Solzhenitsyn both an international celebrity and a pariah in his own nation.
Kruschev soon passed from the scene and with him any hope of Solzhenitsyn publishing his work inside Russia. He was harassed by the KBG, the Soviet political and not-so-secret police, who confiscated manuscripts and oppressed his supporters and associates. The first part of his monumental trilogy "The Gulag Archipelego" was published in the West in 1973, creating a world-wide sensation, exposing the Soviet system as the criminally corrupt and murderous enterprise it had been from its inception. Of course he was in hot water with Soviet authorities but his great fame made it politically inexpedient to just put a bullet in his head like they did with so many lesser known thorns in their side.
When he won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1970 he did not attend the ceremony for fear of not being allowed to come home again. The Soviets solved that dilemma for him in 1974 by stripping him of his citizenship and deporting him to West Germany as a result of the publication of "Gulag" the year before. He wound up settling in Vermont where his wife became a United States citizen. Two of his sons remain here even though Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet Union collapsed and his citizenship was restored. All through these tumultuous times he kept writing and publishing novels, histories and critiques of both the West and his native land.
To his everlasting credit, the man never did become the pawn of the political forces that opposed the Soviet Union. He would be nobody's propaganda tool in the global Cold War struggle for humanity's hearts and minds. Like any great artist, he painted what he saw, and not everything he wrote about the Western democracies was all that complementary. What exactly his politics were never emerged into any cohesive school of thought, but just by being his stubborn self and pointing out what to him at least was glaringly obvious, he advanced the cause for intellectual freedom immeasurably. His honesty, his courage and his firm grip on reality helped topple one of the most powerful and brutal regimes in the history of humanity, a feat accomplished not by the force of arms and the shedding of blood, but by the power of the pen and the might of ideas and ideals.
Eight years in the hell of the Gulag system, a bout with stomach cancer in primitive prison hospital wards, decades of official oppression and finally exile could not take away this man's love of his native land and the people who suffered its excesses. Even in his old age he called for democratic rule in a Russia still attached at the hip to the Soviet system, and yet criticized NATO for attempting to control Russia, independent right to the end. One message seemed to be that people everywhere were not living up to their unlimited human potential due to unquestioned loyalty to one political system or another in spite of their glaring flaws and potential for abuse. The greatest crime is his eyes was the attempted extermination of the human spirit in the name of nationalism and unity. He recoiled at the idea of men making themselves supreme in this world, admitting of no human failings, answerable to no one and holding multitudes hostage to their insane notions. So, perhaps his failure to form any rigid theory of government was a conscious decision. He never did say one way or another, content to let his art speak his mind on these matters.
Many countries, and China comes most readily to mind, live in fear of having their own Solzhenitsyn emerge and so take great pains to control the information available to their writers and rigorously control their artistic output. Having exposed powerful tyrannies as being vulnerable to the power of art and ideas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has left a truly remarkable legacy. It seems altogether fitting that his passing coincides with the Beijing Olympics, the most blatant exercise in international propaganda by a tyrannical government since the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Writers, sharpen your pencils, there's still much work to be done.
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