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Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Russian:Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын) (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his writings he helped to make the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of his best known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His mother was Ukrainian widow, Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (née Shcherbak), whose father had apparently risen from humble beginnings, as something of a self-made man. Eventually, he acquired a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origins and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and later on in the Red Wheel novel cycle). In 1918, Taisia became pregnant with Aleksandr. Shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was then raised by his widowed mother and aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific leanings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944. As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn was developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on the First World War and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914 – some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, at this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps. On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married a chemistry student Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They divorced in 1952 (a year before his release from the Gulag); he remarried her in 1957 and they divorced again in 1972. The following year (1973) he married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (b. 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). During
World
War II Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound ranging battery in the Red Army, was
involved in major action at the front, and twice decorated. A series of
writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted
novel Love the
Revolution!, chronicle his WWII experience and his growing doubts
about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. In
February
1945, while serving in East Prussia,
Solzhenitsyn
was arrested for writing derogatory comments in letters to
a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin,
whom
he called "Usatiy" ("one with mustachios,") "Khozyain"
("the
master"), and "Balabos", (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayis for "master of the house"). He was accused of anti-Soviet
propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet
criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph
11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was
beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his
absence by Special Council
of the NKVD to
an eight-year term in a labor camp.
This
was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the
time. The
first
part
of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several different
work camps; the "middle phase," as he later referred to it, was spent
in a sharashka (i.e., a special scientific
research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev,
upon
whom he based the character of Lev
Rubin in his book The First Circle,
published
in
a self censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968
(an English translation of the full version was eventually published by
Harper Perennial in October 2009). In
1950,
he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During
his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as
a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz
formed the basis for the book One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his colleagues political
prisoners, Ion Moraru,
remembers
that Solzhenitsyn has written at Ekibastuz. While there he had a tumor
removed, although his cancer was not diagnosed at the time. In
March 1953 after the expiry of Solzhenitsyn's sentence, he was sent to
internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan, as was
common for political prisoners. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by
the end of the year, he was close to death. However, in 1954, he was
permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission.
His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and
also found an echo in the short story "The right hand." It was during
this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and
religious positions of his later life; this turn has some interesting
parallels to Dostoevsky's
time in Siberia and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier.
Solzhenitsyn gradually turned into a philosophically - minded Christian
as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He
repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison
compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag: "I remember myself
in my captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery
through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any
better?'" His transformation is described at some length in the fourth
part of The Gulag
Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The
narrative poem The Trail (written
without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and
1952) and the twenty-eight poems composed in prison, forced labor camp,
and exile also provide crucial material for understanding
Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period.
These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for
the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006. After Khrushchev's
Secret Speech in
1956 Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. After his return
to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary
school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote, "during all the years
until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line
of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any
of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I
feared this would become known." In
the
1960s while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was
simultaneously writing The
Gulag
Archipelago. The KGB found out about this.
Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached Alexander
Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Noviy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the
explicit approval of Nikita
Khrushchev,
who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to
allow its publishing, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you;
there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book became an instant hit
and sold-out everywhere. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich was
studied in schools in the Soviet Union as were three more short works
of Solzhenitsyn's, including his acclaimed short story Matryona's Home,
were published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published
in the Soviet Union until 1990. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought
the Soviet system of prison labor to the attention of the West. It
caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the
West — not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because
it
was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the twenties on a
politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man
who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and
yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the
publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance
of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. Most
Soviet readers realized this, but after Khrushchev had been ousted from
power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came quietly, but
perceptibly, to a close. Solzhenitsyn
made
an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his
novel, The Cancer
Ward, legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to get the
approval of the Union of Writers.
Though
some
there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied
publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect
statements and anti-Soviet insinuations (this episode is recounted and
documented in The Oak and the
Calf). The publishing of his work quickly stopped; as a
writer, he became a non-person,
and,
by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his
papers, including the manuscript of The
First
Circle. Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and
feverishly work upon the most subversive of all his writings, the
monumental The Gulag
Archipelago.
The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and
frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the
pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer,
something which had come close to second nature, but which was becoming
increasingly irrelevant. After
the
KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965
– 1967 the preparatory drafts of The Gulag
Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding
at his friends' homes in Estonia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi,
a
lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education in a Lubyanka Prison
cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was
kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi
until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In
1969
Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970,
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at
that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet
Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a
special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish
government refused to accept this solution, however, since such a
ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union
and damage Sweden's relations with the superpower. Instead,
Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been
deported from the Soviet Union. The
Gulag
Archipelago was
composed
during 1958 – 1967. This work was a three volume, seven part
work on the Soviet prison camp system (Solzhenitsyn never had all seven
parts of the work in front of him at any one time). The Gulag Archipelago has
sold over thirty million copies in thirty five languages. It was based
upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 256 former
prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal
system. It discussed the system's origins from the founding of the
Communist regime, with Lenin himself having responsibility,
detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp
culture, prisoner
uprisings
and revolts, and the practice of internal exile. The Gulag Archipelago's
rich
and
varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of
personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical
investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of communist ideology made The Gulag Archipelago one of the most
consequential books of the twentieth century. The appearance of the book in
the West put the word gulag into the Western political
vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities. During this period, he was sheltered by
the cellist Mstislav
Rostropovich, who suffered
considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced
into exile himself. On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was
arrested and on the next day he was deported from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt,
West
Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found
the manuscript for the first part of The
Gulag
Archipelago and,
less than a week later, Yevgeny
Yevtushenko suffered
reprisals
for his support of Solzhenitsyn. U.S. military attache William Odom managed to smuggle out a
large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's
membership card for the Writers' Union and
Second World War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid
tribute to Odom's role in his memoir "Invisible Allies" (1995).
In
Germany,
Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich
Böll's house in Cologne.
He then moved to Zurich,
Switzerland, before Stanford
University invited
him
to
stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to
accommodate you and your family." He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower,
part
of the Hoover
Institution, before moving to Cavendish,
Vermont,
in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard
University in 1978
and on Thursday, 8 June 1978 he gave his Commencement
Address condemning,
among other things, materialism in modern western culture. Over
the
next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his cyclical history of the Russian
Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel.
By
1992, four "knots" (parts) had been completed and he had also
written several shorter works. Despite
spending
two
decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become
fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading
English language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother.
More
importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of
tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television.
Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and
the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well
received in Western conservative circles, alongside the tougher foreign
policy pursued by U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
At
the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly
critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian
patriotism and the Russian Orthodox religion. Solzhenitsyn also
harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity
of the dominant pop culture of
the modern West, including television and much of popular music:
"...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than
those offered by today's mass living habits ... by TV stupor and
by intolerable music." Despite
his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made
clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the
enduring strengths of western democratic societies. In a major speech
delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein
on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight
of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life
under the rule of law — a hard won stability which grants independence
and space to every private citizen." In
a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his
native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the
local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and
New England during his western exile. In
1990,
his
Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to
Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen.
Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his oldest son
Yermolai returned to Russia to work for the Moscow office of a leading
management consultancy firm). From then until his death, he lived with
his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo
(Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once
occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin
Chernenko. Following
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn called for a restoration
of the Russian monarchy. After
returning
to
Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn published eight two-part
short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a
literary memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between the
Millstones) among many other writings. All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S.
citizens. One, Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.
The
most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn's collected works is
soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three
volumes, already in print, recently took place in Moscow. On 5 June
2007 then Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring
on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of
the Russian Federation for
his
humanitarian
work. Putin personally visited the writer at his home
on 12 June 2007 to present him with the award. Like his father,
Yermolai Solzhenitsyn has translated some of his father's works.
Stephan Solzhenitsyn lives and works in Moscow. Ignat
Solzhenitsyn is
the music director of The Chamber
Orchestra of Philadelphia. On
19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large scale
operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his
communications with Soviet
dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir
Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov,
and
Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The
residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities
participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least
three StB agents became translators
and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights),
keeping KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn. KGB
sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a
"memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia
Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to
historian Christopher
Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an
atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between PAUK and
the people around him" by feeding him rumors that everyone in his
surrounding was a KGB agent and deceiving him in all possible ways.
Among other things, the writer constantly received envelopes with
photographs of car accidents, brain surgery and other frightening
illustrations. After the KGB harassment in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn settled
in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with
others and surrounded his property with a barbed
wire fence.
His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became
increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts
finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his
"reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life",
so no further active
measures would be required. In
his
book The Gulag
Archipelago Solzhenitsyn
states
that
he was recruited to report to the NKVD on fellow inmates
and was given a code name Vetrov, but due to his transfer to another
camp he was able to elude this duty and never produced a single report.
In
1976, after Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union a
report signed by Vetrov surfaced. After a copy of the report was
obtained by Solzhenitsyn he published it together with a refutation in
the Los Angeles
Times (published
24 May 1976).
In
1978 the same report was published by journalist Frank Arnau in a socialist Western German magazine Neue Politik. However, according to
Solzhenitsyn the report is a fabrication by the KGB.
He claimed that the report is dated 20 January 1952 while all
Ukrainians were transferred to a separate camp on 6 January and they
had no relation to the uprising in Solzhenitsyn's camp on 22 January.
He also claimed that the only people who might in 1976 have access to a
"secret KGB archive" were KGB agents themselves. Solzhenitsyn also
requested Arnau to put the alleged document to a graphology test but Arnau refused. In 1990 the report was reproduced in
Soviet Voyenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal among the memoirs of L.A. Samutin, a former ROA soldier
and GULAG inmate who was an erstwhile supporter of Solzhenitsyn, but
later became his critic. According to Solzhenitzyn, publication of the
Samutin memoirs was canceled at the request of Samutin's widow, who
stated that the memoirs were in fact dictated by the KGB. Solzhenitsyn
declared
about the failing of atheism: Over
a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a
number of old people offer the following explanation for the great
disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why
all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years
working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read
hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have
already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of
clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked
today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the
ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I
could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten
God; that's why all this has happened." During his years in the west,
Solzhenitsyn was very active in the historical debate, discussing the
history of Russia, the Soviet
Union and
communism. He tried to
correct what he considered
to be western misconceptions. Solzhenitsyn
also published a two volume work on the history of Russian - Jewish
relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). This book
stirred controversy and caused Solzhenitsyn to be widely accused of anti-Semitism. The book became a
best seller in Russia. Solzhenitsyn
begins this work with a plea for "patient mutual comprehension" on the
part of Russians and Russian Jews. The author writes that the book was
conceived in the hope of promoting "mutually agreeable and fruitful
pathways for the future development of Russian - Jewish relations."
There
is sharp division on the allegation of anti-Semitism.
From Solzhenitsyn's own essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the
Life of Nations", he
calls for Russians and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the
"renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically supported a
Marxist dictatorship after the October
Revolution. At the end of chapter 15, he writes that Jews must
answer for the
"revolutionary cutthroats" in their ranks just as Russian Gentiles must
repent "for the pogroms,
for those merciless arsonist peasants, for ... crazed revolutionary
soldiers." It is not, he adds, a matter of answering "before other
peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God."
Similarities
between Two Hundred
years together and an
antisemitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future
Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, has led to inference that he
stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself claims
that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and then
manipulated, forty years ago. However,
according to the
historian Semyon Reznik,
textological
analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
In
1984 Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by Nikolay Kazantsev, a monarchist
Russo - Argentine journalist, for Nasha
Strana, a Russian language newspaper based in Buenos Aires.
In
the
interview he said: "We (Russia) are walking a narrow istmus
between Communists and the World Jewry. Neither is acceptable for us...
And I mean this not in the racial sense, but in the sense of the Jewry
as a certain world view. The Jewry is embodied in "Fevralism" (i.e.
democracy). Neither side is acceptable to us in the case the War breaks
out." He also described the United States as a "province of Israel". Russian dissident writer Vladimir
Voynovich, interviewed for Radio
Liberty on the first anniversary of Solzhenitsyn'
death, has alleged that
Solzhenitshyn harbored anti-Semitic sentiments all his life, as
attested by the 1964 manuscript he later developed into "200 Years
Together". Voynovich further alleged that Solzhenitsyn deliberately
concealed this anti-Semitism, because he knew this would have prevented
him from receiving the Nobel
Prize. In
some
of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998),
Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian
'democracy,' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He
defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme
nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government
to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of the 25 million
ethnic Russians in the "near abroad"
of
the
former Soviet Union. He also sought to protect the national
character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the
admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from
other countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show, where he
freely expressed his views. The show was cancelled because of low
ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to maintain a relatively high
profile in the media. Delivering
the
commencement
address at Harvard in 1978, he called the United
States spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he
said, speaking in Russian through a translator, suffered from a
"decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die
for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States
government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in
Vietnam. He criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked
its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy. He said
that the West erred in measuring other civilizations by its own model.
While faulting Soviet society for denying fair legal treatment of
people, he also faulted the West for being too legalistic: "A society
which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is
taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Shortly after his death, professor Richard
Pipes,
a history professor at Harvard, wrote of him: "Solzhenitsyn blamed the
evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European
origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other
European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He
reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism
and Stalinism could be found in Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian
history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism.
While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the
extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by
non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship
or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was
absurd.".
In
his
1978
Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn argued over Russian culture,
that the West erred in "denying its autonomous character and therefore
never understood it". Solzhenitsyn
emphasized
the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian regime, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov.
He
asserted that Imperial Russia did not practice any real censorship in the style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners
typically were not always forced into labor camps, and
that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one
ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union. He noted that the Tsar's
secret police, or Okhrana,
was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial
Russian Army.
In
a
speech commenorating the Vendée
Uprising, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with Jacobins of the French
Revolution. However, he commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the execution of Maximilien
Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent raged unabated from 1917
until the Khrushchev thaw in the 1950s.
He
believed
that revolutionary violence comes from the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
arguing Marxism is violent. His conclusion
is that Marxist Governments will always be dictatorships, no matter
which country they exist in. According
to
Solzhenitsyn,
Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet
Union. He believed that all ethnic cultures have been oppressed in
favor of an atheistic Marxism. Russian culture was even more repressed
than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more
afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any
other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a
threat by the West but rather as allies. Solzhenitsyn
said that for every country, great power status deforms and harms the
national character and that he has never wished great power status for
Russia. He rejected the view that the USA and Russia are natural
rivals, saying that before the [Russian] revolution, they were natural
allies and that during the American
Civil
War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and
France, which supported the Confederacy],
and then they were allies in the First World War. But beginning with
Communism, Russia ceased to exist and the confrontation was not at all
with Russia but with the Communist Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn
criticized
the Allies for
not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in
World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression of the
nations of Eastern Europe.
Solzhenitsyn
claimed
the Western democracies apparently cared little
about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war
quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West. While stationed in
East Prussia as an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes
against the civilian German population by Soviet "liberators" as
the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women were
gang raped to death. He wrote a poem entitled "Prussian Nights"
about
these
incidents. In it, the first person narrator seems to
approve of the troops' crimes as revenge for German atrocities,
expressing his desire to take part in the plunder himself. The poem
describes the rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers
mistakenly thought to be a German.
In his The Gulag
Archipelago Solzhenitsyn
rejected
the view that it was Stalin who created the Soviet totalitarian
state. He argued that it was Lenin who started the mass
executions, created a planned economy,
founded
the Cheka which would later be turned
into the KGB, and
started the system of labor camps later known as Gulag. Solzhenitsyn
was
the most prominent of the Nobel Laureate Mikhail
Sholokhov's many detractors. He alleged that the work which made
Sholokhov's international reputation, And Quiet Flows
the Don was
written by Fyodor Kryukov,
a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik,
who
died in 1920, possibly in retaliation for Sholokhov scathing
opinion re One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn claimed that
Sholokhov found the manuscript and published it under his own name. These rumors first appeared
in the late 1920s, but an investigation upheld Sholokhov's authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don and the allegations were
denounced as malicious slander in Pravda.
A
1984 monograph by Geir Kjetsaa and others demonstrated
through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely
author of Don. And in 1987, several thousand pages of notes and
drafts of the work were discovered and authenticated. During
the second world war, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid,
and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily
Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Following
Kudashov's death, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she
never disclosed the fact of owning it. The manuscript was finally found
by the Institute of World Literature of Russia's Academy of Sciences in
1999 with assistance from the Russian Government. An analysis of the
novel has unambiguously proved Sholokhov's authorship. The writing
paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand,
and 285 are transcribed by his wife Maria and sisters. In 1973,
near the height of the Sino-Soviet
conflict, Solzhenitsyn sent a Letter
to
the Soviet Leaders to
a
limited
number of upper echelon Soviet officials. This work, which
was published for the general public in the Western world a year after
it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's
authorities to Give
them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while.
And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of
unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and
instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics (a
million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and
guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if they like. The main source
of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great many
points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will also
melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter possibility
and perhaps won't
take place at all [author's
emphasis].
Once
in
America, Solzhenitsyn urged the United States to continue its
involvement in the Vietnam War.
In
his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World
Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. did not
understand the Vietnam War.
He
rhetorically
asks if the American Anti-War Movement ever realized
the effects their actions had on Vietnam: "But members of the U.S.
antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern
nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million
people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from
there?" During his time in the United States,
Solzhenitsyn made several controversial public statements: notably, he
accused Pentagon
Papersleak Daniel
Ellsberg of treason. Solzhenitsyn
strongly
condemned the bombing of
Yugoslavia during
the Kosovo War,
saying
"there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler." Solzhenitsyn
has
stated that the ongoing Ukrainian effort to have the 1930s famine,
the Holodomor,
recognized
as an act of genocide
against the Ukrainian people is
in
fact historical
revisionism. According to Solzhenitsyn, the famine was caused by
the nature of the
Communist regime, under which all peoples suffered. As such it
was not an assault by the
Russian people against the Ukrainian people, and the wish to represent
it as such is only recent and politically motivated. Solzhenitsyn's views on this matter are
in line with those of several historians of the period (such as Dmitri
Volkogonov and Aleksandr
Bushkov) as well as the
official stance of the Russian Government. This view suggests that
policies of collectivization and
mass seizure of property that lead to the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s
were a result of the political (communist) and economic (favoring rapid
industrial growth over consumption) policies of the Soviet Union, and
not racial hatred against the Ukrainians. |