On Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P.
Nobel Prize winning writer and former Soviet disident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died the other day at the venerable age of 89. To put Solzhenitsyn in perspective, over the course of his life he had survived Stalin’s Great Terror, combat in WWII, torture at the hands of the NKVD, slave labor, cancer, harrassment by the KGB and enforced exile to return in bittersweet triumph to his beloved Russia after the Soviet collapse. His last years were spent in ill-health, moving closer to Russian nationalist circles and celebrating Russia as an Orthodox civilization spiritually apart from the liberal West.
An uncompromising and fearless moral voice against Soviet tyranny, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, shook the Soviet Union’s ruling nomenklatura to the core. Along with the liberal physicist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn was the dissident that Soviet leaders most feared given his ability not only to condemn the system’s crimes but to articulate an alternative, Russophilic, 
nationalist political program that millions of Soviet citizens might find attractive. Solzhenitsyn was among the first to postulate an independent Ukraine in his writings and thought that a territorial reduction to the Russian core of the Soviet Union would lead to a healthy regeneration of Russian culture and values that had been so badly damaged by Communism.
Solzhenitsyn was not and never claimed to be an admirer of Western liberal democracy, of whose chances as a historical victor over Communism he deeply and incorrectly doubted. If he had any forerunners in modern Russian history, Solzhenitsyn probably would have sympathized with the Tsarist Prime Minister and conservative reformer Petr Stolypin who had said before his assassination, that ” ….what we want is a Great Russia”. Solzhenitsyn dwelt on Russianess and wrote in the language in a way that eschewed foreign influences and saw other, even deeply entwined, ethnic groups in Russia from Jews to Ukranians and Belarussians as “others”.
A man wrong on many smaller things, on what he had right Solzhenitsyn was a titan.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Bravo.
August 6th, 2008 at 1:48 am
I found this quote from Solzhenitsyn at Open Democracy: It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Completely the opposite about Ukraine: see this interview with A.I. Solzhenitsyn right before returning to Russia:
…"Well, what about Ukraine? Hasn’t Russia made threats toward several of the former U.S.S.R. member states?
Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S. They declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance to the new nation. Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of civic, property and employment rights…"
Solzhenitsyn in his last years became the person he fought against in his dissident years: an apologist and propagandist for statist authoritarian nationalistic Russia, extending its supposed rights towards neighbors it oppressed for centuries, including independent Ukraine. He became vocal anti-Semite, wrote odious pseudo-historical filthy opus where he not only repeated notorious lies, he added his own: that both Russian revolutions were devised and perpetrated by Jews to eliminate Slavic ethnos, that this conspiracy has continued into Stalin’s years and that all camps/Gulag/KGB, the whole system was a product of Jewish policy , aimed at Russian genocide.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:20 am
A footnote re: the 200 Years Together.
In the comments to Marginal Revolution’ post Sailer accuse Matt of forming an opinion about the book without reading it (translation was published in French, but not in English). he’s got his retort, but I want you to read this summary by someone who actually read the French edition – someone as anti-Semitic as Solzhenitsyn: he found exactly what he was looking for. Read also the admiring comments; I’m sure Sailer would find some other rhetorical device to still deny the book was anti-Semitic.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:47 am
Hi Tatyana,
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Earlier, while writing The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn had felt differently and had written with deep sympathy toward the Ukranians in the camps, including the Western Uniates, as well as other nationalities like the Estonians, Chechens and religious minorities. Regarding Ukraine he expressed ( I’m paraphrasing as my 2 vol. set does not have an index to find the passage) hope the Ukrainians would stay with a free Russia but if not then Russian fondness for the Crimea was not reason enough to try to keep them.
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I have had this discussion many times regarding figures who did something great; shortly thereafter, someone points out a failing or flaw of character as if to say "See – he was nothing much". Whether we are discussing Solzhenitsyn or Jefferson or Lincoln or whomever, the argument strikes me as profoundly wrongheaded. The one act does not cancel out the other. Jefferson being a slaveholder does not negate his setting in motion the idea that all men are created equal that ultimately undid slavery. Solzhenitsyn falling into a subsequent moral retreat does not undo his previous battle against tyranny.
As an old man, Solzhenitsyn was bitter at the ruin of his country and less than what he once had been and where he falls short he ought to be criticized. That said, Solzhenitsyn stood up in defiance, repeatedly, of Soviet authorities when very few others dared to do so, and dared them to re-imprison him. They blinked, he did not and his courage gave heart to the oppressed and demoralized the oppressors.
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For that we should remember him.
August 6th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Regarding 200 Years Together which I have not read:
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The Bolshevik wing of the the Russian Social-Democratic movement had a large number of ethnic minorities, among whom Jews were prominent – as were Letts, Transcaucasians, Volga Germans, Poles and Latvians. This is unsurprising as they all felt oppressed in the prison house of nations that was the Russian Empire.
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If in the wider revolutionary movement you include the Jewish Socialist Bund an argument for overrepresentation of Jews is viable. The Cheka was headed by a Polish nobleman and fanatic Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinskii and he recruited not a few Jews and Latvians in particular. Many of these were purged along with Yagoda and replaced by Russians, briefly, because Beria would bring his own followers into the commanding heights of state security.
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Turning this demographic skewing into a " Jewish conspiracy" though, is anti-semitic wingnuttery on Solzhenitsyn’s part. Jewish Bolsheviks were deeply alienated from their roots in much the same way as Stalin was from his Georgian past as a seminarian. Stalin moreover, had no particular love of Jews and this prejudice flamed into mad hatred and potential genocide in his last years.
August 6th, 2008 at 11:51 am
It’s not the same discussion. It’s as if Jefferson, after proclaiming that all men were created equal, would became trader in slaves.
You don’t need to convince me, Zen, about AIS ‘ "anti-semitic wingnuttery". I’ve lived in that country, and I’m a Jew. This is not just a "history in the book" for me.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
" This is not just a "history in the book" for me."
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I understand and respect the immediacy of the subject for you Tatyana. Having been trained as a historian though, everything is ultimately "history of the book" for me.
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"It’s not the same discussion. It’s as if Jefferson, after proclaiming that all men were created equal, would became trader in slaves"
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Ahem. While definitely not a "slave dealer" by profession, Jefferson as a major landowner bought and sold slaves as a matter of course. His record here contrasts poorly with that of Washington’s and several other founding fathers who were slaveholders.
August 7th, 2008 at 4:29 am
I meant to say – it’s not news to me; we’ve studied the history of Russia and history of Communist Party and all other related history courses in school, starting in 4th grade. Just like American kids study for a few years the history of US. And all the facts that were left out of textbooks I [luckily] had a chance to find out when the gates got opened, at the end of 80’s, in addition to any unofficial materials I could find before.
You can’t pick and choose what part of somebody’s life work to preserve as his legacy; I believe historians are trained to collect all sorts of information, for objective evaluation. Solzhenitsyn’s last year negated his earlier, before-exile-activities. I tend to agree with Cathy Young in her article in Reason (i think, in 2002, not sure) – he was always a Russian variety of paleoconservative; proponent of collectivism of patriarchal communal peasant living; anti-individualist, defendant of a singular, uniquely Russian (read: Asian rather than Western) evolution, a religious nut. The fact that contemporary Russian regime found itself incompatible with these views doesn’t make him a beacon of Western liberalism. There were many, many more persecuted dissidents who fit the description better. Cheka was shooting monarchists as well as SR and anarchists; Stalin persecuted any dissent and often invented some where there were none, and all consequent Soviet leaders followed the same scheme; it’s the logic of tyrannical power from the times of Rome. The fact that they all had suffered a terrible fate should not deter from the difference in their ideas; Solzhenitsyn’s had not much in common with libertarianism.
August 7th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Cathy Young’s article. Published in 2004, not 2002.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Hi Tatyana,
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Ah, I think we are quite close in age. Young is wrong. Solzhenitsyn moved toward Russophilism and reactionary mysticism over a period of decades. He did not end up where he began.
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"Solzhenitsyn’s last year negated his earlier, before-exile-activities"
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No they don’t. At least not by any rational calculus that I can see. If you can explain your reasoning on this point I’d be interested.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:45 am
I just did. Not interested in explaining more. He’s not worth talking that much about.