{"id":2817,"date":"2008-08-05T23:06:22","date_gmt":"2008-08-05T23:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2817"},"modified":"2008-08-05T23:06:22","modified_gmt":"2008-08-05T23:06:22","slug":"on-solzhenitsyn-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2817","title":{"rendered":"On Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nobel Prize winning writer and former Soviet disident <strong>Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn<\/strong> died the other day at the venerable age of 89. To put Solzhenitsyn in perspective, over the course of his life he\u00a0had survived\u00a0Stalin&#8217;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.\u00a0 His last years were spent in ill-health, moving closer to Russian nationalist circles and celebrating Russia as an Orthodox\u00a0civilization spiritually apart from the liberal West.<\/p>\n<p>An uncompromising and fearless moral voice against Soviet tyranny, Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s monumental work, <strong><em>The Gulag Archipelago<\/em><\/strong>, shook the Soviet Union&#8217;s ruling\u00a0nomenklatura to the core. Along with the liberal physicist <strong>Andrei Sakharov<\/strong>, Solzhenitsyn was the dissident that Soviet leaders most feared given his ability not only to condemn the system&#8217;s crimes but to articulate an alternative, Russophilic, <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" width=\"250\" src=\"http:\/\/www.russiablog.org\/SolzhenitsynGulagMugshot1953.jpg\" height=\"371\" \/>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0he had\u00a0any\u00a0forerunners in modern Russian history, Solzhenitsyn probably would have sympathized with the Tsarist Prime Minister and conservative reformer <strong>Petr Stolypin<\/strong> who had said before his assassination,\u00a0that &#8221; &#8230;.what we want is a Great Russia&#8221;. Solzhenitsyn dwelt on Russianess and wrote in the language in a way that eschewed foreign influences and saw other, even deeply entwined,\u00a0ethnic groups in Russia\u00a0from Jews to Ukranians and Belarussians as &#8220;others&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>A man wrong on many smaller things, on what he had right Solzhenitsyn was a titan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<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\u00a0had survived\u00a0Stalin&#8217;s Great Terror, combat in WWII, torture at the hands of the NKVD, slave labor, cancer, harrassment by the KGB and enforced exile [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146,234,51,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cold-war","category-communism","category-history","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}