Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an icon of the great Russian writer in the mold of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, died of heart failure this week in his Moscow home. He was 89 years old. As hundreds gathered in the rain on Tuesday to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn, other writers, national leaders and public figures began pondering the essence of who he was for Russian society - dissident, writer, a historical figure endemic to the 20th century, thinker or simply legend. He was buried Wednesday at Donskoy Cemetery in a ceremony that included goose-stepping guards and the dirges of a religious choir.
A Day in the Life
Indeed, the dismantling of the Communist state in Russia would not have been possible without Solzhenitsyn's relentless pursuit in uncovering the atrocities of the Stalin regime, a quest that began in 1962 with the publication of his first short novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Based on his own three years at a labor camp in Kazakhstan, it chronicled the typical, "almost happy" day of a political prisoner. "He was one of the undisputed great Russian writers left," the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a supporter of Solzhenitsyn who suffered for his political views in the 1970s, told The Moscow News. "He put up a barricade against our Stalinist past that was documented in The Gulag Archipelago and the rest of his books."
If Soviet authorities initially approved the publication, they would come to rue their lenience, as an unprecedented body of work documenting the vast chain of Gulag camps that developed to sustain the Soviet Union's forced labor economy followed. The Gulag Archipelago included volumes of eyewitness accounts, personal experience and research at a time when the existence of the camps was not disclosed. A documentary account, the book combined minute descriptions of the political, legal and bureaucratic apparatus that kept the archipelago alive, with bald, unsentimental prose to portray a regime that was solidly founded on slave labor, something that was irrevocably at odds with Communist ideology itself. Completed in 1968, the manuscript - with a few dog-eared copies left to circulate among dissidents and the intelligentsia back home, who reportedly had only 24 hours to read the book before passing it on - was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Europe.
By the time the KGB got their hands on one of the manuscripts, it was too late to silence a writer whose works had leaked to the West and irrevocably tarnished the Soviet regime. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize - but was unable to attend the Stockholm ceremony. Soviet authorities expected him to refuse the prize, much like Boris Pasternak did before him, but Solzhenitsyn held firm. In 1974, he was convicted of treason and exiled - sending him to the camps for a second round was no longer an option.
War, Camp and Exile: The Making of a Dissident
Solzhenitsyn was born into a humble family in 1918, just as Russia had gotten itself out of World War I and into the thick of revolution and civil war. With his father killed in a hunting accident before he was born, he was raised by an educated mother steeped in the Russian Orthodox faith.
But there was hardly anything to predestine the young Solzhenitsyn to become a great writer. A communist despite his Russian Orthodox upbringing, he studied mathematics, philosophy, literature and history. With the breakout of World War II, he was so eager to join the front that he bypassed medical limitations, and went on to command an artillery unit. He was still fighting on German soil when a letter sent to a friend that was critical of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin landed him in prison. He was sentenced under the ubiquitous Article 58 (counterrevolutionary activities) to eight years in a labor camp.
Between 1945 and 1954, Solzhenitsyn endured forced labor, exile and even a bout with cancer. Those years served as the basis of his future works, including The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, both of which were published in the West.
That he refused to keep silent about his experience turned him into a serious problem for Soviet authorities. While Nikita Khrushchev approved Solzhenitsyn's first novel for publication, hoping that it would help his anti-Stalinist liberalization policies, Leonid Brezhnev's more repressive regime tried to clamp down on the writer. However, it was no longer possible to do so. The Soviet authorities were forced to acknowledge him, albeit referring to his work as "the lying writings of Solzhenitsyn" when forced to confront it. Exiling him from Russia was a necessary concession.
But when Solzhenitsyn finally settled in the United States after a brief stay in Switzerland, he somewhat disappointed his new compatriots. Never a conformist, he was not about to begin - nor was his American exile a welcome one for a man who had never wanted to leave his homeland in the first place. Accommodated first by Stanford University, the Hoover Institution and then Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn gave a vitriolic Harvard Commencement Address in 1978, lashing out against modern Western culture and lambasting everything from consumerism to rock music.
As a dissident who had fought against totalitarianism back home, Solzhenitsyn was expected to become a herald of liberty. Instead, he showed himself as a monarchist, a Russophile and a critic of Western-style liberalism. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once had to talk President Gerald Ford out of a meeting with the writer, explaining that his political views dishearten many of his fellow dissidents. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote of him in 2001 as a dominant writer of the 20th century, but also as "a freak, a monarchist, a crank, a has-been."
After his Soviet citizenship was restored, Solzhenitsyn traveled back to Russia in 1994, settling with his second wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo, west of Moscow. If Americans were disillusioned by his failure to embrace their values, then Solzhenitsyn was in no rush to praise Boris Yeltsin's Russia after the fall of Communist rule, often railing against him as viciously as he had denounced so much in American culture. Solzhenitsyn continued with a number of historic works - most notable was his controversial Two Hundred Years Together, on the relations of Russians and Jews. From dissident, he was on the way to establishing himself as a reactionary.
Indeed, what appeared as a turn of heart baffled fellow dissidents and Westerners. But this view failed to take into account that Solzhenitsyn was never a typical dissident - a case in point is his polemic with the more liberal dissident, Andrei Sakharov.
"There is really no difference between his views from the 1960s and his views of the 1990s," Dmitry Bykov, writer, journalist and author of an acclaimed biography of Boris Pasternak, told The Moscow News. "He was a conservative dissident who believed that Soviet rule perverted the essence of Russia. In fact, there was a whole school of conservative Soviet dissidents, and Solzhenitsyn was just the flag bearer of the right-wing opposition, which criticized the Soviet regime from a conservative, right-wing position."
As such, there was also nothing surprising in his relative support of President Vladimir Putin's regime. In a May 2006 interview he gave to The Moscow News, Solzhenitsyn admitted that "saving the nation - numerically, physically and morally - is the greatest task for the state. All measures to raise living standards - housing, diet, health care, education, morality, etc. - are in effect designed to save the nation. This is an overriding priority."
In 2007, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a State Prize for humanitarian achievement, thus sealing what had superficially appeared to be a reconciliation with the state. And yet Solzhenitsyn was far from supporting any single political system.
"Solzhenitsyn certainly liked Putin more than Yeltsin. He saw something of Stoplypin in him," said Bykov, referring to the reform-minded prime minister who served under Tsar Nicholas II. "They even discussed the new forest code. And I think the big part of Russian society agreed with him on this. But of course the [government] never conformed fully to Solzhenitsyn's criteria, which were complex and contradictory."
Meanwhile, Oleg Ossetinsky, a Soviet screenwriter and acclaimed musician, had a different impression of Solzhenitsyn's influence. "He was unable to bring Russia to reason," he told The Moscow News. "I think he came to understand, though, that things don't change in Russia."
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was one of the hundreds of mourners who gathered Tuesday in the rain outside Moscow's Academy of Sciences to pay their last tribute to a man who had remained for the last decade a living legend.
"We are proud that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was our compatriot and contemporary," Putin said Monday in a statement. "His activities as a writer and public figure, his entire long, thorny life journey will remain for us a model of true devotion, selfless service to the people, Motherland, the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism."
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship as the Soviet Union's last leader, said that the writer had played a vital role in overcoming the Stalinist regime that had imprisoned him and millions of others. His books had "changed the minds of millions of people, making them rethink their past and present... We owe him a lot."
By Anna Arutunyan
