Birthday: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who declared, "A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Author, historian

The world and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn seemed to spend most of his 90 years talking past each other, not quite taking the other’s main point.

Though his family lost their money and estate after the revolution of 1917, Solzhenitsyn grew up a good Communist, he thought. While he served as an Army artillery sergeant in World War II, Soviet censors read his mail and took umbrage at some criticisms of Stalin and the war effort.

Offhand comments could get you eight years in a labor camp, and that’s what Solzhenitsyn got. Shifted from camp to camp, he worked as a miner, a bricklayer and a foundry supervisor. His wife of twelve years divorced him in 1952. to preserve her work and residence permits she would have otherwise lost because of his conviction.

Released in 1953, he was sentenced to internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he nearly died of misdiagnosed cancer, and, after recovering, taught school. With ample time to reflect on his wartime and prison experiences, he abandoned Communism and evolved into a philosophical Christian.

Solzhenitsyn had been thinking of writing an epic novel of World War I since he was eighteen; during his imprisonment and exile he began collecting the stories of others like him. After the new Soviet leader, Khrushchev, made his famous Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was released from exile and enjoyed a sort of exoneration. He taught school days and wrote at night, never confident a word of his efforts would see the light of day.

In 1960 he contacted a magazine editor and showed him the manuscript of One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his novel of life in the labor camps. The book was sent all the way up the line to Khrushchev, who, telling the Politburo there was a Stalinist in all of them that needed rooting out, approved publication.

Published in magazine, then book form, One Day caused a sensation, selling nearly 100,000 copies. A political theme, exposure of Party wrongs by a non-Party member, with the Party’s approval? And it read like real life, not the turgid prose of socialist realism. Its impact was seismic as the Soviet reading public pondered the implications of this sudden, apparent, liberalization.

Solzhenitsyn was a golden boy. The book became a set text in schools. He was allowed to publish three short stories as well. Three translations were rushed into print in America in 1963.

Then it all fell down. Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, after the implications of his liberalizations frightened the Soviet establishment. The old regime, restored, went after Solzhenitsyn with a vengeance. The KGB seized his writings in 1965. By 1968 he had become an enemy of the state; in 1969 he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. His work circulated by samizdat- privately made and circulated copies- in the USSR. He gave interviews to foreign journalists, discussing his works in progress; he gave a reading of The First Circle to an audience of 600. Smuggling his work out of the country in those years, Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Cancer Ward, appeared in Europe in 1968; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

Solzhenitsyn’s writing enraged and terrified the Soviets. It undermined the entire moral foundation of Communism, detailing how the Soviet state could not exist and function without the ability to imprison masses of people and force their labor on the great public works and science projects with which the state trumpeted its superiority over the West.

Solzhenitsyn declined the trip to Sweden, fearing the Soviets would not let him return home. The government kept ratcheting up the denunciations and pressure; Solzhenitsyn, isolated, wrote faster. An underground network sheltered him and smuggled his work out. In 1971 the KGB tried to poison him. The first volume of his war epic, August 1914, hit Western bookstores in 1972, and chronicled Russia’s disastrous experience of the Great War.

His expose’ of the labor camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, saw print in France in 1973 and America the next year, driving the KGB around the bend. Earlier that year they had traduced Solzhenitsyn’s secretary into giving up the only complete copy still in Russia; shortly afterward, she killed herself.

Soviet authorities were apoplectic. Radio Liberty was broadcasting the book to Eastern Europe. Condemnations were hailing down from Western governments and intellectuals. As David Remnick reported in The New Yorker, a meeting of the Soviet brass was called in January 1974, to figure out what to do:

Nikolai Podgorny, the chairman of the Presidium, was furious, and indignantly defended Andropov’s proposal to suppress Solzhenitsyn against any prospect of a righteous response abroad. “In China, there are public executions,” he said. “In Chile, the Fascist regime shoots and tortures people! In Ireland, the English use repression on the working people! We must deal with an enemy who gets away with slinging mud at everybody.” 

“We can send Solzhenitsyn away to serve his sentence in Verkhoyansk,” beyond the Arctic Circle, said Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Premier, a “liberal” in the eyes of many foreign analysts. “Not a single foreign correspondent will go visit him there, because it’s so cold.”

Yuri Andropov, the KGB head, sent feelers to Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, and reported to Soviet chairman Leonid Brezhnev the Germans were willing to take Solzhenitsyn off their hands. As bad as it would be having him loosed in the West, keeping him at home would be worse. Plans laid, the KGB arrested Solzhenitsyn in February, 1974, charged him with treason, jailed him, and put him on a plane to Germany the next day. Then the government stripped him of his citizenship.

Solzhenitsyn sojourned in West German for a time. He collected his Nobel Prize, and accepted an invitation to live and write at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. The KGB hounded him, inserted several agents in his employ as secretaries, and tried to kill him again. His friends in the Soviet Union were subjected to reprisals for supporting him. In 1975 he bought an isolated home near Cavendish, Vermont, and went to ground.

His second wife, and an American military attache, had smuggled out most of his archives; Solzhenitsyn built a “writing house” next to his home. His early years in America were one big disaster. American conservatives, led by freshman US Senator Jesse Helms, wanted to make Solzhenitsyn their poster boy in the war of values. He even became, Remick reported, a proxy in the looming battle for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, a tool of the exponents of Ronald Reagan. Dick Cheney, President Ford’s chief of staff, and Donald Rumsfeld, another aide, urged the President to meet the author:

The Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, sent a memo through his executive assistant, George Springsteen, to Ford’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, saying, “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow-dissidents. Not only would a meeting with the President offend the Soviets but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s views of the United States and its allies. . . . We recommend that the President not receive Solzhenitsyn.” When I called Ford in Colorado recently  [1994]to ask about the incident, he spoke blandly about the need to avoid offending the Kremlin during sensitive arms negotiations. “It’s the old never-ending conflict between foreign-policy concerns and domestic political concerns,” he said. “As a matter of principle, we made the right decision.” But it seems that he was rather less measured about it at the time. According to his former press secretary, Ron Nessen, Ford called Solzhenitsyn “a god-damn horse’s ass” and said that the author wanted to come to the White House merely to get more lecture dates and publicize his books.

American liberals were standoffish; he proved quite conservative in many of his views, and they never figured out how to square his documentation the horrors of the Gulag with the American Left’s long romance with Communist ideals.

For his part, Solzhenitsyn refused to become a celebrity, or to embrace the consumerist American utopia. He looked an Old Testament prophet on a bad day. In 1978 he gave a scorching commencement address at Harvard, dismembering the western pop culture and consumerist society in the most withering terms. In a Hoover speech, delivered in his angry, high-pitched voice, he scolded:

Freedom! To fill people’s mailboxes, eyes, ears, and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right to peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements. Freedom! For publishers and film producers to poison the younger generations with corrupting filth. Freedom! For adolescents of fourteen to eighteen to immerse themselves in idleness and pleasure instead of intensive study and spiritual growth. . . . Freedom! To divulge the defense secrets of one’s country for personal political gain.

The Soviets, having feared the West would lionize the exile, were delighted to see him alienating everyone in sight. They kept up their harassment, filling his mailbox with photos of dead people in car accidents, murder victims, and dead children (by then Solzhenitsyn had four of his own). He put up a chain link fence around his property- appearing at a town  meeting to apologize for the inconveniences his residence caused them- and became more and more a contented recluse. His wife set the type for his work and sent it to his publishers in Paris; he kids helped with research. He had decades worth of correcting history to do.

And he was absolutely confident he would go home. The West expected him to embrace exile and join their team. To Solzhenitsyn, the West was simply where he had to be until he could get back to Russia. He embraced nothing, and barely learned English.

He turned out to be right. As the Soviet Union crumbled after 1989, his citizenship was restored, and his publication ban was lifted after 27 years. His moment was at hand, Remnick wrote:

In 1990, [he] emerged from his isolation in Cavendish, Vermont, and issued a vatic manifesto entitled “How to Revitalize Russia.” Published at great length in Komsomolskaya Pravda, it was a document out of time, written in a prophetic nineteenth-century voice, with archaic diction and priestly cadences. 

The manifesto went nowhere, but in 1994, the call finally came. He packed up and flew back to Moscow.

75 years old, he arrived in a much-changed landscape, far too keen on binging on long-forbidden Western amusements. He got a television show, where he harangued people. He wrote long articles trying to show everyone the historical path from which Russia had strayed and to which she needed to retur. He praised the emerging strongman, Vladimir Putin for his nationalist tactics toward Ukraine. Putin gave him awards and called on him at his country home.

A crank, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, Russians called him: Solzhenitsyn kept writing. His collected works grew to some twenty volumes.

Let David Remnick have the last words:

He was deeply aware that the costs of ideology, violence, and empire had not been paid in full. While American triumphalists were still indulging in clichés of how Ronald Reagan had won the Cold War, Solzhenitsyn anticipated the persistence of the old and unrepentant élites, the former Communist Party chiefs and K.G.B. officials who so easily transformed themselves into “democrats” and “businessmen”:

We were recently entertained by a naïve fable of the happy arrival at the “end of history,” of the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss; the ultimate global arrangement had supposedly been attained. But we all see and sense that something very different is coming, something new, and perhaps quite stern. No, tranquility does not promise to descend on our planet, and will not be granted us so easily.

Solzhenitsyn died on August 3rd [2008]...Vladimir Putin, the former K.G.B. operative and Russia’s de-facto President, unabashed by irony, paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s service to “the ideals of freedom, justice, and humanism.” Later that week, while attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Putin discussed with his teammates and fellow heads of state a non-sporting matter: he had ordered his tanks and troop trucks into South Ossetia, in the Caucasus. His Army also attacked Georgia proper, most forcefully the city of Gori, the birthplace of Iosef Dzhugashvili—better known as Stalin, who in his day helped redraw the volatile mosaic of the Caucasus.


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