ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, WITNESS AGAINST COMMUNISM
By Lee Penn
The Christian Challenge
August, 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn – the Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer whose books definitively exposed Soviet tyranny and mass murder to the world – died of heart failure in Moscow in August at age 89. He lived to return home from a 20-year exile and to see what he – almost alone – had expected during the 1970s: the fall of the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn’s most widely known works were “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” (published in 1962 with government approval, during the Khrushchev-era thaw in Soviet repression), and “Gulag Archipelago,” a searing three-volume history of the Soviet camp system, published in 1974, that traced repression back to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, and forward to the Brezhnev era. The Soviet response to the book was swift: arrest, a treason conviction, revocation of citizenship, and expulsion from the country.
Solzhenitsyn spent his exile in Zurich, Switzerland and in Cavendish, Vermont. He warned the West of its own moral disorientation – most notably, in an address that he made to the commencement class of 1978 at Harvard University. His traditionalist views gained the enmity of Western liberals, and led to President Gerald Ford’s refusal to invite him to the White House after the Russian author arrived in the US. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and continued to write, but he did not play a high-profile role in post-Soviet politics.
Solzhenitsyn was born in December 1918, and was raised in an Orthodox family. During his youth, he became a fervent Communist, and won a Stalin scholarship due to his work in physics and mathematics at Rostov University. During World War II, he rose to become a captain in the Red Army. However, he was arrested at the German front in 1945 for “anti-Soviet agitation” after the secret police discovered his mildly anti-Stalin remarks in a letter to a boyhood friend. Solzhenitsyn’s dissent earned him an 8-year term in the Soviet concentration camp system – the network of prisons and death cells that he taught the world to refer to as the Gulag. His prison experiences inspired two novels, “First Circle” and the aforementioned “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,” and his history of the camp system, “Gulag Archipelago.” While in prison, Solzhenitsyn returned to the Orthodox faith. Soon after Stalin died in 1953, he was released to a term of exile in a village in Kazakhstan. While there, he battled cancer – an experience chronicled in another novel, “Cancer Ward.”
In 1956, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated, and allowed to move close to Moscow. He won Khrushchev’s personal blessing – and a Lenin Prize nomination – for publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,” a story of a day in a prisoner’s life in a hard-labor camp under Stalin. But after Brezhnev deposed Khrushchev in 1964, the regime put increasing pressure on Solzhenitsyn and other dissenters – culminating in his 1974 arrest, after the KGB had discovered the long-hidden manuscript of “Gulag Archipelago.”
Some of the most enduring – and universally applicable – lines from this work are this reminder about good and evil in the human heart: “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 un-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. And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good, as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”
Sources: Washington Post, Gulag Archipelago, Vol. II.
END
