Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In the times of the Soviet Union the archetype of the ideal citizen was characterised as “Soviet Man”, men like the coal miner Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov whose allegedly prodigious output was used as the basis of productivity to launch Stalin’s first 5 Year Plan. Hindsight shows us that Soviet Man was a feature of the propaganda machine rather than a reality and the Soviet Union was not the most productive of society’s but did produce impressive dodgy statistics. One true Soviet Man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn born on the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution, a brilliant academic who fought bravely for his country in the “Great Patriotic War” and found himself condemned to a labour camp for a harmless remark about “Uncle Joe.” His searing exposure of the inhumanity of the Soviet system destroyed the moral force of communism and reiterated and revealed a universal truth of all totalitarian systems; that inhumanity dehumanises not just the victims of the system but even more so, the perpetrators of the inhumanity.

Russia is in mourning today (4 July 2008) for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate whose writing helped conquer the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn, 89, suffered heart failure at his home outside Moscow last night. His wife, Natalya, said today: "He was working all day yesterday, as usual. He did not suffer for long. He just became ill in the evening when he had already gone to bed. He wanted to die at home, and he has died at home. He wanted to die in summer, and he has died in summer. He lived a difficult but happy life. And he and I were happy."

Solzhenitsyn's death robs Russia of a hero whose stature was unequalled. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, described him today as a man of "unique destiny, whose name will remain". At a momentous time in Russian history Solzhenitsyn's quiet and courageous revolt against the evils of Josef Stalin's labour camps became an unshakeable force for change. His books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago revealed for the first time the horrors of the camps where ordinary Soviet citizens lived and died in unimaginable conditions of hardship and cruelty. Often, their crimes were no more than mild offences against the dictates and ideology of the Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn after release from the Gulag in 1953

Solzhenitsyn was such a victim. He was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk. World War I had ended disastrously for Tsarist Russia and the nation plunged into civil war between Whites and Reds. Solzhenitsyn's family was white but his father died in a hunting accident before he was born. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and was persecuted by the newly installed Soviet regime. She was denied permanent employment and labouring alone, her family was forced into poverty from most of the 1920s and 30s. After earning degrees in philology, mathematics, and physics at Rostov University, Solzhenitsyn began teaching in 1941, aged 22 and seemed set for a brilliant academic career. That same year Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn enlisted and rose to the rank of artillery captain. He was decorated twice for bravery but this counted for little when, as the war was ending, he wrote a letter to an old friend in which he referred to the Soviet dictator Stalin as "the man with the moustache". This was considered an act of gross disrespect and he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. The Soviets who condemned him to the barren steppes of Kazakhstan could hardly have known it was a move that would contribute to the destruction of their system. Solzhenitsyn began to write, chronicling the minutiae of the camp inmates' suffering and the "crimes" for which they had been sentenced. His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a camp to which he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and it created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book - which became a major film starring Tom Courtenay - was lauded not only for its bravery, but for the quality of its unsparing prose.

The opening paragraph begins bleakly as it intends to continue;

“The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering.

The jangling stopped. Outside, it was still as dark as when Shukhov had gotten up in the night to use the latrine bucket — pitch-black, except for three yellow lights visible from the window, two in the perimeter, one inside the camp. “

And it continues in the same vein, similar to James Joyce’s prose of “meticulous meanness.” The Soviet system was stripped of ideological baggage and reduced to the systems casual and uncaring callousness and one man’s attempt to cope with its inhumanity and survive one more day. Nothing needed to be added and with the raw power, honesty and sparseness of Solzhenitsyn’s narrative it was not possible to take anything away.

Soviet prisoners on the way to the Gulag

When Khrushchev was removed, in 1964, the KGB re-asserted its control and reintroduced many of Stalin's measures against so-called thought-crime. Solzhenitsyn was again persecuted. His next book, The First Circle, was about inmates in a special camp for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential. Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps.

The novel Cancer Ward, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life: in this case, his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956. In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumour and dies - how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"

Solzhenitsyn's work gained power from the fact that no one was spared his anger. He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign. "Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs - and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades - and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people - and they believed it?"

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, and prisoner. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, a move described by Soviet leaders as provocative. He was banned from travelling to receive his prize, but he wrote an acceptance speech in which he quoted a Russian proverb: One word of truth can conquer the world.

Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Boll in exile in 1974

And so it seemed when his work gained currency not only in the West, but inside Russia. Underground copies of his books circulated widely among students and contributed greatly to the dissident movement-than sprang up in the early Seventies. He was perceived as an enemy within and in 1974 he was stripped of his citizenship and exiled on charges of treason. Solzhenitsyn went first to Germany and then to the US, where he settled in a dacha-style compound in Vermont, surrounded by birch and pine forests. He yearned to return to his homeland and although his citizenship was restored by Gorbachev in 1990, he refused to go back until the last vestiges of the Soviet regime had been removed. In 1994, he made a triumphant return, marked in a 56-day train journey from Russia's Far East to Moscow.

But if supporters of Western-style democracy believed they were owed a share in Solzhenitsyn's triumph, they were wrong. His vision was not a simplistic view of a struggle between communism and capitalism, in which capitalism was the just victor. He believed Russia to be a civilisation unique to itself, where no known system - including Western democracy - could properly work. While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before".

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming him for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO and his fostering of the new Russian billionaires, "oligarchs" such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.

When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honour, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted. Solzhenitsyn also criticised Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on the oligarchs. But then the two men drew together in a move that some perceived as a contradiction. Putin, after all, was a veteran of the same KGB apparatus that had victimised Solzhenitsyn. But the author saw in Putin something more vital to Russia's future, a concept of nationalism and unique destiny. More the pity then that Putin did not read his observation that in the camps of the Gulag that the Chechen’s would die rather than submit.

It was a matter of sadness to many of Solzhenitsyn's admirers that as Putin closed newspapers and tightened the state's grip on free speech and enterprise; the great writer appeared to endorse Putin's vision of a separate political and cultural destiny for Russia. In his final TV interview last year, Solzhenitsyn made clear that Western democracy was not the solution to Russia's ills, and he expressed solidarity with Putin for reviving the country's standing.

"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world," he said. "But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism ... As far as the state, the public mind and the economy are concerned, and Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."

Yet Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and that time has now passed. For many young Russians he is a distant, historical figure but in his time he was a clarion voice crying out for the rights of humanity against tyranny and it is arguable that his efforts and those of Andrei Sakharov destroyed the central moral claim of communism that its purpose was to create conditions for human happiness and fulfilment.


From the beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder". His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person - Solzhenitsyn himself - survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

His later years left his admirers in the West confused but his efforts in asserting the primacy of our humanity and defining Russian identity will endure long after his bones have been consigned to the earth of Mother Russia. The bravery of one man in refusing to accept his fate in the “meat grinder” led to a nation and the occupied peoples of the Iron Curtain also refusing to accept their fate. For reminding us of our common humanity this Nobel Laureate achieved a great deal and by removing the moral rationale from a system which claimed to be justified by moral purpose he changed the world. His moral righteousness will resonate forever where humans are crushed by “meat grinders”, be they in Tibet, Guantanamo, British interment camps in Ireland in the 70's, the CIA Gulag or the 5,600 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel.

South African writer and fellow Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee today described Solzhenitsyn as “a man of immense personal courage, and, as a writer, the one indisputable heir of Tolstoy."

But his message and great polemic gift is perhaps best summed up by a character in the Gulag Archipelago, who observes; “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart”.

Never has the soul and earth of his beloved Mother Russia claimed a greater patriot. Rest in well earned peace, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn