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Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Dissident Writer, Dies at 89
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel prize winner who revealed the horror of Stalin's brutal labour camps to the world, has died at the age of 89, his son said last night. Stepan Solzhenitsyn said his father had died of heart failure at his home, but declined further comment.
The author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system was lauded as a moral and spiritual leader as well as one of the greatest writers of his time. His unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labour camps riveted his compatriots, whose secret history he exposed. His writings earned him 20 years of exile and international renown, making him one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era and a symbol of intellectual resistance to communist rule.
His monumental work the Gulag Archipelago, written in secrecy in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and 1978, is the definitive work on Stalin's camps, where tens of millions perished.
Last year he was awarded one of Russia's highest honours, the state prize. In announcing the award Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Solzhenitsyn "the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable".
His experience in the labour camps was described in his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. His major works, including The First Circle and Cancer Ward, brought him global admiration and the 1970 Nobel prize for literature.
Stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of the Gulag Archipelago the writer settled in the United States.
But in 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn's works as part of his perestroika reforms and restored his Soviet citizenship, enabling Solzhenitsyn to return as a hero in 1994.
He was born on December 11 1918, in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, and grew up a loyal communist and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941. As a student he edited the Komsomol newspaper and was awarded one of only seven Stalin scholarships for outstanding social and scholastic achievement.
It was while at university that he began to write short stories, and drafted the plan for an immense Tolstoyan novel intended to celebrate the October revolution. But his devotion to socialist principles and indiscreet hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule led to his undoing.
Shortly before the war's end, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the labour camps.
For many years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day but the daring One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. Its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps were described as "a literary miracle". Within weeks his name was known all over the world.
Last night the Russian government expressed its condolences over his death. "President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family," a Kremlin spokesman said.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
17 Comments so far
Show AllAleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, this sorry world is even more the lesser without you. You told us what happens to those of us who kowtow to tyrants and you also gave us the solution.
When those bastards, who are the tools of those who claim to rule us, aren't sure that they are going to make it back home at night, things will change for the better.
Hopefully, we, the people, will listen to you. One day, our tyrants will have cause to fear like we have feared. In the meantime, you will be missed, tovarishch.
I read the first volume of Gulag Archipelago a while ago; it was a sobering read. I also admired his use of sarcasm.
That was a great book. What a gutsy guy.
Solzhenitsyn was an important voice. Hopefully one day here in the west, we will also appreciate the contributions of Victor Serge, Christian Rakovsky, and legions of others who struggled and died during the years of the Stalinist camps, people who embraced the democratic ethos of socialism, but who also rejected the pseudo democratic posturing of capitalism.
Every one of us should be the hero of his/her own life. He is an inspiration to us all that the struggle against the system of whatever kind need not win to be meaningful.
The struggle itself proves that our souls are not illusions.
Solzhenitsyn supported the Vietnam war and condemned US anti-war people for betraying the East instead of criticizing the US for imperialism.
He also thinks the west is going down hill due to atheism and agnosticism.
Solzhenitsyn also radically underestimates the class conflict in Tsarist Russia. He blames the violence of the Soviets on the teachings of Marx as opposed to the tsarist regime or poverty in russia. I can accept disagreement about what happened to Russia or the merits of Lenin and Trotsky, but to let tsarism and capitalism off the hook is insane and irresponsible for anyone. And it is a completely un-socialist position.
Solzhenitsyn also thought that nationalism and religion were the way forward. These are hardly "socialist" ideas as the article would have it. In fact, Solzhenitsyn thought that Marxian ideas would always lead to totalitarianism.
I must agree with RichM here. This man is a reactionary not a progressive.
In some sense I can't fault him for going the complete opposite way from Stalin-- but the opposite way is hardly exemplary.
"Solzhenitsyn supported the Vietnam war and condemned US anti-war people for betraying the East instead of criticizing the US for imperialism."
From Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address June 8, 1978:"The most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?"
That's not really supporting the VietNam war, from my reading. Maybe there's a quote where he explicitly supports the war, but nobody on this website ever sources their assertions. And he certainly did criticize capitalism, or at least materialism (see the same speech).
Ok, I suppose that isn't defending the VietNam war, but I would say that there is some serious irresponsibility on Solzhenitsyn's part to blame the people who were criticizing the imperialist war machine. There is an element of complicity with the war inherent in this statement. I hardly think anyone deeming themselves progressive would agree with a statement that implicitly puts folks like Kissinger on the side of humanity and the leftist/pacifist subculture on the side of genocide.
I never said Solzhenitsyn didn't criticize capitalism. What I said was that Solzhenitsyn didn't see capitalism or tsarism as a cause of the Bolshevik rev.
I think that Solzhenitsyn's critique of capitalism came from the perspective of tradition and authority and not from an understanding of repression and exploitation much less a sense of solidarity.
Funny, I find the comment above on Vietnam to be quite accurate.
How much of the Vietnam anti-war movement has given a damn about conditions in those countries after the war ended? I am sure there were some. But they were probably a minority. And that's what he is talking about if you read the quote carefully. Also, note the date. The quote is from 1978, and there or four years after the helicopters left the embassy, he's asking where are the people who care about the misery in the region. Don't expand the statement beyond what he is obviously saying.
And yes, people on the left should at times be criticized for the way we as a group seem to adopt a cause for awhile, then forget about it and abandon it. I strongly suspect that a very similar criticism will be quite valid about 4 years after we leave Iraq. We'll leave a lot of misery behind, and very few people in America, even the anti-war progressives, will give a damn.
I was reading a book by Niall Ferguson this weekend called "War of the World". A history of the 20th century that takes a bit of a different look at things.
It struck me when I was reading the section on Stalin's Gulag. This was largely a system of prison slave labor that helped to prop up the economy. It began, as such things usually do, with someone thinking that political prisoners might as well work while they are locked up for thinking.
Then of course it got a life of its own. The slave labor became important to the economy, so it developed that there were quotas on how many had to be arrested and sent off to the camps each year.
What struck me was that we now have our own prison slave labor system in the US. We have some 2 to 3 million prisoners, many of which work in prison factories. And we are dang close to having police depts with quotas to arrest so many people. Maybe not explicitedly to feed the camps, but at all levels of the system, there are something close to quotas of how many must be arrested, how many must be convicted etc. If you are a young police officer or junior DA trying to make a career, you ain't gonna make it if you aren't producing the numbers.
His latest book in 2003 "Two Hundred Years Together is a history of Jews in the Soviet Union. It has yet to be translated and published in English. Don't hold your breath.
I can see how some hipster pacifists may not have cared about other events in the east. But shouldn't we hold our government responsible for the damage it did and was doing in Central America. And while we're talking about the East, what about East Timor?
We had imperialist ends in VietNam. That is why I would have opposed the war had I been alive. The U.S. would only have done more damage had it stayed in VietNam. We were succesful in getting our government out of the quagmire there.
So to blame the dissenters is absurd and to have called for humanitarian interventions in "the east" would have only caused more destruction.
I own and have read all three volumes of *The Gulag Archipelago*; also *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* and the poem *Prussian Nights*. Godspeed, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, and thank you.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was a great writer who openly asked to be left alone, then, when they in Western intellectual circles wouldn't do so, he told them what they did not want to hear and they have never forgiven him for doing so.
Rest in peace and know that some prophets are without honor anywhere, but they are still prophets.
What does this man's life and death mean to the dumbest generation?
The comment about his book TWO HUNDRED YEARS TOGETHER is interesting. Exactly WHY has not this book been published in English?? Is it that Jews formed the backbone of the Bolshevik revolution, with financing coming from Jew New York bankers?? Is it that Jews disproportionately made up the dreaded Cheka secret police?? In fact, the whole idea of communism in Russia springs from Jews, according to Churchill. And, Jews were a very big part of the whole communist effort in Russia until Stalin's purges of the 1930s. I suspect that the reason this book will not be published in the USA is that it will show that the idea of the Khazar Jews of Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe being connected to Palestine is just a big LIE.