Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those heavens from a cell in the Lubyanka prison. He had been arrested three months earlier, a decorated Red Army captain who criticized Joseph Stalin in private letters. Of that night he wrote, "There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." Born on the 11th of December 1918 and dead on the 3rd of August 2008, this Soviet and Russian author and dissident did more than almost anyone to make the world see the Gulag prison system. He won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of copies. How did a man who once embraced Marxism-Leninism become its fiercest accuser? How did a book the Soviet state called a head-on challenge get written under the eyes of the KGB? And why, once free in the West, did he turn his criticism on his hosts? The answers run through prison cells, a Vermont farmhouse, and a quarrel with two centuries of Russian history.

• 2. Cell To Conviction

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  In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH. The cause was nineteen months of correspondence with a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich. In those letters they criticized the Soviet state and Stalin's conduct of the war, calling Stalin hozyain, meaning the boss. They had even drafted a political program titled "Resolution No. 1", confiscated at his arrest and used to convict him.

  Under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, Solzhenitsyn was convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda under paragraph 10 and of founding a hostile organization under paragraph 11. On the 7th of July 1945, a Special Council of the NKVD sentenced him in his absence to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the usual sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.

  The sentence moved through stages. The middle phase was spent in a sharashka, a special scientific research facility run by the Ministry of State Security, where he met Lev Kopelev. Kopelev became the model for the character Lev Rubin in The First Circle. In 1950 he was sent to a Special Camp for political prisoners at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, where he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. A fellow prisoner, Ion Moraru, remembered that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time there writing. While at Ekibastuz he had a tumor removed, though his cancer was not diagnosed at the time.

  In March 1953, after his sentence ended, he was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in the Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954 he was permitted treatment in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. That experience became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward.

• 3. Conscience In The Camps

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  "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes," Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. He turned that gaze on himself. Remembering his captain's shoulder boards and his battery's march through East Prussia, he asked: "So were we any better?"

  The atrocities he witnessed there shaped that question. While serving as an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn saw Soviet military personnel commit war crimes against German civilians. He wrote, "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union. Noncombatants and the elderly were robbed, and women and girls were gang-raped. Later, in the forced labour camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia, whose narrator pointed to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.

  During this decade of imprisonment and exile, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain and compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago, titled "The Soul and Barbed Wire."

  With no pen or paper, he composed in his head. The narrative poem The Trail was written in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952, alongside 28 poems composed in prison, camp, and exile. Largely unknown in the West, these early works were first published in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.

• 4. The Thaw Window

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  After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. He taught at a secondary school by day and wrote in secret by night. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he recalled that until 1961 he was convinced he would never see a single line of his in print, and scarcely dared let close acquaintances read what he had written.

  In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing, saying, "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

  The book sold out and became an instant hit. It was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member who had been to Siberia for libelous speech about the leaders, and yet officially permitted. During Khrushchev's tenure it was studied in Soviet schools, as were three more short works, including the short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963.

  Then the window shut. After Khrushchev was ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw, exposing works came to an end. These would be the last of Solzhenitsyn's works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.

• 5. Writing In Hiding

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  By 1965 the KGB had seized some of Solzhenitsyn's papers, including the manuscript of In The First Circle, and as a writer he became a non-person. The seizure first left him desperate and frightened. Gradually he realized it had freed him from the pretenses of being an officially acclaimed writer, a status that had become familiar but increasingly irrelevant.

  The drafts of The Gulag Archipelago survived through a quiet network. Between 1965 and 1967 they were turned into finished typescript in hiding at friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia, in a Lubyanka prison cell. His original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB by Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  The work itself was vast. Composed from 1958 to 1967, The Gulag Archipelago is a three-volume, seven-part account of the Soviet prison camp system. It drew on Solzhenitsyn's experiences, the testimony of 256 former prisoners, and his own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It traced the system's origins to the founding of the Communist regime, assigning responsibility to Vladimir Lenin, and described interrogations, prisoner transports, camp culture, and revolts such as the Kengir uprising. It has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages.

  The danger was never abstract. In 1973 the KGB confiscated a manuscript after his friend Elizaveta Voronyanskaya was questioned non-stop for five days until she revealed its location. According to Solzhenitsyn, "When she returned home, she hanged herself." On the 8th of August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate him with an unknown chemical agent, most likely ricin, using an experimental gel-based delivery method that left him seriously ill.

• 6. Expulsion And Exile

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  An editorial in Pravda on the 14th of January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and said he was "choking with pathological hatred" for the country where he was born. The Politburo weighed arrest, imprisonment, and expulsion. Guided by KGB chief Yuri Andropov, and after West German Chancellor Willy Brandt said Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely there, they chose deportation.

  On the 12th of February 1974 he was arrested and deported the next day to Frankfurt, West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. U.S. military attaché William Odom smuggled out a large portion of his archive, including his Writers' Union membership card and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom in his memoir Invisible Allies, published in 1995.

  He lived first in Heinrich Boll's house in Langenbroich, then moved to Zurich, Switzerland. Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States, and he stayed at the Hoover Tower before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. During a tour of the East Coast he visited St. Nicholas Old Believer Orthodox Church in Millville, New Jersey, in December 1976. Wearing a dark cloak, he spoke in Russian to a congregation of 50 to 70, urging them to keep their Russian identity and not be assimilated into American culture.

  The pressure followed him abroad. On the 19th of September 1974, Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and cut his contacts with Soviet dissidents. At least three StB agents became his translators and secretaries. He continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery, and other disturbing imagery. After this harassment in Zurich, he settled in Cavendish and reduced his communications with others.

• 7. Quarrel With The West

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  Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University on the 8th of June 1978, Solzhenitsyn told his hosts that the United States had declined in its spiritual life and called for a spiritual upsurge. He critiqued the West for materialism, a decline in courage, and what he called "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness." Asked whether he would hold up the West as a model for his own country, he answered negatively.

  His targets were specific. He attacked the dominant pop culture, the "TV stupor" and "intolerable music," and accused the Western news media of left-wing bias and of filling readers' souls with celebrity gossip. He was a supporter of the Vietnam War and called the Paris Peace Accords a "hasty capitulation." He criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and described the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as "cruel," calling NATO "aggressors" who "have kicked aside the UN."

  He did not reject the West entirely. Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty he saw as an enduring strength of Western democratic societies. In a speech to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on the 14th of September 1993, he implored the West not to lose sight of its "historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law."

  His enthusiasm was for the small scale. He praised the local self-government he witnessed in Switzerland and New England, admiring "the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy." That preference for local self-government would remain his major political theme after he returned home.

• 8. The Return

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  In 1990 Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was restored, and in 1994 he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States, though his eldest son Yermolai later returned. He lived in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow, between dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko.

  His public role in Russia was modest and brief. He hosted a television talk show, eventually a 15-minute monologue twice a month, which was discontinued in 1995. In 1998 he refused Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, saying he was unable to accept an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits.

  His later writings looked back two centuries. He denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666 and for persecuting the Old Believers. In a speech he summed up the cause of the revolution that he said swallowed up some 60 million people, repeating the explanation he had heard from old people as a child: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

  Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view of the Russian Revolution. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. He died of heart failure near Moscow on the 3rd of August 2008, aged 89, and was buried at Donskoy Monastery in a spot he had chosen.