Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the man who helped to tell the world about the horrors of communist Russia and its defining institution, the network of forced labour camps known as the Gulag, has died.
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9 comments to A great man has died |
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Sad news indeed.
If I may be so bold may I also suggest that anyone interested in the gulags and Stalinism read Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate” and “Forever Flowing”.
Agreed Solzhenitsyn was a great man. A good example of how one man, with courage and talent can take on a monster and defeat it. Not by himself, but it is hard to imagine that Soviet Communism would have been as throughly discredited as it was without the “Gulag Archipelago”
He was a Russian nationalist and an orthodox mystic, a complex man whose writing and speeches will be argued over for centuries to come.
Occasionally he also showed a streak of old fashioned graciousness. A few weeks before he left the US to return to Russia he appeared at the local 4th of July parade in Vermont. It was his quite way of saying thank you to his hosts, and perhaps there was some symbolic gesture there.
Nick M
I agree entirely about Grossman, but lets leave that for another day.
I see that the BBC tribute page manages not to mention how many people died at the hands of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union (20 million +). Somehow I doubt that the figure of 6 million would not have been mentioned in connection with the Nazi regime. The double standards towards left and right (if I might use standard terms) regimes is alive and well at the BBC.
Not only that but the BBC News piece on Solzhenitsyn was rather odd and insisted that he saw the world and morality in “black and white” with the implication that he was not quite sophisticated enough…
Well, neither were those Ukranian peasants either.
Sheesh!!!
(Martin Amis: “Koba The Dread: Laughter And The Twenty Million“, 2002, p. 257)
1999 I decided that Solzhenitsyn was the most important writer of the twentieth century. I’ve had no reason to reconsider.
RIP – he was one of the key figure in bringing the horrors of the gulag to the attention of the world, even if he was an anti semite
I can neither speak nor read Russian – so I have to read Solzhenitsyn in translation. But I still regard him as a great writer – as well as a man who finally got many (although sadly not all) people to understand the horrors of Marxism/Leninism.
I would suggest an unusual approach to Solzhenitsyn’s writings – for the newcommer.
Pick up the third volume of his “Gulag Archpelago” and read the chapter entitled “The Peasant Plague” – if you are interested by what you read, then read on.
Perhaps you will read the third volume first – or perhaps you will go back to the first two volumes.
Remember this work was written in many bits and pieces over a long period of time (hidden away as well as he could) – so you are entering a war. A struggle for truth against the most evil ideology humanity has faced.
As for the B.B.C.
Russian English language television was much the same – stressing that Solzenitsyn was a “controversial figure” and so on.
A. Solzenitsyen was a complex man – a Russian patriot (or “nationalist” as some would say) and a man with great doubts about Western liberalism.
But he was also a man who stood for human beings (farmers, businessmen whoever) against the power of the state. And he was a man who stood for truth.
Remember although a mainstream Orthodox Christian he opposed the persecution of the “Old Believers” in Orthodoxy and any other form of religious or other persecution.
So it was not just Marxism that he opposed – although he did regard it (even more than its mutant offspring Fascism) as the greatest evil of our times.
Solzhenitsyn put the figure at 60 million, and wrote: “if they (rulers of SSSR) think otherwise, let them publish their numbers”.
Well put. Best phrase I read in all the obituaries. He stood for truth, and made truth prevail. Untruth, or the big lie, beeing the most outstandig and pervasive characteristic of the evil communist regime.
If I were asked to name the one person most responsible for the downfall of communism – it’s him.
An extraordinary man.
I re-read Cancer Ward (for the first time since I bought the book in 1971) about a week before Solzhenitsyn died. I recommend it strongly as both a great novel with interesting characters and a bitter critique of the Soviet system. It is also semi-autobiographical and gives some insight, I believe, into Solzhenitsyn’s life and character in the 1950s.