Posted on 08/07/2008 1:50:18 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's anti-Sovietism was heroic and influential, but its other side became clearer upon the Union's collapse.
The death of the literary colossus and anti-Soviet dissident has, quite rightly, been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime. His literary achievements, closely connected with his dissident activities, have also justifiably received much attention.
But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn – one which most obituaries have mentioned only in passing, if at all. Solzhenitsyn's analysis of Soviet communism was based on the notion that the Bolsheviks imposed a totalitarian system on Russia that had no basis in Russian history or character. He laid the blame on Marx and Engels and the Bolsheviks.
Russian culture, he argued, and particularly that of the Russian Orthodox Church, was suppressed in favour of atheist Soviet culture. Persona non grata in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn lived in exile in the US from 1974, but found western culture equally to his distaste.
His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism.
The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Solzhenitsyn hoped, as he wrote in a Russian newspaper at the time, would lead to the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in which this alternative culture would flourish.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
He was human. Like most people, he was right on some things and wrong on others. But unlike most people, he was right when being right meant being buried alive.
Not many people have that kind of courage, and thank God most of us will never have to find out if we do or don't.
What?
The man was imprisoned, abused and exiled. Many anti-communists ended up that way. Not all anti-communists were shot outright.
Yes, consider the source...this is from the GUARDIAN and they are still sore at Solzhenitsyn for throwing cold water on their constant defending of the Soviet Union.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s influence with most conservatives waned as his support for the Putin regime increased. Solzhenitsyn did seem to have a myopic view of Russian history that saw the Communist regimes as so horrible as to make the somewhat less oppressive regimes of the Tsarist era seem almost preferable. Solzhenitsyn’s aversion to liberal western thought was also detrimental to his popularity in the west in later years. That is unfortunate in some respects but Solzhenitsyn’s value as a chronicler of the real face of Communism is invaluable and his true legacy.
The article is full of crap. NPR had a very similar hit piece that barely mentioned he had died. They went on and on about why he was an idiot. I’m not seeing the praises from the obituaries that they’re claiming is all they see.
NPR and the Guardian both have Socialist (i.e. Communist) leanings and they’ll trash anyone who doesn’t agree.
Solzhenitsyn’s arguments were more nuanced than the article makes out, although I have problems with many of them, but then who cares about the truth when you’re just preaching the false gospel of a dead Soviet Empire.
“If dude had been so “anti-Soviet”, he would have been killed before the world could hear about him.”
Not so dude (wow, how hip to call people “dude”). Solzhenitsyn went into the GULAG during WWII because a letter he wrote critical of Stalin led to his arrest and he got an 8 year sentence for “anti-Soviet propaganda”. At the time he was a Communist sympathizer but camp life changed all that.
His experiences led to his writing “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, a relatively short novel depicting one typical day for a GULAG prisoner. The story was published in 1962 with the approval of the Communist’s authorities, particularly then Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev, who was using it as part of the Communist sham propaganda ploy to purge Stalinism, or the “cult of personality”. Thus Solzhenitsyn was in no immediate danger, though later he was continually harrassed by the KGB.
As a result of “Ivan” Solzhenitsyn became the voice of the prisoners, many of whom told him their stories one way or another. (Many feared the Khruschev thaw would be reversed and for criticising Stalin, and by implication the Party, they would be sent back to the camps. So they met with Solzhenityn secretly or left him unsigned testimonials). From these stories came the monumental “Gulag Archipelago”.
Solzhenitsyn then became a “non-person” in the Soviet Union and was ultimately banished from his beloved Russia, rather than killed, because, at that time, the Communists were pretending to be civilized in order to assuage world opinion.
Got it, dude?
Don't look now, but your Slavophobia is showing. 'Somewhat less oppressive'? Even for those of you whose Western rationalism (whether of the Latin Christian, protestant or secularist variety) is so opaque that you can't see what the Byzantine ideal and its Russian continuation were really all about, that's a bit like saying the flu is somewhat less virulent than AIDS.
The Tsars never even dreamed of, much less committed mass murder even on the scale of Lenin, much less Stalin, and the entire Tsarist secret police (which only functioned in Moscow and St. Petersburg) was smaller than the Checkist detail assigned to a typical Soviet oblast.
Sheesh, get some historical perspective!
As someone old enough to know full well that the communist regimes were responsible for tens of millions of murders I don't need any 'history lessons' from you.
Perhaps, in your misguided zeal to find something, anything to criticize as a vehicle to rant about Communist Soviet butchery, you missed the part of my previous post that stated Solzhenitsyn's influence had waned. I wasn't endorsing Soviet Communist butchery, simply making a comparison as I thought Solzhenitsyn saw it.
Perhaps you should consider gaining some literary perspective before going off on a rant against someone who essentially agrees with you.
Sheesh, yourself.
I did not take you to task for ‘endorsing Soviet Communist butchery’, but for mischaracterizing the rule of the Tsars as only ‘somewhat less oppressive’. ‘Somewhat’ is a feeble adverb for a difference many orders of magnitude in numbers of secret police, imprisonments, and deaths.
Very good wrap up of Solzhenitsyn. The reason I think they didn’t kill him was because when his books were finally published in the west, they wouldn’t dare hurt him. In the Soviet Union, his books were passed around secretly from person to person to read and tell what was happening in the camps. A lot of people didn’t know.
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