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Posted on 08/07/2008 5:02:20 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Solzhenitsyn Laid to Rest at Monastery
07 August 2008
By Matt Siegel / Staff Writer
It was as though someone had suddenly removed the stopper from an overturned bottle. As the great man's body, hoisted high by a military procession, made its final turn on the path toward the cemetery, a sea of mourners poured down the church steps like water down a rocky crag.
The crowds had to be held back as a salute was fired. They had to be held back as the choir, chanting a hymn about eternal life, hovered over the freshly dug grave. They had to be held back as Alexander Solzhenitsyn was returned to the Russian soil that he loved so much.
Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning author and Soviet-era dissident, was laid to rest at the cemetery in Donskoi Monastery in central Moscow on Wednesday. The author, who revealed the horrors of Stalinist repression in his landmark works, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago," died on Sunday at age 89 from heart failure.
More than 1,000 mourners, including President Dmitry Medvedev and his wife, Svetlana, traveled to the grounds of the 16th-century monastery to pay their respects to one of the 20th-century's towering literary and political figures.
Many of the mostly elderly attendees, milling about the path leading from the church to the cemetery grounds where Solzhenitsyn was interred, spoke at length about what the author's works had meant to them personally.
Edmund Akapov, 75, used to tune in to shortwave transmissions of the BBC World and Voice of America in his native Tbilisi. Despite the danger of being caught listening to banned broadcasts, he continued to search the airwaves for information about the beloved writer, whose works he discovered as a young man.
"About 40 years ago, I already knew about him and was reading his books in samizdat," he said, watching a military honor guard walk into the church. "Frankly speaking, I never thought his funeral would be as organized as it is now."
There was something odd, he said, about seeing Solzhenitsyn, a symbol of protest for so many, surrounded by the trappings of authority.
Medvedev, who returned from his summer vacation to attend the funeral, arrived in his presidential motorcade just before noon. Unlike Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who attended Solzhenitsyn's wake on Tuesday, Medvedev entered the building through a side door and attracted little attention from the assembled crowd.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990, attended the funeral, as did Mayor Yury Luzhkov. Filmmaker and State Duma Deputy Stanislav Govorukhin, whose groundbreaking 1990 interview with Solzhenitsyn helped to reintroduce him to the Russian public, also attended.
Throughout the morning, Solzhenitsyn's body lay in state, covered in flowers left by mourners and admirers. Despite the high-domed ceilings and soaring gilded walls of the church, the feeling was more intimate than at Tuesday's wake, held at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Compared with the moderate turnout on Tuesday, the funeral was well attended. A stream of mourners filed in and out of the monastery's grand cathedral in a steady procession all morning.
Inside the church, visitors lit candles and offered prayers as they shuffled past the body. The smell of incense, carried through the grand hall together with the strains of religious chanting, hung heavy in the air. Family members, including Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya, and son Stepan, kept a silent vigil beside the coffin.
At one point, because of the heavy turnout, the path through the church became backed-up, leading to a momentary panic.
"Everything is blocked," shouted a panicked young novice to the head priest. Calmly, the elder priest smiled and, seemingly with a wave of his hand, cleared the path of stragglers.
Putin and Medvedev have studiously avoided referring to Solzhenitsyn's dissident works in the wake of his death. It was fitting then, perhaps, that politics could not be altogether banished from the funeral of a man whose life was defined for so many by his political courage.
The appearance of Eduard Limonov, a harsh Kremlin critic and founder of the banned National Bolshevik party, caused a small stir in the crowd. Although many of the aged attendees appeared unaware of his presence, their grandchildren pointed and whispered as Limonov mingled with a small group of supporters.
The normally talkative Limonov declined a request for a brief interview, citing the timing and nature of the event.
Despite the state-approved narrative, praise for Solzhenitsyn the radical has poured in from foreign leaders since his death on Sunday.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, at loggerheads with Russia over the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, took a veiled swipe at his country's former imperial master on Wednesday in the form of a letter to the Solzhenitsyn family.
Like so many in attendance, Saakashvili thanked the author for his work in fighting totalitarianism and speaking truth to power.
"That the Georgian people are free today is a merit of the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn," he said, Interfax reported. "All of Georgia grieves together with you."
It is hard to imagine that Solzhenitsyn, who struggled for the freedom of others his whole life, would have minded that sentiment as his epitaph.
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May the beautiful soul of Solzhenitsyn rest in the Arms of the Lord.
Another great Russian, composer Igor Stravinsky, could have been quite comfortable with Solzhenitsyn. He was quite religious(spiritual?) and renounced communism. Sadly, during his time Soviet Union was still powerful. He had to be buried in Rome instead of Moscow.
Those are very moving pictures. Thank you for posting them.
Thank you for this post.
Wow... that's an image I never imagined I'd see. Stunning stuff and thanks for posting them.
Ironically he is buried in Venice a city to which many Orthodox Christians fled during the end times of the City - Constantinople - falling to the muslims. Unfortunately millions of Russians who were butchered and beaten down by the Marxists could not escape either.
Have you ever heard his Symphony of Psalms?
He lived near Cabot Vermont for years. Anybody have memories to share?
Great photos. Thank you for posting.
Who could have imagined twenty years ago that the President of Russia would be formally attending the funeral of Solzhenitsyn, and placing a wreath?
That should give hope to others in oppressed lands—tyranny CAN fall, and be replaced.
That was what I thought, too. Solzhenitsyn was like a rock - he just kept asserting the truth, no matter what they did to him. And the truth always does win out, eventually.
As an interesting sidelight on what the left thinks, btw, I was in Spain for the last month and had occasion to read the Spanish press on the death of Solzhenitsyn. The country is like the US. It has a nasty, sullen left that controls the media and also the world of arts and letters.
Solzhenitsyn came to Spain in the late 70’s and gave a talk. Afterwards he was interviewed, and he was asked if he thought the Soviet dictatorship was the same as Franco’s. He said no, of course, pointing out that under Franco, there were no concentration camps, people were free to travel within and even outside of of the country, the use of photocopiers was not prohibited, newspapers and foreign newspapers were freely sold at the newstands, etc. There was no comparison, in short.
The left was enraged, and their leading writer of the time, a hack named Juan Benet, said this: “I firmly believe that as long as people like Solzhenitsyn exist, concentration camps have to exist. They should even be better guarded so that people like him can’t get out.”
This was probably typical of the reaction of the international left to Solzhenitsyn. Of course, in terms of the historical victory, who now has even heard of the two-bit Spanish novelist Juan Benet? Ironically, he’d probably be totally forgotten today except for his negative remarks on Solzhenitsyn...
Vechnaya Pamyat!
Eternal memory!
A shame that Russia mourns the hero who did so much to free it from its past tyranny, yet Russia fails to throw off its present tyrants, who hypocritically praise the hero.
Every time three Russians are born, four Russians die. When will the new hero arise to save Russia from the destruction that slowly overtakes it?
At least they recognized his greatness at the end—that is to their credit. Rest in peace and may God welcome you home.
What a great writer.
make no mistake.....we are being silenced here.....not by guns...but by constant repudiation and intimidation.....tell anyone they are racist and its like a scarlet letter...
I disagree. I don’t think Solzhenitsyn did anything to free itself from its past tyranny. He wrote about the gulags, but this is something most Soviets knew of anyway.
What is forgotten here is what dissidents, particularly Ukrainian dissidents, have remembered about Solzhenitsyn in the past few days. He was an informant for at least 20 years, starting in the camps. Everything his Ukrainian compatriots told him was reported right back to the KGB. I don’t judge him for this, most dissidents were compromised. Such is the power of a tyrannical state. However, it seems to have been whitewashed, as is much of Soviet history.
Russia, Ukraine and Belarus will not know real change until all the Soviet archives are released, and the names of all informants are out in the open. That, of course, won’t happen, because those same people are the ones now in power.
oops - I meant “did anything to free Russia from its past of tyranny.
You appear to have fallen in with that small group of bottom feeders that exist in all societies, who puff themselves up by denigrating their betters. It would be wise for you to break off communications with them, you will regret trusting them, if you have not already degenerated into one of them.
In any case I have no further interest in anything you have to say.
Another useful idiot, I see.
Nothing I have stated is inaccurate. Had you ever lived in the USSR, as I did, you would know this is true. Everything I have stated I have also said outside the confines of the internet. Nevertheless, that is a rich comment, coming from someone who is also respondng in the “shadowed recesses of the internet”.
Many of the dissidents Solzhenitsyn betrayed commented publicly on his informant status, well before he died. This is not an unknown fact for anyone who really knows anything about the Soviet system or the dissident movement. Evidently, you are not among that group. Denial of truth, which is endemic in the FSU, is a greater threat to the ability to create democratic and prosperous societies than anything I can state.
As I stated, I am not judging Solzhenitsyn for his actions. He was not the first to have informed on his comrades, nor the last. I also admire many things about him. However, he was, in the end, like all of us, an imperfect human being. And, he was not the great slayer of communism you erroneously assume he was.
bump
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