Hero of a dark century

National Review, Sept 1, 2008 by Daniel J. Mahoney

WITH the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the world has lost one of the great souls of this or any age. His story was beyond improbable: A former prisoner or "zek" in the vast system of Soviet prisons and labor camps who had also miraculously survived a bout with abdominal cancer, an "underground writer" who never expected a single word of his to be published in his own lifetime, Solzhenitsyn was catapulted to world fame with the November 1962 publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Nikita Khrushchev, the most "humane" of Soviet leaders, mistook Solzhenitsyn for a Soviet loyalist whose movingly understated account of a single day in the life of a simple peasant unjustly incarcerated in a Soviet labor camp would be useful to his own efforts at "de-Stalinization." Khrushchev, who never completely lost touch with his own peasant roots, was undoubtedly also genuinely moved by this powerful testament to the human spirit. The soon-to-be-deposed Soviet leader may have been the first to misunderstand and underestimate Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the grand 19th-century Russian literary tradition who was supremely confident in the power of literature, rooted in truth and the best ethical traditions of Russia and the West, to defeat violence and lies, the twin pillars of 20th-century totalitarianism. And he was right. The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume "experiment in literary investigation," as he suggestively subtitled that remarkable work, did more than any other piece of writing or political act in the 20th century to delegitimize the entire Communist enterprise.

Solzhenitsyn traced the origins of totalitarian repression and the gulag concentration-camp system to Lenin himself. He showed beyond doubt that Leninist Communism was beyond redemption and that the distinction between a "good" Lenin and a "bad" Stalin was untenable on both moral and historical grounds. In a voice that was at once sardonic and graceful, the former zek mocked the "Progressive Doctrine" (Marxism-Leninism) and showed that it did not contain a single truth about the nature of man, society, or the human soul.

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The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris on December 28, 1973, led to Solzhenitsyn's forced exile from the Soviet Union, an exile he neither sought nor welcomed. In the West he faced a new set of challenges, including the incomprehension of Western elites who mistook this brave if sometimes prickly anti-totalitarian writer and moral witness as an advocate for new forms of authoritarianism. His return to Russia brought a different set of challenges and burdens as Solzhenitsyn faced the initial apathy of a public that did not want to come to terms with the crimes of the Communist past and the rise of a new "oligarchy" (as he was the first to call it in his speech to the Duma in October 1994) disguising itself as a democracy. In the West (and in Russia, too, at least among the Left-liberal Muscovite intellectuals) Solzhenitsyn continued to be lied about as no great writer or public figure has been lied about in modern times. He responded to these terrible distortions ("theocrat," "anti Semite," "a new Russian Ayatollah") for the first and last time in a masterful 1983 essay called "Our Pluralists." He was above his critics' pettiness and, in any case, preoccupied with his two great moral and literary "missions."

I.

The first mission was to tell the truth about Communism and all its works, as he did in The Gulag Archipelago and so many of his speeches and writings until the day he finally left this earth. The other mission was to recover the full truth about Russia's past, a past that had been distorted beyond all recognition by the Soviet propaganda machine. This Solzhenitsyn attempted to do particularly in his great multi-volume chef d'oeuvre The Red Wheel, consisting of four "knots"--August 1914, November 1916, March 1917, and April 1917--in ten volumes. That work, coming in at no fewer than 6,000 pages in Russian, combined fiction, dramatized history, and a full array of modernistic literary devices (including innovative "screen sequences" and newspaper and newsreel reports). Its thesis was that there was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik Revolution, that human action, agency, and statesmanship could have put Russia on the path to rational and humane liberty. But absent such efforts, the revolution took on the character of a profound and unstoppable movement, a "gigantic cosmic wheel" in which "everybody, including those who turn it, becomes a helpless atom."

Solzhenitsyn's beau ideal of a statesman was Pyotr Stolypin, the remarkably capable prime minister of Russia between 1906 and 1911. Before he was assassinated in the Kiev opera house in the fall of 1911, Stolypin worked assiduously to create a regime of citizen-proprietors in Russia, one that would hew to a "middle line" between reaction and nihilistic revolution. But as Solzhenitsyn wrote memorably in November 1916 (with Stolypin's "greatness" clearly in mind), "nothing is more difficult than drawing a middle line for social development. The loud mouth, the big fist, the bomb, the prison bars, are of no help to you, as they are to those at the two extremes. Following the middle path demands the utmost self-control, the most inflexible courage, the most patient calculation, the most precise knowledge." Contrary to legend, Solzhenitsyn saw himself as a "true liberal" who saw through the "false liberals" who persisted in seeing no enemies to the left. In literature and politics, he defended what he called in a January 19, 1993, address to the National Arts Club in New York a "healthy conservatism" that was "equally sensitive to the old and the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore without which no future can ever be born."