Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 1918-2008

by Joe Auciello & George Shriver / September 2008

One of the most influential Russian writers of the post-Stalin decades died at age 89 in August this year. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life (1918-2008) spanned the Soviet era and nearly two decades of its aftermath.

Solzhenitsyn’s work as a writer, in fiction and nonfiction, could be summarized as an effort to portray real life in Soviet society, to explain its social conflicts, and to chart a course for the future.

He succeeded in only the first of these efforts, and wrote the novels by which he will be remembered: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "Cancer Ward," "First Circle," plus several short stories. For these works, written out of terrible personal experience and against incredible obstacles—that is, 11 years in Stalin’s prisons, labor camps, and internal exile system—Solzhenitsyn deserves to be celebrated and, most importantly, to be read.

Critics have compared Solzhenitsyn to the giants of Russian and world literature like Leo Tolstoy. Similarities in style, scope, and theme make the praise implied in this likeness well deserved.

Solzhenitsyn’s first novel bore a resemblance to Tolstoy’s "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Tolstoy exposed the emptiness and sterility of Russian society through the death of one of its more well-to-do members, the judge Ivan Ilyich, whose "life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

Solzhenitsyn, likewise, in plain language and with quiet irony, told the story of a Soviet Ivan, an ordinary man and typical victim. "One Day" revealed the barbarism and numbing degradation of the Gulag (State Administration for Labor Camps), which stole the lives of its prisoners, the "zeks." This account—"most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible"—gave the lie to the official rhetoric of the bright, shining future of what was falsely called "socialism."

Before "Ivan Denisovich," many official crimes of the Stalin era had been admitted, belatedly, by Stalin’s heirs. Stalin’s misrule was attributed to the "cult of personality," no mention being made of the privileged caste of bureaucrats on whom his rule depended and who survived him.

Khrushchev, to be sure, famously denounced some crimes of Stalin in a 1956 speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, but the speech itself was not published in the Soviet Union. Instead, in an effort to win public support against the more conservative wing of the Soviet bureaucracy, which was inclined to justify and if necessary revive Stalin’s methods of massive state terror, Khrushchev did, temporarily, loosen some restrictions on Soviet writers and artists.

This partial relaxation of controls saw the publication in 1962 of an edited version of "One Day"—which sold out in one day. Finally, many could learn the truth for themselves or have the satisfaction of seeing it stated publicly at last.

Solzhenitsyn’s novel expressed and deepened the anti-establishment, oppositional mood that arose worldwide in the 1960s. A year earlier, in the United States, a character in Joseph Heller’s novel, "Catch-22," defined the novel’s title as the routine abuse of authority by those in command: "Catch-22 means they have the right to do anything they can get away with." Power, in other words, means never having to say you’re sorry; or to use the title of a Solzhenitsyn story: "We Never Make Mistakes."

The characters in "One Day," while discussing the years served of their prison sentences, came to a conclusion similar to Heller’s about the routine abuse of authority. "In happier days everybody got a flat ten. But in ’49 a new phase set in: everybody got twenty-five regardless. Ten you could just about do, without turning up your toes. But twenty-five?"

Here the prisoners of the Gulag, victims of the bureaucracy, point to the arbitrary, unjust, and immoral nature of the laws by which they were sentenced. Further, and more damning, readers can easily conclude that those who held power and enforced such laws had no right to do so. The Soviet system, then, was stripped of its moral authority and social legitimacy.

In this short novel Solzhenitsyn did not directly assess the role of the concentration camp system. Censorship prevented him from asserting that the Gulag was not some accidental outgrowth of Stalinism but an essential element of it; that the Gulag, by the enormity of its size, was an integral part of the rule of the Soviet bureaucracy from the 1930s to the Khrushchev era, when most of the 10 million "zeks" were freed, but a tightly controlled secret police system continued, under a new name: KGB instead of NKVD.

The Soviet bureaucrats trampled with indifference and disdain over Marx’s notion that socialism means the withering away of the state. Instead they promoted a monstrous growth of police, military, and official power.

In that context, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" had a huge impact. Discussion of "the camps" and of arbitrary police and prison methods became widespread. The bureaucratic rulers felt threatened by that, and as a result, following the publication of a handful of short stories, no more works by Solzhenitsyn were published. Nor was "One Day" reprinted in the Soviet Union until the Gorbachev era, the late 1980s,

In fact, after Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, censorship and repression against Soviet writers increased, and a highly publicized series of trials was held that sent authors to prison or psychiatric wards.

This policy of punishment, allegedly in the name of Bolshevism, stands in sharp contrast to actual Bolshevik policy after 1917 and into the 1920s.

V.I. Lenin, head of the revolutionary government, personally disliked many of the then modern forms of literary and artistic expression, but he did not interfere with Bolshevik Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, who promoted modern writers and artists. In the first years of the Soviet government, before Stalin consolidated his hold on power, different and competing schools of art flourished in Russia.

In 1967 Solzhenitsyn vigorously condemned the censorship of literature in an open letter to the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union. He would not have known that his views paralleled those of Leon Trotsky, who in 1938 wrote, "But a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of ‘leading’ and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power" ("Art and Politics in Our Epoch," in "Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art," p. 114).

For his protest, Solzhenitsyn was expelled in 1969 from the Writers’ Union. In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. After the KGB seized a copy of "The Gulag Archipelago," Solzhenitsyn was deported in 1974, the first Soviet citizen to be dealt with in that way since Leon Trotsky was sent out of the country in 1928.

Solzhenitsyn’s writings after that became increasingly reactionary and irrelevant. He equated Stalinism with socialism and wrote that "communism is unregenerate; it will always present a mortal danger to mankind."

Nonetheless, revolutionary socialists did not hesitate to conclude: "The responsibility for Solzhenitsyn’s rejection of Marxism lies completely with the Stalinists" (Ernest Harsch in Intercontinental Press, Jan. 14, 1974).

Solzhenitsyn argued for the moral regeneration of Russia by a return to the Orthodox Church, the supremacy of the Slavic people, a culture of Mother Russia based on the peasantry, all ruled by an authoritarian government.

Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn found little enthusiasm for these positions when he returned to Russia in 1994, and, by the time of his death, he supported an ex-KGB officer who became president of post-Soviet Russia in the late 1990s and is now its prime minister, Vladimir Putin.

Yet, Solzhenitsyn cannot be dismissed and should not be forgotten. What the great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky applies as well to their literary heir. Despite their retrograde positions, Luxemburg said, "the writings of both have, nevertheless, an inspiring, arousing, and liberating effect upon us. And this is because their starting points are not reactionary. … On the contrary, theirs is the warmest love for mankind and the deepest response to social injustice. ... [W]ith the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive" (from "Rosa Luxemburg Speaks," p. 345).

That’s how Solzhenitsyn also deserves to be remembered.