Author Solzhenitsyn, who exposed gulag horrors, dies at 89.

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89. Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. See photos from Solzhenitsyn’s life »

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn’t read his books.

During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.

But under Vladimir Putin’s 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn’s vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.

Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can’t be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.

“Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking,” Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. “For 1,000 years Russia has belonged to such a category.”

***

Born December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II, where, in the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called “certain disrespectful remarks” about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as “the man with the mustache.” He served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.

That’s where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn’t be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin’s gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.

He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.
***

The first fruit of this labor was “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all.

Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.

***

“A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country,” he wrote in “The First Circle,” his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin’s “special camps” for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.

Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.

***

The novel “Cancer Ward”, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional work based on Solzhenitsyn’s life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin’s death, until June 1956.

In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. “A man sprouts a tumor and dies — how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?”

He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin’s reign.

“Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? … Or all of Lenin’s old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?”

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.

***

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author’s life after decades of work. The academy cited “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the non-fiction “Gulag” trilogy appeared in Paris.

“During all the years until 1961,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, “not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known.”

The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.

Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life’s work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled “The Red Wheel.”

***

Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.

To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West’s faith in “Western pluralistic democracy” as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of “wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension.”

Some critics saw “The Red Wheel” books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire.

“Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses,” D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was “a projection of his own repressed violence.”

***

Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup. Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.

While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak “the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before.”

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia’s economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed “oligarchs” by an American diplomat.

Yeltsin’s reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three “times of troubles” in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.

***

The author’s last book, 2001’s “Two Hundred Years Together,” addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he “understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character.”

***

Yeltsin’s successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia’s oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.

But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin’s determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia’s natural resources and to concentrate political power.

Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society.

“We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly,” he said

***

Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is pictured at his home in 2007 with former Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Mary Dejevsky: Farewell to the keeper of Russia’s conscience - All that Solzhenitsyn wrote rang true. It was suffused with personal experience of bitter conflicts.

Tuesday, 5 August 2008

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An excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Dissident writer whose accounts of life in the gulag exposed the moral infamy of Soviet Communism

Moscow; the afternoon of Monday, 18 December, 1989, and the grey day was already fading to dusk. The temperature had fallen to more than 20 degrees below; flakes from the intermittent snow squalls dusted hats and gloves; the powder underfoot had long packed into ice.

Yet still they queued: thousands upon thousands of dark-clad Russians, heads bowed, exchanging the merest snatches of conversation. An out-of-towner – who else would have posed such a question at that place and on that day – approached and asked, as a new-arrival habitually asked of any long queue in those days, “What are they selling up there?” To which the answer, borne on the perishing wind from somewhere further up the line, was this: “Conscience, that’s what they are selling. Fragments of our conscience.”

This was the day they buried the nuclear physicist, Nobel laureate and Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov; I had just arrived in Moscow as a reporter, and the Soviet Union still had two years of its faltering existence to run.

The times now could not be more different: the height of summer, rather than the bitter depths of winter; the colourful chaos of plenty, rather than the grey and white of deprivation; a society that has burst open, compared with one that was still essentially closed. But the announcement of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn conveyed me instantly back, as it doubtless conveyed many Russians old enough to remember, to that winter’s day when the country re-discovered its national conscience and brought the end of Soviet power that much closer.

Solzhenitsyn was then living in Vermont – where he spent most of his enforced exile – and resisting the still-secret entreaties of the Kremlin to return. Mikhail Gorbachev’s loosening of Soviet constraints through the late 1980s brought many former dissidents, including Sakharov, in from the cold. But Solzhenitsyn was an infinitely tougher nut to crack.

His eventual return to Russia in 1994, after 20 years of enforced exile, was intensively negotiated and planned. A progress across the country, east to west, his homeward journey was hailed – as he surely knew it would be – as proof that Russia had finally recovered its soul.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life mirrored in an uncanny way the fate of his fellow-countrymen and of Russia itself. Born in 1918, he was destined always to be as old as the Bolshevik revolution. Decorated for bravery as a young officer in the Second World War, he was denounced almost immediately for criticising Stalin. At which point his long peregrinations through the Soviet system of prison camps – chronicled in his later work, The Gulag Archipelago – began.

In common with many of the more original writers and artists of his generation, he had to wait until his forties, and the later stages of the cultural “thaw” initiated by Khrushchev, to have his first work published. Even then, it was a brave editor – Alexander Tvardovsky at Novy Mir – who ventured to print the novella that made his name, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. An account, in minute detail, of the daily drudgery of a Gulag prisoner, the work was lionised – for political as much as literary reasons – by a Western world in the grip of the Cold War.

With Khrushchev’s tenure, and the “thaw”, summarily ended two years later in 1964, Solzhenitsyn’s major novels were all published abroad and smuggled back to Russia. There, devotees spent many hours copying them out in minute script, word by word, page by page, for distribution through the burgeoning – and risky – network of Samizdat. The Nobel Prize for Literature followed, along with internal exile in the provincial city of Ryazan. In 1974, the year in which the first volume of his magnum opus on the prison camps appeared, he was summarily expelled from Russia to Switzerland.

Solzhenitsyn is not one of those dissenters of whom it can be said that Western exile made him. His reputation in the then Soviet Union was built on his courage in tackling quintessentially Russian subjects that many knew about, either personally or second-hand, but few were prepared to address in print. All he wrote rang true; it was suffused with personal experience of the bitter conflicts that intellectual life demanded in those years, and his utter – some would say, pigheaded – refusal to compromise. As an artist, he addressed universal dilemmas, but he remained a very Russian writer-hero.

While some Soviet-era dissidents courted Western attention as strengthening their cause and, perhaps, keeping them alive, for Solzhenitsyn such considerations always seemed immaterial. His was an internal Russian world that did not go much beyond the book-lined walls of his study.

In Vermont he rarely strayed beyond the bounds of his walled estate, where he and his family lived almost in the manner of Russian intellectuals before the Revolution. As his polemics against Western secularism showed in later years, he never ceased to tend the flame of his brand of Russian-ness – espousing the priorities of Orthodoxy, autocracy and national identity by which Tsarist Russia defined itself.

And in a Russia where cynicism about Soviet life and its increasingly discredited values was mounting, Solzhenitsyn provided something constant, an alternative standard to which many felt they should aspire, but knew they could never meet. When Gorbachev – another child, incidentally, of the Khrushchev “thaw” – unleashed the cacophony of “glasnost”, and the Soviet Union collapsed under its weight, there was Solzhenitsyn: still as stern, as uncompromising and, in his patriarchal way, as enduring a guardian of the Russian soul.

Solzhenitsyn was among those cultural luminaries – Rostropovich was another – who, by what they were rather than what they did, helped Russia re-emerge as a state from the ruins of the Soviet Union. His work, now freely available in every Russian bookshop, fostered not only a sense of continuity, but a sense of conscience. It supplied many of the less edifying chapters edited out of the country’s fractured past.

Had Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia even a year before he did, he might have been accompanied across his native land by hundreds of thousands, flocking to him for some sort of absolution. The quieter reception he was accorded in 1994 reflected a country settling into its new life and starting to reconcile itself – albeit fitfully – to its chequered past. Today’s Russia is also more sceptical of the very 19th-century brand of Russian exceptionalism that distinguished his thinking. To this extent, Solzhenitsyn had outlived his age.

When he died, on his estate outside Moscow, Solzhenitsyn was culturally back on his country’s margins.

Then again, for a writer whose place in history is guaranteed as the keeper of Russia’s conscience through the grimmest of times, the margins are probably where he would most like to be.

 m.dejevsky at independent.co.uk