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Solzhenitsyn, tortured poet of Stalin's Gulag
Keith Dovkants, Evening Standard4 Aug 2008
Russia was in mourning today for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate whose writing helped conquer the tyranny of the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn, 89, suffered heart failure at his home outside Moscow last night. His wife, Natalya, said today: "He was working all day yesterday, as usual. He did not suffer for long. He just became ill in the evening when he had already gone to bed.
"He wanted to die at home, and he has died at home. He wanted to die in summer, and he has died in summer. He lived a difficult but happy life. And he and I were happy."
Solzhenitsyn's death robs Russia of a hero whose stature was unequalled. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, described him today as a man of "unique destiny, whose name will remain".
At a momentous time in Russian history Solzhenitsyn's quiet and courageous revolt against the evils of Josef Stalin's labour camps became an unshakeable force for change.
His books, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago revealed for the first time the horrors of the camps where ordinary Soviet citizens lived and died in unimagineable conditions of hardship and cruelty. Often, their crimes were no more than mild offences against the dictates and ideology of the Soviet system.
Solzhenitsyn was such a victim. He was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk and seemed set for a brilliant academic career. He excelled at mathematics and physics then, in World War II, served as a front-line artillery captain.
As the war was ending he wrote a letter to an old friend in which he referred to the Soviet dictator Stalin as "the man with the moustache". This was considered an act of gross disrespect and he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp.
The Soviets who condemned him to the barren steppes of Kazakhstan could hardly have known it was a move that would contribute to the destruction of their system. Solzhenitsyn began to write, chronicling the minutiae of the camp inmates' suffering and the "crimes" for which they had been sentenced.
His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a camp to which he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.
The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and it created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all.
Abroad, the book - which became a major film starring Tom Courtenay - was lauded not only for its bravery, but for the quality of its unsparing prose.
When Khrushchev was removed, in 1964, the KGB re-asserted its control and reintroduced many of Stalin's measures against so-called thought-crime. Solzhenitsyn was again persecuted.
His next book, The First Circle, was about inmates in a special camp 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.
The novel Cancer Ward, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life: in this case, 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?"
Solzhenitsyn's work gained power from the fact that no one was spared his anger. 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, a move described by Soviet leaders as provocative. He was banned from travelling to receive his prize, but he wrote an acceptance speech in which he quoted a Russian proverb: One word of truth can conquer the world.
And so it seemed when his work gained currency not only in the West, but inside Russia. Underground copies of his books circulated widely among students and contributed greatly to the dissident movement-than sprang up in the early Seventies. He was perceived as an enemy within and in 1974 he was stripped of his citizenship and exiled on charges of treason.
Solzhenitsyn went first to Germany and then to the US, where he settled in a dacha-style compound in Vermont, surrounded by birch and pine forests.
He yearned to return to his homeland and although his citizenship was restored by Gorbachev in 1990, he refused to go back until the last vestiges of the Soviet regime had been removed.
In 1994, he made a triumphant return, marked in a 56-day train journey from Russia's far east to Moscow.
But if supporters of Western-style democracy believed they were owed a share in Solzhenitsyn's triumph, they were wrong. His vision was not a simplistic view of a struggle between communism and capitalism, in which capitalism was the just victor. He believed Russia to be a civilisation unique to itself, where no known system - including Western democracy - could properly work.
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 him for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO and his fostering of the new Russian billionaires, "oligarchs" such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.
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. Solzhenitsyn also criticised Yeltsin's succesor, Vladimir Putin, in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on the oligarchs.
But then the two men drew together in a move that some perceived as a contradiction. Putin, after all, was a veteran of the same KGB apparatus that had victimised Solzhenitsyn. But the author saw in Putin something more vital to Russia's future, a concept of nationalism and unique destiny.
It was a matter of sadness to many of Solzhenitsyn's admirers that as Putin closed newspapers and tightened the state's grip on free speech and enterprise, the great writer appeared to endorse Putin's vision of a separate political and cultural destiny for Russia.
In his final TV interview last year, Solzhenitsyn made clear that Western democracy was not the solution to Russia's ills, and he expressed solidarity with Putin for reviving the country's standing.
"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world," he said. "But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism ... As far as the state, the public mind and the economy are concerned, Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."
He was writing to the end and a project to publish his complete works began in 2006. Solzhenitsyn hinted at the time that he did not expect to see the 30-volume edition finished, in 2010.
Tributes flowed in today. The celebrated artist Yevgeniy Mironov said: "No one has ever experimented - sorry for the cruelty of the word - on himself like Solzenitsyn. Without knowing how his ordeal would end, not knowing there would be a Nobel prize and coming back to Russia, he kept fighting for the truth, for the motherland."
Yet Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and that time has now passed. For many young Russians he is a distant, historical figure. Witness this posting on a blog today, from Maria, aged 19: "My mother is crying today, really upset about his passing, and of course I know this man was a great writer and a famous dissident. To my school friends, though, it was hard for us to understand his books and his thoughts ... he was like an old grandad who had lost touch with reality, not understanding the life today."
