Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Александр Солженицын
Born	11 December 1918 Kislovodsk, Terek Oblast, Russian SFSR
Died	3 August 2008 (aged 89) Moscow, Russia
Cause of death	Cancer
Nationality	Russian
Known for	Right-wing literature

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian anti-communist writer, poet, Nobel Prize winner, and anti-Semite best known for writing the fictional novel The Gulag Archipelago (1973), along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Matryona's Place (1963), Cancer Ward (1966), In the First Circle (1968), August 1914 (1971), and several other books.

Life

Early life

Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918, the son of the late Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn (1891–1918) and Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (1894–1944). His father was an Imperial Russian Army officer and his mother a farmer who had inherited a large estate from Solzhenitsyn's granfather. Due to Taisiya's poor health and Isaakiy's premature death, Solzhenitsyn was mostly raised by his aunt Irina and his maternal grandparents.

In 1924, with his father gone and with the family estate decimated by the Civil War, Solzhenitsyn and his mother moved to Rostov-on-Don. He studied in school from 1926 to 1936 and became interested in literature. At the age of 18, he joined Komsomol and enrolled in V.M. Molotov Rostov State University. In university, Aleksandr studied physics and mathematics, while also learning about history and Marxism–Leninism in his own time. Solzhenitsyn met chemist Natalya Reshetovskaya (1919–2003) at Rostov, whom he married on 7 April 1940. In May–June 1941, around the same time that the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn graduated with honours. In the abstract of his test sheet, the dean's office spoke highly of him and recommended that "Comrade Solzhenitsyn" be made a university assistant or graduate student.

Great Patriotic War

Unlike many other Soviet citizens, Solzhenitsyn wasn't immediately mobilised to fight in the War due to his poor health. However, by October 1941, the situation had become so dire that the Soviet government began passing conscription laws which declared that any man aged 16 to 28 might have to enlist. This included Solzhenitsyn, and on 18 October, he was drafted and assigned to a Red Army horse-drawn transport battalion.

In April 1942, six months into his service, Solzhenitsyn left for an artillery school in Kostroma along the Volga River. Seven months later, he was released as a sergeant and sent to Saransk. When he arrived in Saransk, he was made the commander of an artillery sound ranging battery which was assigned to the Bryansk Front of the 63rd Army. The unit fought in the Battle of Kursk in 1943. During the battle, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War (2nd Class) for successfully identifying the location of and disabling three German artillery batteries. In addition, he was promoted to senior sergeant.

In May 1944, Solzhenitsyn was promoted to captain. As part of the 48th Army, Solzhenitsyn's unit took part in Operation Bagration. He yet again was awarded on 8 July 1944—this time the Order of the Red Star—for detecting two German batteries and ordering counter batteries to fire upon them.

Late into the war, during the East Prussian Offensive, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claimed that he bore witness to war crimes, including rapes and murders, committed by Soviet military personnel against the German civilian population. He also saw firsthand the deportation of ethnic Germans (many of them Nazi collaborators or settler colonists) from present-day Poland and Kaliningrad. This along with setbacks the Red Army faced earlier in the war may have led to him beginning to lose faith in the Soviet government and starting to sympathise with the Germans. Future Solzhenitsyn would even go as far as defending Nazi collaborators such as Andrey Vlasov.

Arrest and trial

By the end of the war, Solzhenitsyn had become disillusioned with Stalin and the Soviet leadership, which he accused of "distorting Leninism." In a private correspondence to his friend, chemist, and comrade-in-arms Nikolai Vitkevich, Solzhenitsyn criticised Stalin, comparing the Soviet system to Feudalism, and calling for the creation of a terrorist organisation with the goal of overthrowing Stalin's government. He also referred to Stalin as Balebos in the letter, which may have been an anti-Semitic dog whistle.

Military censors picked up on Solzhenitsyn's agitation and on 2 February 1945, SMERSH ordered his immediate arrest. Seven days later he was taken into custody, stripped of his rank, and sent to Lubyanka Prison. From 20 February to 25 May, Solzhenitsyn was interrogated by the NKGB. A court drew up a verdict which was then approved by Commissar of State Security (3rd Class) Pyotr Fedotov in June. Only a month later on 7 June 1945, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 26, was found guilty; charged with spreading anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 58, Paragraph 10 of the RSFSR Penal Code) and founding a hostile organisation (Article 58, Paragraph 11 of the RSFSR Penal Code). He was sentenced in absentia to eight years in a labour camp with immediate internal exile afterwards.

While bourgeois ideologists cite this as an example of supposed repression by the Soviet government, this practice was in fact employed in many other countries at that time. Nearly all parts of the British Empire used military censorship during the First and Second World Wars, as did the United States and Nazi Germany. Even neutral countries, such as Switzerland and Ireland limited what could and couldn't be said via mail. 80 years later, the State of Israel continues to censor what IDF personnel can say. Such a practice was commonplace relative to the time and place. Further, consider what would have happened had SMERSH not intervened and Solzhenitsyn & Vitkevich actually gone about founding this "organisation" of theirs:

"Any [...] participation in an organisation, formed for the preparation or carrying out of one of the crimes indicated in this chapter, shall be punishable by measures of social defence, indicated in the corresponding articles of this code." -Paragraph 11, Article 58 of the Penal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, 6 June 1927

Such 'measures of social defence' were:

"[...] The supreme measure of social defense—shooting." -Paragraph 2, Article 58 of the Penal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, 6 June 1927

Therefore, if it wasn't for this invasion of privacy, Vitkevich and Solzhenitsyn would have been killed. And it would have been their fault, as it would have been they who killed themselves.

Imprisonment

Initially, instead of doing manual labour, Solzhenitsyn was assigned a job at the Research Institute of Communications in Moscow due to his background as a physicist. There he met Lev Kopelev, a Russian-Jewish author of German descent, and Dmitry Panin, an engineer. Solzhenitsyn based the characters Lev Rubin and Sologdin off these two in In the First Circle (1968). Solzhenitsyn seems to have had an effect on Panin, as Panin, like Solzhenitsyn, began referring to the leader of the Soviet Union as the "Godfather" and adopted the name Sologdin in his book The Notebooks of Sologdin (1973).

While Solzhenitsyn was serving his sentence, his wife divorced him in December 1948.

In 1950, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to the (1st) Special Camp in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan. He was put to work as a miner, construction worker, and foreman. While at Ekibastuz, he was given free medical care following the appearance of a tumor.

Ekibastuz uprising

Solzhenitsyn took part in the Ekibastuz uprising of 1952. To summarise, in the Autumn of 1951, around 2,000 Western Ukrainians (most of them Nazi collaborators) were interned at the Gulag in Ekibastuz. Four years earlier, in 1947, the maximum sentence had been raised from 20 years to 25 years. Considering the dramatic drop in life expectancy after 1940, this was essentially a life sentence. These prisoners, still holding pro-Nazi beliefs and having nothing to lose, began organising. The Ukrainian Nationalists identified prisoners who were sympathetic to or worked with the camp administration and had them killed. Dozens of informants, who could've just been regular prisoners that reported when things went wrong or undercover guards were also murdered.

When the camp administration learnt of this on 6 January, they began transferring the Western Ukrainian prisoners to the 2nd of the two camps in the Gulag. On 22 January 1952, the Nazis in the 1st camp rioted, destroying the fence around the security barracks. Their goals were to 1) gain access to the informers' cell in the security barracks where the informants were hiding, and burn anyone in there alive; and 2) release the prisoners that had been suspected of the earlier murders. Before they could accomplish their goal, however, some of the other prisoners ratted them out.

The guards took up positions from their towers and opened fire with machine guns, killing many. After the shooting, even more guards came out onto the yard, armed with pipes and batons. They began beating the mob, injuring three and killing one. In all, twenty-one prisoners were killed. Solzhenitsyn was already in his cell by the time this had happened.

The next morning on 23 January, most of the prisoners in the 1st Camp launched a hunger strike, refusing to eat or work. The demands of the strike were 1) the guards who defended those men in the security barracks were to be tried, 2) the locks would be removed from the prisoners' barracks, 3) the numbers would be removed from the prisoners' uniforms, and 4) all Special Council sentences in the Ekibastuz gulag would be reviewed in open courts (the only reasonable demand out of all of them).

Solzhenitsyn, knowing very well that the rioters were Nazi collaborators, thugs, and murderers, joined in on the strike. But by 19 February, when most of the protesters realised that their demands weren't going to be met, they gave up. The instigators of the strike were sent to other camps.

First exile

On 13 February 1953, Solzhenitsyn was released and exiled to Birlik in Southeastern Kazakhstan. Less than a month later, Stalin was dead. In the ensuing power struggle, Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the leader. While in exile, Solzhenitsyn worked at a school teaching maths and physics. However, his health began to deteriorate, and in late-1953 he was diagnosed with cancer following the appearance of a tumor in his abdomen. For his diagnosis, Solzhenitsyn was allowed to leave for Tashkent in Uzbekistan. His experiences there and in the Gulags became the basis of the novel Cancer Ward (1966).

Solzhenitsyn returned to exile after his treatment, and for three years he wallowed in his own loathing and self-pity. He genuinely believed that he had murdered innocent Nazi artillerymen who had no choice but to genocide Eastern Europe. However, during the Khrushchev Thaw in June 1956, Solzhenitsyn was pardoned and released from exile by the Soviet government.

Return to Russia

After his exile ended, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, working as a schoolteacher in Ryazan. He remarried his ex-wife on 2 February 1957. Four days after that, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. In 1962, with the full backing of Khrushchev and Politburo (who were trying to discredit the legacy of Stalin), Solzhenitsyn was granted permission to join the Union of Soviet Writers and publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The book was very influential, having sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year, and was even taught in Soviet schools. The journal which published the book, Novy Mir, nominated Solzhenitsyn for the Lenin Prize in 1964, although it was instead awarded to the electrical engineer Vladimir Kotelnikov.

Solzhenitsyn published three short stories in 1963, those being An Incident at Krechetovka Station, Matryona's Place, and For the Good of the Cause. Around the same time, Solzhenitsyn approached Novy Mir once more and asked that they also print Cancer Ward, although such pleas were never answered.

In 1964, the Central Committee ousted Khrushchev and replaced him with Brezhnev. Brezhnev reversed many of Khrushchev's reforms, including strengthening censorship. This personally affected Solzhenitsyn, whose writings were no longer being published, whose written draft for In The First Circle was seized from his friend's apartment by the KGB, and who was removed from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1969. In a desperate bid to save some of his writings, Solzhenitsyn sent the manuscripts he was writing to colleagues. The drafts for The Gulag Archipelago, for example, were sent to Heli Susi, the daughter of an Estonian Nazi collaborator he had met at Lubyanka.

In August 1968, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began an affair with a woman named Natalya Svetlova (1939-). This would culminate in his wife Reshetovskaya attempting suicide via drug overdose and seeking divorce once more, which she obtained in 1972. Aleksandr married Svetlova the following year. They had three children in total: Yermolai (1970-), Ignat (1972-), and Stepan Solzhenitsyn (1973-). In addition, Aleksandr took up a stepson from Svetlova's previous marriage.

While he had lost the heart of the Soviet government, Solzhenitsyn was still the darling of the West. By this point in his life, Solzhenitsyn's works had been read by millions of people and were available in dozens of languages. Journalists from all over the world interviewed him and listened to what he had to say about this issue or the other. And in 1970, the Swedish government awarded Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize in Literature. Solzhenitsyn didn't claim the prize until 1974 out of fear that he would be barred from the Union while on visit to Sweden, but the award was still his.

In 1971, Solzhenitsyn fell ill after a visit to Novocherkassk, the site of the Novocherkassk massacre of 1962. Many journalists and historians believe that Solzhenitsyn was covertly poisoned by the KGB, although no evidence beyond the testimony of one Soviet general exists to support this claim. Conspiracy or not, Solzhenitsyn survived and would continue to agitate against the Soviet Union for almost another 37 years.

The KGB under the leadership of Yuri Andropov became suspicious of Solzhenitsyn's colleagues for whatever reason and began investigating them. They discovered the notes of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya (typewriter and close associate of his), which mentioned The Gulag Archipelago. These notes were sent to the Central Committee in order to gain an arrest warrant. The request was approved, and in August 1973 she was detained at the Moskovsky railway station in Saint Petersburg and taken in for questioning. She revealed the location of one of the three copies of The Gulag Archipelago (at the dacha of Leonid Samutin, a Nazi collaborator and friend of Solzhenitsyn) which was then seized by the Soviet government. Elizaveta was released within five days of interrogation, and on 23 August, she committed suicide by hanging herself.

Solzhenitsyn, upon hearing of her death, realised what was happening and quickly sent a copy of The Gulag Archipelago to France in September 1973. It was initially published in its original Russian, but later translated into French and English.

On 31 August 1973, an open letter was published in Pravda, condemning Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn for "slander[ing] our state and social system." The letter was signed by 31 writers, including Mikhail Sholokhov and Chinghiz Aimatov.

Arrest and deportation

On 11 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. Proceedings began not long after, with Solzhenitsyn being tried for treason under Article 64 of the RSFSR Penal Code. Solzhenitsyn said that this was "unexpected" and simply referred to the charge as a "grave accusation." When asked by The New York Times to elaborate on what he meant by that, he refused. On 12 February, he was stripped of his citizenship, and on 13 February, he was flown to Frankfurt in West Germany.

Second exile

He temporarily lived at the house of Heinrich Böll (a CIA-affiliate via the Congress for Cultural Freedom) in Kreuzau, Cologne, before moving to Zürich. He was only in Switzerland for a few months before he decided to move again, this time to Cavendish, Vermont. Today, an exhibit is dedicated to him nearby at the Vermont Historical Society Museum in Montpelier. While in Switzerland, his wife (who lost her Soviet citizenship in 1976) created the Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund.

During the period from 1974 to 1994, while Solzhenitsyn was in the West, his writings claimed that:

• Communism killed 110 million Russians (even higher than the estimate provided by The Black Book of Communism (1997), which, through erroneous methodology, came to the conclusion that Communism killed 93 million people worldwide).
• Spanish progressives shouldn't push to hard for change, because Spain was more free under Francisco Franco than the Soviet Union was at any point in its history. The Spanish don't know what dictatorship is; only Solzhenitsyn does.
• It was literally impossible to move from city-to-city in the Soviet Union (despite Solzhenitsyn traveling to Kislovodsk, Rostov, Ryazan, Novocherkassk, etc. on his own accord).
• People shouldn't have fought against the Vietnam War because it would make the Western Bloc look weak on Communism or something in the future (the implication being that the United States should have stayed in Vietnam).

In 1983, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Templeton Prize, which "honours individuals whose exemplary achievements advance Sir John Templeton's philanthropic vision" Templeton was a billion-dollar banker, investor, and philanthropist.

Later life

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn regained his Soviet citizenship, and in 1994, he and his wife moved to the newly-formed Russian Federation. Their children stayed in the US, although Solzhenitsyn's stepson, Dmitry, died the same year. Solzhenitsyn had numerous TV shows and documentaries made of him, gave a speech at the State Duma, and personally met with Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin (whom he supported).

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure on 3 August 2008 at the age of 89. His funeral was held on 5-6 August, with attendees including Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dmitry Medvedev, and Yevgeny Primakov, among others. He was buried at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.

Antisemitism

• Solzhenitsyn used the Yiddish rendering of the word Balebos (meaning "[Jewish] master of the house") in reference to Stalin. Stalin himself was not Jewish. He, like Solzhenitsyn, was a Christian convert to Atheism. But that doesn't stop anti-Semites from claiming that the Bolshevik Revolution was a plot by "international Jewry."
• For "some reason," Solzhenitsyn emphasises the Jewishness of the Russian anarchist, Dmitry Bogrov, in his 1971 book August 1914.
• He claimed that Jews were treated better in the Gulags than non-Jews were.