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 fiction 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 in Kislovodsk, the son of the late Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn (1891–1918) and Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (1894–1944). His father was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army and his mother a farmer who had inherited a large estate from Solzhenitsyn's grandfather. Due to his mother's poor health and his father'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 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Solzhenitsyn's studies were cut short. Solzhenitsyn graduated from Rostov 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 serve in the Red Army due to his poor health, even though he wanted to. By October however, the situation had become much more dire than it was in June, and on 18 October, he was drafted and assigned to a 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.

Arrest and trial

As the war raged on, Solzhenitsyn became more and more disillusioned with Stalin's government. He blamed initial military setbacks on Stalin's poor management, accused Stalin of "distorting Leninism", compared the Soviet system to Feudalism, and claimed to have witnessed horrible atrocities such as rape and murder being committed by Soviet military personnel against the German civilian population in Poland (which he viewed as needless acts of revenge, perpetrated in response to earlier atrocities by the Germans). He also observed the harsh conditions that the exhausted, demoralised, frozen, and starved German Army had to endure. All of this led to him beginning to lose faith in the regime and sympathising not just with German civilians but even Nazi soldiers and collaborators (with future Solzhenitsyn going so far as to defend figures like Andrey Vlasov).

In mid-1943, Solzhenitsyn and his closest friend Nikolai Vitkevich, a chemist and a fellow officer, wrote a "Resolution" calling for the creation of an organisation with the mission of overthrowing the Soviet government. The "Resolution" does not appear to be available online, though Solzhenitsyn's biographer, D. M. Thomas, by no means pro-Soviet (as he frequently portrays the Soviet government in a negative light in the book and was even awarded the Orwell Prize for his biography of Solzhenitsyn in 1999) gives the following description of the "Resolution":

The two young officers, after days of discussion, astonishingly drew up a program for change, entitled "Resolution No. 1." They argued that the Soviet regime stifled economic development, literature, culture, and everyday life; a new organization was needed to fight to put things right.

Solzhenitsyn stated in a 1977 interview with Michael Scammell that:

Koka [Vitkevich] and I had moved a very long way forward. What we did in essence was to found a kind of new political party. We wrote our . . . Resolution No. 1. There was a descriptive introduction in which we characterized the Soviet regime as having all the attributes of feudalism and exploiting all our lives. . . . Then we described its influence on economics, how it stifled economic development, how it stifled literature and culture and our everyday lives. We said that it had to be fought against and that it was impossible to undertake all these tasks without forming an organization. This was our final point: an organization was absolutely essential. That is, we were saying in effect that we needed to create a new party.

"Political party" in this context was likely a euphemism for a clandestine resistance/opposition group. Solzhenitsyn frequently used euphemisms and pseudonyms in both his written and verbal correspondence, choosing his words very carefully (in the USSR mainly to avoid arrest, and in the West to paint himself as a victim).

Solzhenitsyn and Vitkevich weren't immediately arrested in 1943 as they kept to themselves and avoided speaking to anyone else about the "Resolution". Solzhenitsyn hid his copy of the "Resolution" in his map case while Vitkevich kept his in his gas-mask holder. But in late-1944, Solzhenitsyn and Vitkevich were separated, and in order to keep in touch, they had to write to each other.

Though Koka had been moved to another front, he and Sanya [Solzhenitsyn] continued to discuss their anti-Stalinist "Resolution" in an exchange of letters, referring jokily to "the war after the war" in which they would carry out the program drawn up in the—echoing the Tehran Conference—"Big Two" conference they had had.

Military censors, who in 1945 had been monitoring Solzhenitsyn's correspondence for some time, picked up on his anti-Soviet agitation and, on 2 February 1945, SMERSH ordered his 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, who had obtained copies of "Resolution No. 1" as well as all correspondence between him, Natalya, Vitkevich, and a few others from April 1944 and February 1945.

Solzhenitsyn was charged with spreading anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 58, Paragraph 10 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1926) and founding a hostile organisation (Article 58, Paragraph 11 of the Criminal Code).

A court drew up a verdict which was then approved by Commissar of State Security (3rd Class) Pyotr Fedotov in June. A month later, on 7 June 1945, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 26, was found guilty in absentia and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp followed by permanent internal exile afterwards.

Bourgeois ideologues cite Solzhenitsyn's arrest and imprisonment as an example of supposed "brutal Communist repression", either not aware of or choosing to ignore the fact that Solzhenitsyn conspired to overthrow the Soviet government (and the Soviet government was likely aware of this since they had been monitoring Solzhenitsyn's correspondence). Solzhenitsyn himself claimed in a short autobiography that:

I was arrested on the basis of censored extracts from my correspondence with a school friend in 1944-5, basically for disrespectful remarks about Stalin, although we referred to him by a pseudonym.

The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, whose President is Solzhenitsyn's son Ignat, says in its biography of Solzhenitsyn:

In 1945 he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile.

Again, the fact that Solzhenitsyn formed or planned to form an organisation for the explicit purpose of overthrowing Stalin's government isn't mentioned.

In most countries in the world today (and certainly back then), forming or planning to form an organisation with the intent of overthrowing one's own government would be considered treason. Furthermore, in most countries in the world at the time, treason was considered a capital crime, that is, a crime punishable by death).

This was the case in Russia as well. Article 58, Paragraph 10 of the Russian SFSR's Criminal Code states that:

Propaganda or agitation, containing a call for the overthrow, subversion, or weakening of Soviet authority or for the carrying out of other counterrevolutionary crimes (art. 58-2 to 58-9 of this code), and likewise the distribution or preparation or keeping of literature of this nature shall be punishable by--

deprivation of liberty for a term not less than six months.

The same actions during mass disturbances, or with the use of religious or nationalist prejudices of the masses, or in a war situation, or in areas proclaimed to be in a war situation, shall be punishable by--

measures of social defence, indicated in art. 58-2 of this code.

Such measure social defence, indicated in Article 58, Paragraph 2 were:

The supreme measure of social defence-- shooting, or proclamation as an enemy of the workers, with confiscation of property and with deprivation of citizenship of the union Republic, and likewise of citizenship of the Soviet Union and perpetual expulsion beyond the borders of the USSR, with the allowance under extenuating circumstances of reduction to deprivation of liberty for a term of no less than three years, with confiscation of all or part of one's property.

Considering that Solzhenitsyn could have been facing the death penalty, the actual punishment he received for his crime was pretty lax.

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.