Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 Dec 1918 – 3 Aug 2008) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, philosopher, historian and a political ideologist. Born a year after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in October 1917 and in the immediate aftermath of WWI, his life and works were shaped by the harsh realities of life during his formative period and the consequences of war.
His parents had all the trappings and background of Imperial Russia. His father, Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, was an officer in the elite Cossack Brigade (which was fiercely Tsarist) of the Imperial Russian Army and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner in the Kuban region in the northern foothill of the Caucasus. Thus, his family fitted the typical bourgeois family, as defined by the revolutionary Bolshevik party, against which Bolshevik revolution was carried out in 1917. His father died soon after his mother conceived him and so he was brought up by his widowed mother in extreme hardship deprived of her wealth by the communist regime of Soviet Russia. Although he was to become a great literary giant, he studied Physics and Mathematics at Rostov State University.
As he grew up as an ardent communist, the drums of next war (WWII) were beating louder and louder and, inevitably, he had to join the Russian Army against Nazi invasion to save his motherland. As a brilliant officer of Cossack heritage, he showed his military excellence and was twice decorated. But the war left a very painful imprint on him. He witnessed war crimes by the Soviet Army against German civilians – the non-combatants and the elderly were robbed of meagre possessions, women were gang raped and killed, houses were burnt and the whole village pillaged. On atrocities, he wrote in agony, “You know very well that we have come to take revenge against the Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union”.
While serving in the Red Army in WWII, he was arrested for derogatory remarks on the conduct of the war by Josef Stalin in a private letter to a friend in 1945, just a couple of months before the end of the war, and was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in labour camps. He was in a prison in Moscow when on 9th May 1945 Germany had surrendered. While the whole city erupted in jubilation, the person who fought for the country and risked his life was in the prison!
His sentence started in 1945. He chronicled his life in labour camps as forming three phases. In the last phase, from 1950 to 1953, he was in a ‘Special Camp’ for political prisoners in Kazakhstan, where was forced to work as a miner, bricklayer and a foundry foreman. His experience during this time formed the basis of his novel ‘One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’ (1962). This was the only book that was allowed to be published in the Soviet Union after the reforms that were carried out by Nikita Khrushchev and, even then, only after Khrushchev’s personal patronage. That reform also freed him from exile in 1956 and allowed to go back to Moscow. His books ‘Cancer Ward’ (1968), ‘August 1914’ (1971), ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ (1973) and many more were all published abroad.
In all of his books, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ received most attention in the West, as it was in this book, he exposed the moral depravity of communist ideology. The Gulag, in Russian, is the acronym of Main Directorate of Camps (labour). It was written over a period of ten years taking materials from reports, interviews, diaries as well as legal documents and his own experiences. The three volumes of this book published in 1973 in the West led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. The authorities in Soviet Union were very much angered by his supposedly anti-communist moral and ethical propaganda in the form of literary contributions. In 1974 Soviet Authorities withdrew his Soviet citizenship. He was then flown to the then West Germany and after protracted negotiations, he was allowed to move his family to America in 1976. He lived in America from 1976 until 1994 when he returned to Russia after the fall of Soviet Union. During this period, he wrote the dramatized account of Russian Revolution of 1917 in “The Red Wheel”.
Although in the West he is portrayed as the voice against communism, a lone writer standing up to the might of an ‘Evil Empire’ etc, in reality, he was simply expressing his moral values – be it against communism or capitalism. He wrote a number of articles, while in America, showing the vacuousness of American capitalism and its moral degradation. He strongly criticised America for invading Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. He wrote, “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State”. This narrative is now relevant to many countries, East or West.
He also wrote, “Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle”. It may have been written against the backdrop of Josef Stalin’s atrocities and violent measures in WWII, but it also applies very well to modern day politicians – democratically elected in Western affluent countries – like George W Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Trump and many more.
In 1994 he returned to Russia with his family and lived in Western part of Moscow. Although he lived over 17 years in America, he never accepted American culture and way of life. As he became old, he moved away from socialism and became a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. He died on 3 August 2008 of heart attack.
Dr A Rahman is an author and a columnist