The Gulag Archipelago


Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 38

Palash Biswas
http://troubledgalaxydetroyeddreams.blogspot.com/


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who exposed the
horrors of Soviet-era labor camps, was buried today at the Donskoi
Monastery in Moscow in a state funeral attended by President Dmitry
Medvedev.

Solzhenitsyn never represented the Great Rusian tradition of
Literature we knew.

We may not compare him with Russian gretas like  Dostovosky, Tolstoy
or Gorky.

He was quite different in content as well as style. We never could
digest the bitterness of Truth he showcased so well!Neither we could
neglect him. What we did ? We read Solzhenitsyn and right and right
rejected him as an US agent in literature! It happened with Pastarnac
as well as Sholokhov! We never tried to look into the Concentration
camps! We considered that we were amidst the mainstream! Which proved
nothing but an Illusion , far from reality!

I had gone through Soviet classics like `Mother’ by Maxim Gorky and
`War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy in my school days thanks to Chhoto
Kaka. During first year of my undergraduate college life in DSB
College Nainital, our studies were closely monitored by Tara Chandra
Tripathi. We had to read Aristotle and Socrates, Hobbs,Lock and
Russeau, Adam smith, Hegel, Charbak,Chanakya and all basic theories
and philosophies. We had to go through the vast volumes of Das Capital
as well as `Psychoanalysis’ and `Psychology of Sex. Then, we had
separate list in our study circles which included Howard Frost and
Julius Fuchik. In those days, we were assigned a course of systematic
study of Soviet Literature from Dostoevsky to Alexander Couperin,
Chekhov to Mayakovasky. Thus, I read The Gulag Archipelago by
Solzhenitsyn just after we finished Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and
have already enjoyed the films like `War and Peace’ as well as ` Dr
Zhivago’.After Solzhenitsyn we read Sholokhov. We had a long journey
from River Moscova to river  Done!

I have to wear the spects once again which I discarded years back. In
Nainital, while I was a student in GIC, I was suggested by the doctors
of Sitapur Eye hospital to use spects for my studies. I neglected as I
always hated spects!

In Kolkata, doctors diagnosed diabetes in 1999. The immediate security
measure was to adopt spects. I used spects some time as everyone
suggested how I would be losing vision very soon. I came over the fear
factor very soon and spects were the first thing which I threw away
with most hatred. Nowadays, I feel giddy so soon and had been
virtually unable to read any book. Though, I feel at home with my PC.,
it is very hard to go through the smallest fonts used in
Newspapers.Thus, I had to opt for spects once again!

The fact remains, so called ideologies happen to be the greatest
spects ever invented. We hated George Orwell for his creations `1984’
and `Animal Farm’. Rather we have been admirers of Victor Hugo,Charles
Dickens and Hemingway! We preferred to read Les Miserables to the real
History of France! `The Old man and the Sea’ always inspired us. We
were spellbound to read `Out Sider’ by Camus. We were fans of Sartre
as he refused Nobel Prize. But we did read his works, too.

But the Ideological Spects made us so biased! i never cared to read
Ambedkar or anything indigenous before settling in Kolkata and bearing
the stings of Manusmriti! Rather we sympathised with Black Brotherhood
and Anti Apartheid movement led by nelson Mandela. But seldom we tried
to understand the social fabrics and indigenous production system in
this divided bleeding subcontinent. We depended so much so on the
studies made by RC Majumdar, Jadunath  Sarkar, A.L.Basam, Romila
Thapar, Irphan Habib, Sumit Sarkar, Ramchandra Guha and so on! We
never tried to know other versions, specially the indigenous first
versions of recent history!

As a student of Shakespeare during my post graduation days, I always
wore the ideological spects. Thus, I discarded all the conservative
critics like Bradley and David Cecil.I always boasted to read the most
of Shakespearean works and banked  mostly on French and Russian
critics. I had never had an excellent command on language as Dr Manas
Mukul Das bluntly used to say. But I could scare anyone with my logic
and analysis. In my M.A. previous exams I quoted Dr Ram Vilas Sharma,
Boris Pasternak, Dorothy vaugngent, Sartre and Camus which proved
disastrous for me as I got just the passing marks, only 36. In the
final year, it happened with my Fiction paper in which I tried to be
an expert and got only 49. While I got seventies in Poetry and
Literary criticism. It wiped out my chances in the most sought career
in the universities!

I want to insist a point. We read literature,true. But we were biased
to go through the lines. I never read Tagore very seriously and
discarded Sharat and Bankim. While Manik was my hero. We loved
Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya.

I must admit that I was biased to evaluate the works of Orwell,
Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Sholokhov. We could not tolerate anything
against the Soviets, China, Cuba, Central Europe and the Communist
movement.

What we see in India now. The polity is transformed in an Animal Farm!
Democratic institutions and fundamental rights along with civic and
human rights are inflicted with `1984’!

With the damned Manusmriti, Indian subcontinent has been the largest
Gulag for thousands and thousands years and the Society itself
inflicted with apartheid and caste system has been the largest
concentration camp where 85 percent of population is enslaved for time
infinite. We are handicapped with inherent injustice and inequality. I
wish, I could read all the literature once again!
The so called anti communist writers have a different meaning for me
after we saw the failures of insurrections like Nandigram and Singur
to convert into a pure infight in between the Power hegemony and
Resistance Hegemony of the Polity. Market is sovereign. Nationalities,
identities and mother languages are being destroyed. It is an
unlimited concentration camp where all the indigenous people have to
be annihilated!

Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Winner, Given State Funeral (Update1)

By Torrey Clark

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning
author who exposed the horrors of Soviet-era labor camps, was buried
today at the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow in a state funeral attended
by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Solzhenitsyn's widow Natalia and their sons stood by the grave under a
chilly, overcast sky. White-gloved soldiers fired a salute. The
ceremony, attended by hundreds of mourners, was broadcast live on
state television.

The author had appealed to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II five
years ago to be laid to rest in the monastery's cemetery, state
television station Vesti-24 said. Solzhenitsyn's grave is next to that
of pre-revolutionary historian Vasily Klyuchevsky.

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure three days ago at the age of 89
after months of ill health. The author, who portrayed dictator Josef
Stalin's labor camps and political oppression, was stripped of his
Soviet citizenship in 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize
in Literature at a ceremony he couldn't attend. He lived in
Switzerland before moving to the U.S.

Medvedev, who interrupted a working vacation on the Volga River to
attend, ordered the government to create scholarships in the author's
name and for Moscow to name a street in his honor. Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin called for Solzhenitsyn's works to be studied more
extensively in schools as ``a vaccination against tyranny for our
society,'' Vesti-24 reported.

Political Prisoner

After returning from exile in 1994, Solzhenitsyn became a critic of
Russia's first post-communist leader, Boris Yeltsin. He later praised
Yeltsin's successor Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, for
restoring Russia's authority in the world.

Solzhenitsyn, who wrote more than 20 books, drew on his own experience
as a political prisoner in his early works, including ``One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich'' and ``The First Circle.'' In 2007,
Solzhenitsyn accepted a state award from Putin for outstanding
achievement in culture and education.

Medvedev laid red roses on Solzhenitsyn's open casket during the
funeral service at the monastery today, as Putin did yesterday during
a memorial ceremony at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Putin yesterday praised Solzhenitsyn for giving ``an example of truly
selfless devotion and of unselfish service to the people, the
fatherland'' and for championing ``the ideals of freedom, justice and
humanism.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a4Yx2EQUza9w&refer=muse



The Gulag Archipelago
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Gulag Archipelago (Russian) is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. It is
a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary
research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a
prisoner in a Gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968 (dates
given at the end of the book) it was published in the West in 1973,
thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in
the Soviet Union until its official publication in 1989.

"GULag" is an acronym for the Russian term "Chief Administration for
Corrective Labor Camps" , the bureaucratic name of the Soviet
concentration camp main governing board, and by metonymy, the camp
system itself. The original Russian title of the book is "Arkhipelag
GULag", the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor deployed
throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor
camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast "chain of islands",
known only to those who were fated to visit them.

Structure and factual basis
Structurally, the text is made up of seven sections divided (in most
printed editions) into three volumes: parts 1-2, parts 3-4, and parts
5-7. At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the
Soviet concentration camp and forced labour system from 1918 to 1956,
starting with V.I. Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October
Revolution establishing the legal and practical frame for a slave
labor economy, and a punitive concentration camp system. It describes
and discusses the waves of purges, assembling the show trials in
context of the development of the greater GULag system with particular
attention to the legal and bureaucratic development.

The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, the time of Nikita
Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956
denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the
surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era. Though the speech was not
published in the USSR for a long time, it was a break with the most
atrocious practices of the concentration camp system; Solzhenitsyn was
aware, however, that the outlines of the GULag system had survived and
could be revived and expanded by future leaders.

Despite the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront this
shameful Soviet system, the realities of the camps remained taboo into
the 1980s. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet
Union's supporters in the West viewed the GULag as a deviation of
Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and the opposition tended to view it as a
systemic fault of Soviet political culture — an inevitable outcome of
the Bolshevik political project. This view, politically unpopular
inside and outside the USSR during the Cold War, because it ascribed
to Lenin the theoretical and practical origins of the concentration
camp system, has become the prevalent view of informed writers and
scholars since the USSR's demise.

Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows
the typical course of a zek (political prisoner) through the
concentration camp system, starting with arrest, show trial and
initial internment; transport to the "archipelago"; treatment of
prisoners and general living conditions; slave labor gangs and the
technical prison camp system (where Andrei Sakharov and his team of
prisoner-scientists developed the hydrogen bomb, among other Soviet
scientific breakthroughs); camp rebellions and strikes (see Kengir
uprising); the practice of internal exile following completion of the
original prison sentence; and ultimate (but not guaranteed) release of
the prisoner. Along the way, Solzhenitsyn's examination details the
trivial and commonplace events of an average zek's life, as well as
specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system,
including revolts and uprisings.

Aside from using his experiences as a zek at a scientific prison (a
sharashka), the basis of the novel The First Circle (1968),
Solzhenitsyn draws from the testimony of 227 fellow zeks, the first-
hand accounts which base the work. One chapter of the third volume of
the book is written by a prisoner named Georgi Tenno, whose exploits
enraptured Solzhenitsyn to the extent that he offered Tenno a position
as co-author of the book; Tenno declined.

The sheer volume of firsthand testimony and primary documentation that
Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble in The Gulag Archipelago made all
subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work useless. Much
of the impact of the treatise stems from the closely detailed stories
of interrogation routines, prison indignities and (especially in
section 3) camp massacres and inhuman practices.

There had been works about the Soviet prison/camp system before, and
its existence was known to the Western public since the 1930s.
However, never before had the wide reading public been brought face to
face with the horrors of the Soviet system in this way. The
controversy surrounding this text in particular was largely due to the
way Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical,
legal and practical origins of the GULag system at Lenin's feet, not
Stalin's. According to Solzhenitsyn's testimony, Stalin merely
amplified a concentration camp system that was already in place. This
is significant, as many Western Communist or Socialist parties in the
seventies tended to view the Soviet concentration camp system as a
"Stalinist aberration", rather than as an intrinsic component of the
Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet government in fact could not
govern without the very real threat of imprisonment, and that the
Soviet economy depended on the productivity of the forced labor camps,
especially insofar as the development and construction of public works
and infrastructure were concerned.

This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system. In
Western Europe the book came, in time, to force a rethinking of the
historical role of Lenin. With the text, The Gulag Archipelago,
Lenin's political and historical legacy became problematic, and the
fractions of Western communist parties who still based their economic
and political ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof
against them.

Additional remarks
Though the scope of the text ends in 1956, the last prisoners
sentenced according to the political paragraphs of the criminal code
were quietly released in 1989. The exact number of Soviet citizens who
went through the camp system will never be known, especially as key
documentation was deliberately destroyed as the USSR was collapsing.
But western estimates put the figure at a minimum of 20 million
people, probably around 30 million, but no more than 35 million.
[citation needed] The number of those who died in the system will also
never be known, but a figure of 8-10 million is not exaggerated.
[citation needed]

One of the noteworthy elements of Solzhenitsyn's analysis are the
seemingly outlandish claims of Soviet brutality, which subsequently
turned out to be true - or which in some cases turned out to be more
outrageous than Solzhenitsyn had originally stated. For instance,
Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Gulag system was so voracious that
between 1930 and 1939, a quarter of the population of Leningrad (now
St. Petersburg) was shipped to the Gulag. Post-Soviet scholarship has
confirmed that the figure was even higher.[1] This one, seemingly
unbelievable event, was reported by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag
Archipelago, to skepticism in the West. The collapse of the USSR and
subsequent availability of heretofore secret documents (including the
secret 1937 Soviet census, which was suppressed because it reflected
the negative impact of the Gulag system on the population) have
confirmed that Solzhenitsyn's claims and estimates were either true,
or even understated.

One of the surprising and noteworthy elements is the powerful humor
Solzhenitsyn employs throughout the text. It is one of the reasons the
book has remained so popular. Rather than a grim rendering of crimes
and atrocities, The Gulag Archipelago is often sarcastic and ironic,
quite possibly the darkest gallows humor ever written. Precisely
because of this dark humor, the prose often turns human and profoundly
moving without ever falling into sentimentality or self-pity.

The work is also a powerful testament to Solzhenitsyn's multi-layered,
rhythmic and precise prose art. In interviews he has often stated his
wish to use all the resources of the language, old and new, proverbs,
prison slang, legal style and poetic images; this variety is
masterfully used in The Gulag Archipelago, and carries over even in
translation.

Publication

The KGB seized one of only three extant copies of the text still on
Soviet soil - this was achieved by torturing a dissident woman,
Solzhenitsyn's typist[2] who knew where the typed copy was hidden;
within days after she was released by the KGB, she hung herself.
[when?]

The book was published by the YMCA Press in Paris.[when?] Solzhenitsyn
had been in touch with them about the upcoming publication, which he
knew he could not put off much longer, but the final decision was
taken by the YMCA Press themselves with the author's implicit approval
(two years previously, they had published August 1914).

Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia
first, but he knew this was impossible under conditions then extant.
The international impact of the work was profound; not only did it
provoke a very vivid debate in the West, a mere six weeks after the
work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into
exile.

Because the Gulag might obviously render anyone who came into contact
with it a long prison sentence for 'anti-Soviet activities',
Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Due to
the KGB's constant surveillance of him, Solzhenitsyn only worked on
parts of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the book as
a whole into jeopardy if he happened to be arrested. For this reason,
he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow and the
surrounding suburbs, in the care of trusted friends, and sometimes
purportedly visiting them on social calls, but actually working on the
manuscript in their homes. During much of this time, Solzhenitsyn
lived at the dacha of the world-famous cellist Rostropovich, and due
to the reputation and standing of the musician, even with Soviet
authorities, he was reasonably safe from KGB searches there.

Solzhenitsyn did not think this series would be his defining work, as
he considered it journalism and history rather than high literature
(the distance between those two poles is shorter, anyway, in Russian
tradition than in many Western European literatures, although an
analogy might be drawn between Russian and French-Enlightened
publishing traditions by public intellectuals). However, it is by far
his most popular work, at least in the West (with the possible
exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).

Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled
out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal representative, Dr Kurt Heeb of
Zürich, to await publication (a later paper copy, also smuggled out,
was signed by Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against
possible accusations of a falsified work).

Solzhenitsyn was aware that there was a wealth of material and
perspectives that merited to be continued in the future, but he
considered the book finished for his part. The royalties and sales
income for the novel were transferred to the Solzhenitsyn Foundation
for aid to former camp prisoners, and this fund, which had to work in
secret in its native country, managed to transfer substantial amounts
of money to those ends in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the winter of 1974, unbound and mimeographed samizdat copies of The
Gulag Archipelago began being surreptitiously passed between Soviet
citizens. These initial readers were normally given 24 hours to finish
the work before passing it on to the next person, requiring the reader
to spend an uninterrupted day and night to get through the work. Years
later, this initial generation of Soviet readers could still recall
who had given them their copy, to whom they had passed it on, and who
they had trusted enough to discuss their thoughts about the book.


Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (IPA: /soʊlʒəˈniːtsɨn/[1] Russian:
Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, Russian pronunciation: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪ
ˈsaɪvʲɪtɕ səlʐɨˈnʲitsɨn]) (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008)[2] was
a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he
made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's labour camp
system, and for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974.
He returned to Russia in 1994. He was the father of Ignat
Solzhenitsyn, a well-known conductor and pianist. He died at home
after years of declining health on August 3, 2008.[3]

Contents
[hide]
1 Biography
1.1 While in the Soviet Union
1.2 In the West
1.3 Return to Russia
1.3.1 "Two Hundred Years Together" and the accusations of
Antisemitism
1.3.2 Other works
1.4 Death
1.5 Legacy
2 Historical and political views
2.1 Historical views
2.1.1 The West
2.1.2 Russian culture
2.1.3 Communism, Russia and nationalism
2.1.4 World War II
2.1.5 Stalinism
2.1.6 Mikhail Sholokhov
2.1.7 The Sino-Soviet Conflict
2.1.8 Vietnam war
2.1.9 Kosovo War
2.1.10 Holodomor as a genocide
2.2 Western culture
2.3 Modern world
3 See also
4 Published works and speeches
5 Notes
6 References
7 External links



[edit] Biography

[edit] While in the Soviet Union
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now Russia) to a
young widow, Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (née Shcherbak), whose father had
risen, it seems, from humble beginnings, much of a self-made man, and
acquired a large estate in the Kuban region by the northern foothills
of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study.
While there she met Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, a young army officer, also
from the Caucasus region (the family background of his parents is
vividly brought alive in the opening chapters of August 1914, and
later on in the Red Wheel novel cycle).

In 1918, Taisia became pregnant with Aleksandr. Shortly after this was
confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr, who
had three brothers and a sister,[4] was raised by his widowed mother
and aunt in lowly circumstances; his earliest years coincided with the
Russian Civil War; by 1930 the family property had been turned into a
collective farm. Solzhenitsyn stated his mother was fighting for
survival and they had to keep his father's background in the old
Imperial Army a secret.

His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and
scientific leanings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith;[5]
She died shortly before 1940.[6]

On 7 April 1940, Solzhenitsyn married chemistry student Natalya
Alekseevna Reshetovskaya.[7] They divorced in 1952 (a year before his
release from the Gulag); he remarried in 1957 and divorced again in
1972, the following year marrying his third wife, Natalya Dmitrievna
Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage.
[8] He and Svetlova (b. 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat
(1972) and Stepan (1973).[9]

Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University, while at
the same time taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute
of Philosophy, Literature and History (at this time heavily
ideological in scope; as he himself makes clear, he did not question
the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union before he
had spent some time in the camps).

During World War II, he served as the commander of an acoustic
recognizance unit in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the
front, and twice decorated. In February 1945, while serving in East
Prussia, he was arrested for writing a derogatory comment in a letter
to a friend, N. D. Utkevich, about the conduct of the war by Josef
Stalin, whom he called "the whiskered one,"[10] "Khozyain" ("the
master") and "Balabos", (Odessa Yiddish for "the master").[11] He was
accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the
Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organisation" under
paragraph 11.[12] Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in
Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was
sentenced in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet
security police (NKGB) to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be
followed by permanent internal exile. This was the normal sentence for
most crimes under Article 58 at the time.[13]

The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several
different work camps; the "middle phase," as he later referred to it,
was spent in a sharashka, special scientific research facilities run
by Ministry of State Security, where he met Lev Kopelev, paragon of
Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in the West in 1968.
In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners.
During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in
Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer and foundry foreman. His
experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich. While there he had a tumor removed, although
his cancer was not then diagnosed.



Solzhenitsyn reenacts being searched in the Gulag, 1953
In March of 1953, Solzhenitsyn sentence was commuted to internal exile
for life at Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer
spread, until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. However,
in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent,
where his tumor went into remission. These experiences became the
basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short
story "The right hand]". It was during this decade of imprisonment and
exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the
philosophical and religious positions of his later life; this turn has
some interesting parallels to Dostoevsky's time in Siberia and his
quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn gradually turned
into a philosophically-minded man in prison. He repented for what he
did as a Red Army captain and in prison compared himself with the
perpetrators of the Gulag ("I remember myself in my captain's shoulder
boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia,
enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'") His
transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The
Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire").

During his years of exile, and following his reprieve and return to
European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary
school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in
writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote, "during all
the years until 1961, not only was I convinced 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 this would become known."[14]

Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached Alexander Tvardovsky,
a poet and the chief editor of the Noviy Mir magazine and a politburo
member, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of
Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it and declared at the presidium of
the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publishing, "There’s a
Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root
out this evil". The book became an instant hit and sold-out
everywhere. During Khruschev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union and three more
novellas of his were published in 1963. These would be the last of his
works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of
prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much a
sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West—not only by its
striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major
piece of Soviet literature since the twenties on a politically charged
theme, written by a non-party member, even by a man who had been to
Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and still it had not
been censored. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story
was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of
politics through literature. Most Soviet readers realized this, but
after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such
raw exposing works came quietly, but perceptibly, to a close.
Solzhenitsyn did not give in but tried, with the help of Tvardovsky,
to get his novel, The Cancer Ward, legally published in the Soviet
Union. This had to get the approval of the Union of Writers, and
though some there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied
publication unless it were to be revised and cleaned of suspect
statements and anti-Soviet insinuations (this episode is recounted and
documented in The Oak and the Calf).

The publishing of his work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a
non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers,
including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn
continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most subversive of
all his writings, the monumental Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his
novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but
gradually he realized it had set him free from the pretences and
trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which
had come close to second nature, but which was getting increasingly
irrelevant (the circumstances of how he actually survived in this
period, without any income from his books, are obscure; he had quit
his teaching post when he broke through as a writer).

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He
could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time,
since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union.
Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special
ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government
refused to accept this solution, since such a ceremony and the ensuing
media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Sweden's
relations to the superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize
at the 1974 ceremony after he had been deported from the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work on the Soviet prison
camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well
as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own
research into the history of the penal system. It discussed the
system's origins from the very founding of the Communist regime, with
Lenin himself having responsibility, detailing interrogation
procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner
uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile. The
appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western
political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet
authorities.


[edit] In the West
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav
Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of
Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself. On February
13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to
Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The
KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag
Archipelago and, less than a week later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered
reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn.

In Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house. He then moved
to Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the
United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and
your family." He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of
the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont in 1976.
He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in
1978 and on Thursday, June 8, 1978 he gave his Commencement Address
condemning modern western culture.

Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his cyclical history of
the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four
"knots" (parts) had been completed and he had also written several
shorter works. Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in
America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been
comfortable outside his homeland.[citation needed]

Despite spending two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did
not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading
English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his
mother[citation needed]. More important, he resented the idea of
becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in
order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of
Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West
were generally well received in Western conservative circles,
alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by U.S. President Ronald
Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly
critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for
Russian patriotism and the Russian Orthodox religion. Solzhenitsyn
also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual
vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including
television and rock music: "...the human soul longs for things higher,
warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits ...
by TV stupor and by intolerable music."


Return to Russia


Solzhenitsyn boards a train in Vladivostok after returning to Russia
from exile. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he
returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United
States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later,
his oldest son Yermolai returned to Russia to work for the Moscow
office of a leading management consultancy firm). From then until his
death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-
Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet
leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko.

The writer, however, deplored what he considered Russia's spiritual
decline, increasingly adopting Western materialistic values, but in
the last years of his life he praised President Vladimir Putin for
Russia's revival.

After returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn published eight two-
part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose
poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between
the Millstones).


[edit] "Two Hundred Years Together" and the accusations of
Antisemitism
He also published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish
relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn
emphatically lays the blame for the Russian revolutions of 1905 and
1917 on the Jews, but stops short of alleging this to be the work of a
"Jewish conspiracy" [15]. He purports to document the predominance of
Jews in the early Bolshevik leaderships, excepting Lenin, using
unreliable and manipulated figures. At the same time, he calls on both
Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples
who acted in complicity with the Communist regime. He also accuses the
Jews of wartime cowardice, and evasion of active duty.

The reception of this work confirms Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing
figure both at home and abroad. According to his critics, the book
confirmed Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitic views as well as his ideas of
Russian supremacy to other nations. Professor Robert Service of Oxford
University has defended Solzhenitsyn as being "absolutely right",
noting Trotsky himself claimed Jews were disproportionately
represented in the early Soviet bureaucracy.[16] An important critique
of Solzhnitsyn's position (debunking the majority of his claims)was
published by the historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Stern[17].

Another famous Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a
polemical study "A Portrait Against the Background of a
Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he tried to prove
Solzhenitsyn's egoism, anti-Semitism, and lack of writing skills.
Voinovich had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042
through the self-centered egomaniac character, Sim Simich Karnavalov,
an extreme and brutal dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the
Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia. Using a
more circuitous line of argument, Joseph Brodsky, in his essay
Catastrophes in the Air (in Less than One), argued that Solzhenitsyn,
while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed
to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be the
outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage
of Old Russia and of "the severe spirit of Orthodoxy" (venerated by
Solzhenitsyn) and much less due to the more recent (Marxist) political
ideology. This somewhat contorted interpretation of his outlook has
been seen by many as a defense of Marxism by contrasting it with what
they saw as the greater prior evils of the old regime, a view shared
by some historians as well - although clearly the revolutionary zeal
went far beyond any excesses from the past in terms of the sheer
volume and intensity of violence.


[edit] Other works
In his recent political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and
Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic
excesses of the new Russian 'democracy,' while opposing any nostalgia
for Soviet communism. He defended moderate and self-critical
patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism), argued for the
indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and
expressed concerns for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in
the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He also sought to
"protect" the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and
fought against the admission of Catholic priests and Protestant
pastors to Russia from other countries. For a brief period, he had his
own TV show, where he freely expressed his views. The show was
cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to
maintain a relatively high profile in the media.

All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has
achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.


[edit] Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on August 3, 2008, at
age 89.[18][19] A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery,
Moscow, on Wednesday, August 6, 2008.[20] He was buried on the same
date at the place chosen by him at Donskoye graveyard.[21]


[edit] Legacy
The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn’s collected works
is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three
volumes, already in print, recently took place in Moscow. On June 5,
2007 then Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring
on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his
humanitarian work. Putin personally visited the writer at his home on
June 12, 2007 to present him with the award. Like his father, Yermolai
Solzhenitsyn is an author and has translated some of his father's
works. Stephan Solzhenitsyn is an urban planner in New York. Ignat
Solzhenitsyn is the music director of The Chamber Orchestra of
Philadelphia.


[edit] Historical and political views

[edit] Historical views
During his years in the west, Solzhenitsyn was very active in the
historical debate, discussing the history of Russia, the Soviet Union
and communism. He tried to correct what he considered to be western
misconceptions.


[edit] The West
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the
country spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans,
he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, suffered from a
"decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to
die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States
government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in
Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and
attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.
He said that the West erred in measuring other civilizations by its
own model. While faulting Soviet society for denying fair legal
treatment of people, he also faulted the West for being too
legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and
never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high
level of human possibilities."[22]


[edit] Russian culture
In his 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn argued over Russian culture,
that the West erred in "denying its autonomous character and therefore
never understood it "[23]


[edit] Communism, Russia and nationalism
It is a popular view that the October revolution of 1917 resulting in
a violent totalitarian regime was closely connected to Russia's
earlier history of tsarism and culture, especially that of Ivan the
Terrible and Peter the Great.[citation needed] Solzhenitsyn claims
this is fundamentally wrong and famously denounced the work of Richard
Pipes as "the Polish version of Russian history". Solzhenitsyn argues
Tsarist Russia did not have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet
Union. For instance, in Solzhenitsyn's view, Imperial Russia did not
practise censorship; political prisoners were not forced into labour
camps and the number of political prisoners was only one ten-
thousandth of those in the Soviet Union; the Tsar's secret service was
only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the army.
The violence of the Communist regime was in no way comparable to the
lesser violence of the Tsars.

He considered it far-fetched to blame the catastrophes of the 20th
century on one 16th century and one 18th century czar, when there were
many other examples of violence which could have inspired the
Bolshevik in other countries earlier in time, especially mentioning
similarities with the Jacobins of the Reign of Terror of France.

Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing Marxism itself is violent. His
conclusion is Communism will always be totalitarian and violent,
wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian
conditions which affected the outcome.

He also criticized the view that the Soviet Union was Russian in any
way. He argued Communism was international and only cared for
nationalism as a tool to use when getting into power, or for fooling
the people. Once in power, Communism tried to wipe clean every nation,
destroying its culture and oppressing its people.

According to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian culture and people were not the
ruling national culture in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no
ruling national culture. All national cultures were oppressed in
favour of an atheistic Soviet culture. In Solzhenitsyn's opinion,
Russian culture was even more oppressed than the smaller minority
cultures, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among
Russians than among other peoples. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued,
Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as
a threat by the West but rather as allies.[24]


[edit] World War II
Main article: World War II
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against
Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in
Soviet domination and oppression of the nations of Eastern Europe.
Solzhenitsyn claimed the western democracies apparently cared little
about how many died in the east, as long as they could end the war
quickly and painlessly for themselves in the west. While stationed in
East Prussia as an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war
crimes against the civilian German population by Soviet "liberators"
as the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women were
gang-raped to death. He wrote a poem, "Prussian Nights", about these
incidents in which the first-person narrator seems to wholeheartedly
approve of these crimes, expressing his desire to take part in the
plunder himself. The poem describes the rape of a Polish woman whom
the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German.[25]


[edit] Stalinism
Main article: Stalinism
He also rejected the view Stalin created the totalitarian state, while
Lenin (and Trotsky) had been "true communist." He argued Lenin started
the mass executions, wrecked the economy, founded the Cheka which
would later be turned into the KGB, and started the Gulag even though
it did not have the same name at that time.


[edit] Mikhail Sholokhov
Main article: Mikhail Sholokhov
Solzhenitsyn was the most prominent of the Nobel Laureate Mikhail
Sholokhov's detractors. He believed that the work which made
Sholokhov's international reputation, And Quiet Flows the Don was
written by Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik, who died in
1920. According to Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov found the manuscript and
published it under his own name. The controversy raged for years,
without conclusive proof on either side.


[edit] The Sino-Soviet Conflict
Main article: Sino-Soviet split
In 1973, near the height of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Solzhenitsyn
sent a Letter to the Soviet Leaders to a limited number of upper
echelon Soviet officials. This work, which was published for the
general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its
intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to

Give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a
while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of
unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and
instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics
(a million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and
guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if they like. The main
source of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great
many points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will
also melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter
possibility and perhaps won't take place at all [author's emphasis].
[26]


[edit] Vietnam war
Main article: Vietnam war
In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World
Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. did not
understand the Vietnam War. He rhetorically asks if the American
antiwar proponents now realize the effects their actions had on
Vietnam: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being
involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in
the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those
convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"[27]

During his time in the West, Solzhenitsyn made a few controversial
public statements: notably, he characterized Daniel Ellsberg as a
traitor.


[edit] Kosovo War
Main article: Kosovo War
Solzhenitsyn strongly condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia, saying
"there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler."[28]


[edit] Holodomor as a genocide
Main article: Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn said that Ukrainian efforts to have the 1930s famine
recognised as a Russian genocide against Ukraine is an act of
historical revisionism.

In an interview with the newspaper Izvestia, he explained that the
famine was caused by the corrupt ideals of the Communist regime, under
which all suffered equally. It was not an assault by the Russian
people against the people of Ukraine, and that the wish to view it as
such is only a recent development.[29]

This provocative outcry of genocide was voiced only decades later. At
first, it thrived secretly in the stale chauvinist minds opposing the
"bloody Russians". Now it has got hold of political minds in modern
Ukraine. It seems they've surpassed the wild suggestions of the
Bolshevik propaganda machine. "To the parliaments of the world" - a
nice teaser for the Western ears. They have never cared about our
history. All they need is a fable, no matter how loony it appears.


[edit] Western culture
Main article: Western World
…there also exists another alliance — at first glance a strange one, a
surprising one—but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well -
grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our
Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new. The
very famous Armand Hammer, who is flourishing here today, laid the
basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip into Russia,
still in Lenin's time, in the very first years of the Revolution.

And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces—
in a country which is by contemporary standards poor—they are used to
crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—and we have western
capital to thank for this also.

Testimony to the U.S. Congress, July 8 1975.[30]

Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I
could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had
actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying
in the face of the danger confronting it…All of us are standing on the
brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up
civilization and changes whole epochs.


[edit] Modern world
He described the problems of both East and West as "a disaster" rooted
in agnosticism and atheism. He referred to it as "the calamity of an
autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who
is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of
other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not
properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from
the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we
have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to
restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.[31]


The death of Solzhenitsyn
http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/soviet-solzhenitsyn-era-russia

Andrey Kurkov

Published 05 August 2008

4 comments
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The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on how the author of the Gulag
Archipelago, who related the terrible truth about Soviet
totalitarianism, outlived his era to become something of a living
monument to Russia's past




On the death of such figures as Solzhenitsyn, the phrase ‘end of an
era’ is bound to come up, but Alexander Isaevich outlived his era and
never truly accepted the new ‘post-soviet’ epoch.

Having sincerely dedicated his life to a desperate struggle against
communism, in 1991 Solzhenitsyn suddenly found himself without a
battle to fight.

From that moment his activities grew less noticeable. He was less and
less asked for his commentary on developments. A note of irony
appeared in the use of his nickname: the ‘Vermont Recluse’. Then in
1994 he came out of seclusion and returned to Russia.

He returned to the country he had literally torn apart in 1962 with
his short story “A Day In the Life Of Ivan Denisovich”. During a
meeting of the Politburo Khrushchev himself insisted on the story’s
publication. It contained no direct criticism of the Soviet system. It
was a simple but detailed description of one day in a camp prisoner’s
life, one almost happy day.

Solzhenitsyn was immediately made a member of the writer’s Union. More
of his work was published. He felt his time had come and he tried to
write as much as possible, perhaps fearing that any ‘thaw’ would be
temporary. However you look at it, Solzhenitsyn was of great use to
Krushchev in his efforts to ‘de-Stalinize’ the Soviet UnionSolzhenitsyn had been sent to a camp three months before the end of
the Second World War for having referred to Stalin and Lenin
disrespectfully in a letter to an old school friend who was serving on
the front line.

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in camps, special prisons, secret KGB
institutions and internal exile. During that time he twice overcame
cancer.

It seems he was destined to be hardened through the cruellest of
suffering. He admitted that having overcome cancer for the second
time, he lost all fear of death and after the publication of his first
stories he lost his fear of the Soviet system.

Kruschev had been overthrown, but Solzhenitsyn still believed in the
possibility of democracy in the Soviet Union. Publication of his work
ceased in 1965 and, two year later, in an open letter to the Fourth
Congress of the Writers’ Union of the USSR he said: “I call upon the
Congress to demand and insist on the abandonment of all forms of
censorship…”

In May 1967 the Soviet authorities decided to ‘deal with’
Solzhenitzyn, but the writer himself saw it the other way round; he
was dealing with the Soviet Authorities.

His 1968 novels “Cancer Ward” and “In the First Circle”, which were
banned from publication in the USSR, were published abroad. At the
same time, Solzhenitsyn smuggled out to the west a microfilmed
manuscript of his most important work – the three volumes of research
into the Soviet system of repression and punishment, “The Gulag
Archipelago”.

A Samisdat (homepublished) copy of this work appeared in my home at
the beginning of the eighties. My older brother had managed to get
hold of a copy for a couple of days. I remember trying to read it as
quickly as possible.

Anyone found by the KGB in possession of it would get five years in a
prison camp. By that time the author was already living in Vermont,
where he had bought a house with 20 hectares of land around it to
guarantee his creative isolation.

He had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974 he had been
stripped of his Soviet citizenship and sent into exile as a traitor.
This was the “humane face” of the Brezhnev era. After all, instead of
a special flight to Germany, he could have been thrown into a train
wagon bound for the camps.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn never fell in love with the USA or the west in
general and, having returned to his homeland he was disappointed to
discover that his compatriots no longer read his books. Disenchantment
with the Yeltsin’s form of democracy encouraged pro-Putin sympathies.

Putin himself would go to ‘take tea’ with Solzhenitsyn and discuss
what was to be done with Russia. But Putin’s visits were more
representative than practical – a ritual attendance at a ‘living
monument’ to the fight against Communism and Stalinism.

Solzhenitsyn was unable to influence contemporary Russia, although he
did provoke further discussion of the “Jewish question” in one of his
last works, “Two Hundred Years Together”. That book will continue to
stir emotion within Russia, but on the international plane,
Solzhenitsyn will forever remain the author of “Gulag Archipelago” -
that terrible and truthful book about the Soviet totalitarian regime.


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4 comments from readers
Pencils
05 August 2008 at 21:49
Is this a parody?

Gideon Polya
06 August 2008 at 01:06
Excellent article. I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovitch" over 40 years ago and was immensely moved.
Over the years I then read "The First Circle", "Cancer Ward" and "The
Gulag Archipelago".



I came to Solzhenitsyn pre-primed because my Hungarian grandmother's
cousin Dr Edith Bone, a British subject, was arrested by the Stalinist
secret police in 1949 as a "British spy" while covering an
international Socialist conference in Budapest for the London Daily
Worker. She survived 7 years solitary confinement in a Hungarian
prison (she was released during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956) and
wrote an account of her extraordinary physical and mental survival in
a book entitled "Seven Years Solitary".



Another such hero was Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who
disappeared into the Soviet Gulag after saving many Hungarian Jews
from the Nazis (there is a monument to this wonderful man in
Melbourne's busy Kew Junction) .



A key action of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was his May 1967 open letter to
the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union of the USSR in which he
said: “I call upon the Congress to demand and insist on the
abandonment of all forms of censorship…”



Soviet Communism and its censorship has more or less fallen (e.g. my
great grandfather Jakab Polya's translation into Hungarian of Adam
Smith's classic "An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations" was forbidden
to all but specialist economists) but Russian media are still
evidently State-dominated.



Solzhenitsyn's message on censorship needs to be taken seriously in
the Western Murdochracies in which Monopoly Media (rather than the
NKVD, GUGB or KGB) determine what people read and believe and how they
vote.



Thus in the "open societies" such as the British Murdochracy,
Mainstream media censorship and entrenched lying by omission means
that most people are utterly unaware of the carnage in the American
Gulag that stretches (with a few interruptions) from Occupied Somalia
to Occupied Afghanistan and Predator Robot-bombed Waziristan in
formerly "British" Pakistan.



Thus, using estimates from the UN Population Division, UNICEF and top
US medical epidemiologists, it is estimated that the continuing
Palestinian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide involve post-
invasion excess deaths of 0.3 million, 2 million, and 3-6 million,
respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths of 0.2 million, 0.6
million and 2.3 million, respectively; and refugees totalling 7
million, 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively) (for the latest
details and documentation see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19915/42/
; http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Messages190308.htm#polya ;
http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080208.htm; http://www.liberalati.com/?q=node/261
and "Obama, Mccain, Iraqi Genocide & Afghan Genocide": http://www.newsvine.com/qana
).



Indeed many Britons would have been utterly surprised to learn from a
January 2008 BBC broadcast involving myself, 1998 Economics Nobel
Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and other scholars that in 1943-45
Britain deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in the man-
made Bengal Famine atrocity that has been largely deleted from history
in the English-speaking world (see: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.h...
).



Silence kills and silence is complicity. We are obliged to inform
others about gross abuses of humanity. We cannot walk by on the other
side.

knave
06 August 2008 at 08:53
good article and interesting comment Gideon

Douglas Chalmers
06 August 2008 at 15:31
# "...the story .....was a simple but detailed description of one day
in a camp prisoner’s life, one almost happy day..."



It is remarkable how it is the stark experiences which we mostly avoid
that bring us the greatest insights. From that experience on, if we
survive it, everything we see or feel or hear is aligned with its true
worth. There is no more room for illusions or the superficiality of
personality. One can then write clearly and with great effect.



# "...Putin..... would go to ‘take tea’ with Solzhenitsyn and discuss
what was to be done..."



Interesting how Putin remarked quite seriously after the funeral about
the era of "repression" in Russia - especially so coming from the
grandson of Joe Stalin's cook. Pity that the West only uses these
people for its own propaganda but never applies the lessons to itself.