Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in the city of Kislovodsk, located in modern day Russia in the North Caucasian region between the Caspian and Black seas. Aleksandr’s father died before he was born, leaving the young boy to be raised by his mother and aunt.

Under soviet redistribution policy, the family property was turned into a collective farm in 1930, causing the family to become poor. Despite the lowly circumstances in which he grew up, the young Aleksandr aspired to get an education and become a writer.

EDUCATION AND MILITARY SERVICE

Because Solzhenitsyn couldn’t afford to go to the university at Moscow and receive the literary education he desired, he had to study mathematics at the local Rostov University instead. He was good at mathematics even though he did not want to devote a career to it. However, his mathematical skills would prove providential later in life and helped to save him from death on two occasions.

From 1939 to 1941, Solzhenitsyn had a chance to acquire a literary education as well by taking a correspondence course from Moscow. This education was heavily weighted with Marxist propaganda, which he accepted at the time.

On April 7, 1940, Solzhenitsyn married the chemistry student Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. The following year WWII broke out, and Solzhenitsyn was sent to fight in the front lines with the Soviet Army. He showed great bravery as commander of a sound-ranging battery unit and was decorated twice.

While serving in East Prussia in 1945, Solzhenitsyn fell afoul of the government after letters were discovered that he had written to a friend. Since these letters contained disrespectful remarks about Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was charged with anti-Soviet propaganda and taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. After being beaten and interrogated, he was sentence to eight-years in a labour prison camp.

PRISON AND EXILE

The first part of Solzhenitsyn’s sentence was served doing hard labour in a series of different correctional facilities. He would probably not have survived the eight years in prison if it weren’t for his mathematical training. Realizing his aptitude for mathematics, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to the scientific research institutes in 1946. Although still a prisoner, this helped to ease his existence for the next four years. In 1950 he was transferred to a newly established camp for political prisoners at Ekibastuz where he worked as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman.

Because all writing was considered contraband at Ekibastuz, Solzhenitsyn devised a method for memorizing long sections of his own prose. Using a chain of beads made from chewed bread, he made each bead to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he had it memorized. By the end of his prison term, he had memorized 12,000 lines.

One month after his eight-year term was completed, an administrative decision was made to the effect that he was not to be released but exiled for life to southern Kazakhstan. Once again, Solzhenitsyn was saved through his knowledge of mathematics. Instead of being made to do hard labour with the rest of the prisoners, he was put to work teaching mathematics and physics at a primary school. He spent his days teaching and his nights writing poems, plays and sketches, even though he had no hope of ever getting them published.

FREEDOM AND FAME

Solzhenitsyn’s exile came to an end in 1956, following Khrushchev’s decision to release Stalin’s political prisoners and empty most of the Gulags. The decision was based on policy changes outlined in Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, in which the Soviet leader expressed a desire not to perpetuate the crimes of the Stalinist period.

The Solzhenitsyn who was released was a different man. Not only had he abandoned the Marxism of his youth, but his experiences in prison had turned him into a deeply reflective man in addition to strengthening his faith. He formed a strong conviction that the struggle between good and evil cannot be resolved by policies, parties and politics, but is a battle that is waged within the individual human heart.

As a freeman he continued to teach and to write, but he still did not dare to make any of his works public. He would later reflect on this period, saying, “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.”

At the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear him down, mainly because none of his works could be judged by people with literary training. In 1961, he decided to take the risk and offer his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for publication. The book describes his experiences in prison camp through the experiences of the fictional Ivan.

Surprisingly, the book was well received and was published by the literary magazine New World with the approval of Khrushchev. The Soviet leader had personally read a copy of the manuscript and had been impressed. Khrushchev was eager to reverse the legacy of the Stalinist era, saying, “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.” Khrushchev hoped that the book’s publication would help “root out this evil” and advance his more tolerant policies. For the first time since the soviets came to power, a book critical of the party’s ideology was allowed to be published. The book became a bestseller and was even studied in Soviet Schools. This set the stage for three more of Solzhenitsyn’s novels to be approved for publication.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich created a sensation outside as well as inside the Soviet Union by alerting the world to a side of communism that had previously been concealed.

BECOMING A NON-PERSON

Things changed dramatically for Solzhenitsyn after Khrushchev was ousted in 1964. During the years of Brezhnev’s leadership (1964 – 1982), Soviet government morphed from a personal dictatorship into an oligarchy ruled by a privileged minority of hard-line communists. Although the new leadership allowed for increasing Westernization and debate, intellectuals who criticized the State were treated harshly. Inevitably, Solzhenitsyn became an immediate target of the strengthen KGB, who banned further publication of his writings, seized the manuscripts he was working on and declared him to be a non-person. Being a “non-person” meant that he was stripped of his citizenship rights and was no longer recognized by the state as existing.

No longer an officially acclaimed writer, Solzhenitsyn felt released to take a more critical approach to the government of his country. He continued to write voluminously, smuggling his manuscripts into the West on microfilm.

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize was denounced by the Soviets and Solzhenitsyn was unable to receive it.

Between 1958 and 1968 Solzhenitsyn secretly wrote his most influential work, the monumental Gulag Archipelago. This three-volume, non-fiction narrative was a monumental exposé of the Soviet prison camp system, drawing on his own experiences as well as extensive primary research and interviews. Solzhenitsyn not only exposes the camp system in horrifying detail, but explains the complicity that the Russian people played in allowing the system to develop in the first place.“We didn’t love freedom enough,” was Solzhenitsyn’s simple assessment.

With the help of friends, Solzhenitsyn was able to sneak the manuscript into the West, where it was published in 1973. Gulag Archipelago had even more of an enormous impact than his previous works in terms of exposing the horrors of the communist system. Many consider this work to have been instrumental in the eventual destruction of the Soviet Union. Prior to its publication, many American liberals had looked favourably on the Marxist experiment. “The Gulag Archipelago” was described by George F. Kennan, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union and the chief architect of postwar U.S. foreign policy, as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

When news of the book’s publication reached the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn began living in daily fear of his life, sleeping with a pitch fork by the side of his bed for purposes of self-defence. Solzhenitsyn’s fears were realized when he was arrested on Feb. 12, 1974. Given Solzhenitsyn’s high profile, the KGB realized that sending him back to prison camp, or even allowing him to remain in the country, would be counter-productive. The KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, wrote in a secret memorandum, “If Solzhenitsyn continues to reside in the country after receiving the Nobel Prize, it will strengthen his position, and allow him to propaganda his views more actively.” As a solution, they decided to deport him to West Germany. Six weeks after his expulsion, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was joined by his second wife, Natalia Svetlova and their three sons.

LIFE IN AMERICA

From Germany, the Solzhenitsyn family moved to Switzerland before finally settling in the United States. They eventually came to live in the small town of Cavendish Vermont, where he continued to write Russian realistic novels in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

During his time in America, Solzhenitsyn resisted becoming a media celebrity and remained isolated, keeping to himself and his family. He hardly ever left his 50 acres and rarely consented to a telephone call. Neighbours protected the family from sightseers by posting a sign saying, “No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns.”

Despite his reclusive lifestyle, Solzhenitsyn did occasionally consent to speak in public. The most famous of these occasions was an address he delivered at Harvard. Given Solzhenitsyn’s literary achievements, the faculty of Harvard University were thrilled when he agreed to deliver the university’s 1978 commencement address. His criticisms of Western politics, the American media and the licentiousness of modern society were not well received by the Harvard audience and have been criticized ever since.

RETURN TO RUSSIA

All the while, Solzhenitsyn’s dream was to one day return to his homeland. This was made possible in 1990 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev offered to restore his citizenship. However, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994 that Solzhenitsyn and his wife returned.

Solzhenitsyn remained in Russia until his death last August (August 3, 2008) at the age of 89, outliving by nearly 17 years the Soviet system he had helped to overthrow.

The legacy of Solzhenitsyn remains an enigma for the West. Recognized as a great writer and defender of freedom, he alienated himself from many of his former admirers because of his unpopular ideas on the misuse of liberty in Western culture. Solzhenitsyn’s reclusiveness, long beard and rejection of pop culture, contributed to the impression that he was something of a freak.

THE CALL TO PUBLIC REPENTANCE

Throughout his writings, Solzhenitsyn was incisive in his critique not only of Soviet Communism, but also the sins of Western materialism and secularism. His answer to both was the same: repentance. “I have grown used to the fact”, he said in a 2007 interview, “that, throughout the world, public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician…We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation.”

As much as Solzhenitsyn favoured democracy, he warned against seeing democratic institutions as a hedge against the corruptive potential latent in the human heart. He argued that democracy is just as capable of being corrupted as communism, and pointed to the triumph of mediocrity “under the guise of democratic restraints” as an example. He also warned of the “false and dangerous current” in the Western drift towards socialism.

Solzhenitsyn saw both communism and Western mediocrity as symptoms of rejecting God. Without belief in God and man’s religious responsibility, freedom cannot be sustained, he argued. “…in early democracies,” Solzhenitsyn proclaimed in his Harvard address, “as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.”

In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn appealed to America’s founding fathers and attacked the increasing tendency to use the legal structure of rights as a substitute for ethics and personal responsibility. “The defence of individual rights”, he said,

has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenceless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defence against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

The shallowness of Western pop culture was also a great concern for Solzhenitsyn, who remarked that “The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, exemplified by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”

Solzhenitsyn remained vocal about politics right up until the time of his death last autumn. He was an outspoken critique of America and Britain’s democracy building projects, telling the London Times in 2005 that “Democracy cannot be imposed from above, by clever laws or wise politicians. It must not be forced [on people] like a cap. Democracy can only grow upwards, like a plant… Democracy is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet…. The U.S. has a strange idea of democracy. They first interfered with the Bosnian situation, bombed Yugoslavia, then Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Who is next? Perhaps Iran?”

Solzhenitsyn’s message – enthusiastically accepted when communism was the target but rejected when turned against Western corruption – remains as relevant today as it was during his lifetime. It is a message that, despite its negativity, also offers hope. Healing of a nation is possible, Solzhenitsyn assured us, but only through public repentance.