In 1994, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn flew from Alaska to Magadan, the former center of the Soviet Union’s labor camp system on the Pacific coast. From there Solzhenitsyn journeyed slowly by train across the expanse of the country, taking his time and talking to ordinary people along the way. Having been an exile from his homeland for twenty years, Solzhenitsyn relished the intentionally long train journey, which gave him a chance to savor the country and reconnect with the people he loved.

During his travels Solzhenitsyn was generally well received by the Russian people. However, this was not always the case. Passing through Siberia, he was met with an angry Russian who shouted, “It is you and your writing that started it all!” The man was, of course, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the system of communism it had birthed in Russia. As this hostile comment suggests, the people of Russia did not all agree that the fall of communism had been a good thing for Russia. But they did agree that the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been instrumental in communism’s collapse.

From Christian to Communist

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the city of Kislovodsk in 1918, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution plunged the entire nation into chaos. Aleksandr’s father had died before he was born, leaving the 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 Mrs. Solzhenitsyn to become poor. Despite the lowly circumstances in which he grew up, the young Aleksandr aspired to receive an education and become a writer. He devoured the great novels of Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (he read Tolstoy’s War and Peace when he was only ten).

Aleksandr’s childhood was not only saturated in good literature, but Christianity as well. His aunt Irina was a lady of devout convictions, and when he got time off school, the young Aleksandr would accompany her to services at the local Russian Orthodox Church where the rhythms and rituals of the worship etched themselves deep on the mind of the young boy.

But there was another influence in Aleksandr’s life that was threatening to squeeze out Christianity: communism. At the age of ten, the Young Pioneers (a communist version of the Boy Scouts) ripped the cross off Aleksandr’s neck, a visible sign of their hostility to his Christian faith. Two years later Aleksandr joined the Pioneers, partly out of peer pressure, but also because the brainwashing he received at school was convincing him that the communist cause was right.

Education and Military Service

Solzhenitsyn’s interest in communism dovetailed with his interest in history, particularly the events that had led to Russia’s participation in World War I. Being unable to attend the university at Moscow and receive the literary he desired, he had to settle with studying mathematics at the local Rostov University instead. This was providential, as Solzhenitsyn’s mathematical skills would later help to save his life on two occasions.

From 1939 to 1941, Solzhenitsyn had a chance to acquire a literary education by taking a correspondence course from Moscow. This education was heavily weighted with Marxist propaganda, which Solzhenitsyn not only accepted, but embraced enthusiastically. He supplemented his own studies by devouring all the Marxist/Leninist literature he could get his hands on. It was this very enthusiasm for Marxism and Leninism that gave him reservations about Stalin, whom he believed he departed from the key values of classical communism.

Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiasm for communism can be seen by the fact that he took Marx’s Das Kapital to read on his honeymoon, following his marriage to Natalia Reshetovskaya on April 7, 1940.

The Solzhenitsyns did not have long to enjoy married life together. World War II had broken 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.

Solzhenitsyn shared his interest in politics with his high school classmate Vitaly Vitkevich. While serving in East Prussia in 1945, the two men discussed a range of political issues, and this inevitably led to some criticism of Stalin who, the men believed, had departed from the classical communist doctrine of Lenin. Though Solzhenitsyn didn’t mention the leader of the Communist Party by name, he referred to Stalin cryptically as “the whiskered one”, using a term which in Russian also denoted a gang leader. It was a fatal mistake. Government officials intercepted the letters and charged Solzhenitsyn with anti-Soviet propaganda. At first Solzhenitsyn thought the charges against him were a mistake. Being naively confident in the soviet system, he believed that everything would soon be cleared up. After all, he was a loyal patriot of the Soviet Union. However, after being mistreated, deprived of sleep and interrogated, he was charged with conspiracy to “overthrow, undermine, or weaken the Soviet regime, or to commit individual counter-revolutionary acts.” Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight-years in a labor prison camp.

Prison and Exile

At the time, the Soviet Union officially denied that their vast network of prison camps even existed. By experiencing the injustices at these camps and hearing the stories of the other prisoners, Solzhenitsyn’s eyes began to become open to the darker side of communism. Even so, his rejection of communist ideology was a gradual process spanning years of reflection during his time in captivity.

The first part of Solzhenitsyn’s sentence was served doing hard labor in a series of different correctional facilities. Due to the brutal treatment, the severe cold and deprivation in food and sleep, most of the prisoners died before they finished serving their sentences. Solzhenitsyn would probably not have survived his eight years term had not been for his mathematical training. Realizing his aptitude for mathematics, officials transferred Solzhenitsyn to the scientific research institutes of in 1946. This was still a prison, but a prison for more educated prisoners who could help the Soviets with various research projects.

For the next four years Solzhenitsyn enjoy a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Prisoners were given sufficient food to eat (even dessert after dinner), nine hours of sleep and were even allowed access to books. Even more gratifying, however, was the chance to meet some of Russia’s finest thinkers. Being already imprisoned, these men felt free to talk about anything they wished, and Solzhenitsyn was able to test many of his emerging convictions in debate with other intellectuals.

At first, his criticisms of the Soviets had remained focused against the abuses of Stalinism. However, after enjoying many good debates with Christian intellectuals who had also been imprisoned, Solzhenitsyn began to slowly rethink the entire atheistic worldview on which communism had been founded. He developed a particular friendship with a man named Dimitri Panin, who later became the character of Sologdin in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle. Panin was a devout Russian Orthodox and was as committed to God as he was antagonistic to Communism. Looking over this period of his life, Solzhenitsyn later reflected on how he began to return to his childhood faith:

I began to move ever so slowly, towards a position that was in the first place idealist, as they call it, that is, of supporting the primacy of the spiritual over the material, and secondly patriotic and religious. In other words, I began to return slowly and gradually to all my former views.

Life at the research institutes was so comfortable that Solzhenitsyn and Panin began to test the waters, subtly refusing to cooperate with their captors. The non-cooperation came at a heavy cost, and in 1950 Solzhenitsyn was transferred to a newly established camp for political prisoners in remote Siberia. Here he worked as a miner, a bricklayer and a foundryman. It was this camp, in a place called Ekibastuz, which provided the material he would describe in his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The camp at Ekibastuz was more inhuman than anything Solzhenitsyn had yet before experienced. In his chapter on Solzhenitsyn in Great Souls, David Aikman described some of the conditions prisoners had to face:

The daily, brutal labor, the marches to the worksites in rain, or slush, or cold so intense it was like a knife against the skin, the endless searches before you left the camp in the morning, the searches on your return, the waiting in line morning and night for the thin gruel, the absence of books, the conscienceless brutality of the criminal prisoners. All of this for 330 days a year (there were three days of rest each month), killed thousands upon thousands of prisoners, or turned the survivors into cowed, zombielike men.

Whilst in prison Solzhenitsyn’s interest in being a writer intensified. Although any permanent writing was considered contraband at Ekibastuz, this did not stop Solzhenitsyn. In his autobiography The Oak and the Calf, he described how he devised a method for memorizing long sections of his own poetry and 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 the entire section memorized. By the end of his prison term, he had memorized 12,000 lines. Solzhenitsyn would have to take an entire week every month just to recite to himself everything he had memorized – a task he performed while undergoing the strenuous routine of camp life.

The intellectual work of composing and memorizing worked as an antidote against what Solzhenitsyn would later describe as “the narrowing of the intellectual and spiritual horizons of a human being, the reduction of the human being to an animal and the process of dying alive.” The hope that he might one day be released and be able to write down his works for others to read, gave Solzhenitsyn something to live for amid the inhuman conditions of the camp.

It was during his imprisonment at Ekibastuz, in January 1952, that Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with having a cancerous growth under his right groin. Treatment required an operation. It was during his time of recovery in the prison hospital that Solzhenitsyn finished the long process of returning to his faith. He later wrote the following poem to recount his return to Christianity:

I look back with grateful trembling
At the life I have had to lead.

Neither desire nor reason
Has illumined its twists and turns,
But the glow of a Higher Meaning
Only later to be explained.

And now with the cup returned to me
I scoop up the water of life.
Almighty God! I believe in Thee!
Thou remained when I Thee denied…

One month after his eight-year term at Ekibastuz was completed, an administrative decision was made to the effect that Solzhenitsyn would 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 labor with the rest of the prisoners at Kazakhstan, he was put to work teaching mathematics and physics at a primary school.

At the very beginning of his exile, Solzhenitsyn’s cancer returned and he was given three weeks to live. Facing immanent death, Solzhenitsyn’s greatest agony was the thought that he might pass silently from the world without ever having had the chance to write down the thousands of lines in his head. Reflecting on this later in The Oak and the Calf, he wrote,

All that I had memorized in the camps ran the risk of extinction together with the head that held it. This was a dreadful moment in my life: to die on the threshold of freedom, to see all I had written, all that gave meaning to my life thus far, about to perish with me…. In those last few weeks that the doctors had promised me I could not escape from my work in school, but in the evening and at night, kept awake by pain, I hurriedly copied things out in tiny handwriting, rolled them, several pages at a time, into tight cylinders and squeezed these into a champagne bottle. I buried the bottle in my garden – and set off for Tashkent to meet the new year (1954) and to die.

Providentially, Solzhenitsyn did not die. He put this down to a divine miracle, believing that his life had been returned to him for a purpose. “Since then,” he wrote, “all the life that has been given back to me has not been mine in the full sense: it is built around a purpose.” That purpose, Solzhenitsyn believed, was to write.

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 prisons. The decision was based on policy changes outlined in Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, in which the Soviet leader expressed a desire to distance himself from the crimes of the Stalinist period.

The Solzhenitsyn who was released was a different man to the one who had been imprisoned many years earlier. His experiences in prison had turned him into a deeply reflective man in addition to strengthening the Christian faith of his boyhood. Moreover, he had 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 human heart.

As a freeman, Solzhenitsyn 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 abilities. In the early 60’s, Solzhenitsyn felt that conditions might be favorable towards finally getting some of his works published. There was an anti-Stalinist mood even among the high officials of the communist party, and Khrushchev was himself eager to reverse the legacy of the Stalinist era. 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, One Day was well received and was published by the literary magazine New World with the approval of Khrushchev himself. The Soviet leader had personally read a copy of the manuscript and had been impressed. “There’s a Stalinist in each of you” Khrushchev remarked, “there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.” Khrushchev hoped that the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would help “root out this evil” and advance his more tolerant policies.

The publication of the novel had huge symbolic value since this was the first time since the Soviets had come to power that a book critical of the party’s ideology was allowed to be published. Since everyone in the Soviet Union knew that the book could never have been published without the support of Khrushchev, the communist press felt they ought to praise it, which they did. This helped the book to become a bestseller. It 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 also created a sensation outside the Soviet Union by alerting the world to a side of communism that the Soviet Union had previously kept carefully concealed.

Testing the Waters

As in the research institute, Solzhenitsyn began to test the waters to see how far he could go. As he began speaking at meetings, seminars, forums, and always writing, his tone of hostility against the Soviets gradually increased. But even as he grew in popularity with the public, he was beginning to be looked upon as a liability by the Soviet government.

Solzhenitsyn may have had a friend in Khrushchev, but there were many in the government who resented Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policies. Solzhenitsyn discovered this for himself when Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.

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 strengthened KGB, who banned further publication of his writings, seized the manuscripts he was working on and declared him to be a non-person. Being declared a “non-person” meant that he was stripped of his citizenship rights and was no longer recognized by the state as even existing. Meanwhile, the full force of the Soviet propaganda machine was unleashed against Solzhenitsyn in an attempt to discredit him in the eyes of the Russian public.

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. He also wrote a scathing attack of the Soviet censorship system and sent it to other Soviet writers.

The Soviet authorities were incensed when book after book continued to appear in the West with Solzhenitsyn’s name on it. Under normal circumstances, a troublesome writer like this would quietly pass out of the public’s eye, spending the rest of his days heavily rugged in one of the many Soviet mental asylums (non-acceptance of communism was considered a symptom of insanity). But the Soviets knew that they had already let Solzhenitsyn go too far. To get rid of him now would be political suicide at a time when they had political incentives for putting on a nice face to the rest of the world. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn was also a celebrity within the Soviet Union (a 1967 Soviet poll found that he was overwhelmingly the people’s favorite author), with the result that the authorities could not incarcerate him without creating a colossal public uproar.

In the ten years between 1958 and 1968 Solzhenitsyn had been secretly writing 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 revealed the camp system in horrifying detail, but explained 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. In terms of exposing the horrors of the communist system, Gulag Archipelago had even more of an impact than his previous works. The U.S. Kremlinologist George Kennan called the work, “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime…in modern times.” Many consider the book to have been instrumental in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Prior to its publication, many European liberals had looked favorably on the Marxist experiment. However, after the evils that Solzhenitsyn exposed came to light, the West became increasingly critical of the Soviet system.

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.”

Becoming a non-person

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-defense.

When the Soviets discovered that The Gulag Archipelago had been published in the West, they began give an increasing amount of attention to the Solzhenitsyn problem. Of thing was increasingly obvious: sending him back to prison camp would be political suicide, not least after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. But allowing him to remain in the country would also be counter-productive to the Soviet’s aims. As 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, the authorities decided to deport Solzhenitsyn to any country that agreed to have him and eventually West Germany agreed. Solzhenitsyn didn’t know that, and on February 2, 1974 Solzhenitsyn received a knock on the door of the apartment where he was staying. Immediately upon opening the door, he was surrounded by six KGB agents, taken to prison and then put in an airplane. He had no idea where they were taking him, but must have been relieved when he stepped into the freedom of West Germany. Six weeks after his expulsion, he 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 Solzhenitsyn kept an incredibly demanding work schedule, writing 14 to 15 hours a day for seven days a week for eighteen years.

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 fifty acres and rarely consented to a telephone call. Neighbors protected the family from sightseers by posting a sign saying, “No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns.”
It was during his time in Vermont that Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Orthodox faith took on a new importance to him. In Joseph Pearce’s biography Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, he describes the piety of the Solzhenitsyn home:

Everyone in the house in Vermont wore a cross, Lent was observed rigorously and Easter was more important than Christmas. The children’s saints’ days were celebrated as enthusiastically as their birthdays and there was an Orthodox chapel in the library annexe where service were said whenever a priest came to the house.

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 this guru of human rights agreed to deliver the 1978 commencement address.

In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn argued that both communism and Western mediocrity are symptoms of forgetting God. Without belief in God and man’s religious responsibility, freedom cannot be sustained, he argued. As he put it:

…in early democracies, 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.

Solzhenitsyn went on to attack the increasing tendency to use the legal structure of rights as a substitute for ethics and personal responsibility. “The defense of individual rights,” he said,

has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless 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 defense 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.

Solzhenitsyn’s comments about God, his criticisms of Western politics, the American media and the licentiousness of modern society were not well received by the progressive Harvard audience. The wider American audience did not react more favorably. The New York Times responded to the speech by saying that his worldview was “dangerous,” while the Washington Post criticized him for promoting “boundless cold war.” To this day, intellectuals throughout the world have joined the chorus of criticizing Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech with the same enthusiasm with which they have praised his other achievements.

Other intellectuals, such as the human rights guru Jeri Laber, have found themselves deeply uncomfortable with the way Solzhenitsyn failed to carefully distinguish between Marxism, Stalinism, Communism and socialism. Such distinctions were important to many liberals in the mid to late 20th century, since they looked favorably on Marxism while lamenting the direction it had taken in the Soviet Union. For Solzhenitsyn, however, Marxism, communism, socialism and the abuses of the Soviet system were all part of the same package, rooted in the worldview of atheism. As Alan Wilson put it in an article on Solzhenitsyn for the journal ‘Christianity & Society’:

For the Russian exile there is no convenient distinction between socialism and the labels “communism” or “Stalinism,” which has been the handy method employed by left-wing intellectuals to whitewash their ideology in connection with the inhumane cruelty in the U.S.S.R. (and elsewhere).

Return to Russia

Though Solzhenitsyn’s life in America was comfortable, his prayer 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 family finally returned.

Solzhenitsyn stayed in Russia until his death on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89, outliving by nearly 17 years the Soviet system he had helped to overthrow. Right up until his death Solzhenitsyn remained vocal about politics. He was an outspoken critique of America and Britain’s democracy building projects in the Middle East, in addition to criticizing what he called the “false and dangerous current” in the Western drift towards socialism. He continued to write, and even had his own TV talk show for a while.

The Solzhenitsyn Enigma

If ever there was proof that the pen is more powerful than the sword, Solzhenitsyn was it. Through his writings he contributed to the complete dismantling of the Soviet system. In 1976 the British journalist Bernard Levin said that he could not recall any other time in recent history when “a single man with no power – he wasn’t a king, a dictator, a general – but with the power of the moral force of his own will and beliefs and character, has compelled the world to listen to him.”

Even so, Solzhenitsyn’s legacy 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 about the West’s misuse of liberty. Solzhenitsyn’s reclusiveness, long beard and hostility to pop culture, contributed to the impression that he was something of a freak, a remnant of a bygone age out of touch with modern life.

Solzhenitsyn even fell out of favor with some of America’s presidents. When Gerald Ford was attempting to develop better ties with the Soviet Union, he refused to invite Solzhenitsyn to his executive mansion. Ford’s secretary of state, Dr. Henry Kissinger, was hardly any better, calling Solzhenitsyn’s views “an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents.” Similarly, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had been an advisor to President Kennedy, wrote in 1986 that Solzhenitsyn’s idea that we should be responsible before God amounted to his advocating “a Christian authoritarianism governed by God-fearing despots.”

Lessons from the Life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Among the many important lessons furnished by the life and writing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most important is probably this: the pathway to healing lies in repentance. Solzhenitsyn urged that repentance was the solution, not only to the sins of Soviet Communism, but also the evils of Western materialism and secularism.

“I have grown used to the fact”, Solzhenitsyn 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.”

Given the crucial role that repentance played in his thought, Solzhenitsyn cautioned us not to put too much confidence in political solutions, including the solution of democracy. Democratic institutions, he warned, cannot act as a hedge against the corruptive potential latent in the human heart any more than communism could. This is because democracy is just as capable of being corrupted, and Solzhenitsyn pointed to the triumph of mediocrity “under the guise of democratic restraints” as an example.

It followed that the solution to Russia’s problems were not, first and foremost, political but spiritual. As he argued in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, written in 1973 shortly before his deportation, Christianity is “the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia.” Later, in his Templeton Lecture of 1983, Solzhenitsyn reiterated this. Reflecting on the vast amounts of time he spend researching the history of Russia’s revolution for an eight volume history of the event, he concluded by saying

“But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”

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.

 

The rest of this post has been removed because it appears in my book Saints and Scoundrels.

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