Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center — Biography

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for reminding us that on August 3, 2008 Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89.

Great Souls: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
https://youtu.be/YLEPQ7evzdU

Images:
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in Kazakhstan, 1953
2. Battery commander Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and commander of Artillery Reconnaissance Division E. Pshechenko, February 1943
3. The 'MARFINO' SHARASHKA (Secret Research Prison). Prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn WORKED here from 1947 to 1950.
4. Teaching Physics at Mezinovka School 1956-57

Biographies
1. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alexander-solzhenitsyn-his-final-interview-885152.htm
2. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/lifeinfocus/alexander-solzhenitsyn-gulag-soviet-russia-writer-one-day-dissident-putin-a8502976.html

1. Background from {[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alexander-solzhenitsyn-his-final-interview-885152.html}]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: His final interview
Rebel, prisoner, poet and hero: half a century since they were published, Solzhenitsyn's searing accounts of Stalin's labour camps remain among the most profound works of modern literature. Last summer, as his health began to fail, he looked back on his extraordinary life with Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp
Tuesday 5 August 2008 00:00

Q: Alexander Isayevich, when we came in we found you at work. It seems that even at the age of 88 you still feel this need to work, even though your health doesn't allow you to walk around your home. What do you derive your strength from?
Solzhenitsyn: I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work – to work and to the struggle.

Q: In your book My American Years, you recollect that you used to write even while walking in the forest.
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Solzhenitsyn: When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

Q: And your strength did not leave you even in moments of desperation?
Solzhenitsyn: Yes. I would often think: whatever the outcome is going to be, let it be. And then things would turn out all right. It looks like some good came out of it.

Q: I am not sure you were of the same opinion when, in February 1945, you were arrested by the military secret service in Eastern Prussia. In your letters from the front, you were unflattering about Joseph Stalin, and the sentence for that was eight years in the prison camps.
Solzhenitsyn: It was south of Wormditt. We had just broken out of a German encirclement and were marching to Königsberg [now Kaliningrad] when I was arrested. I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.

Q: What views?
Solzhenitsyn: Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.

Q: All your life you have called on the authorities to repent for the millions of victims of the gulag and communist terror. Was this call really heard?
Solzhenitsyn: I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.

Q: Putin [then President] says the collapse of the Soviet Union was the largest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and that it is high time to stop this masochistic brooding over the past, especially since there are attempts "from outside", as he puts it, to provoke an unjustified remorse among Russians. Does this not just help those who want people to forget everything that took place during the county's Soviet past?
Solzhenitsyn: Well, there is growing concern all over the world as to how the United States will handle its new role as the world's only superpower, which it became as a result of geopolitical changes. As for "brooding over the past", alas, that conflation of "Soviet" and "Russian", against which I spoke so often in the 1970s, has not passed away in the West, or in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. The elder political generation in communist countries was not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.

Q: Including the Russians.
Solzhenitsyn: If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates now among the less affected part of our society. Nor would the Eastern European countries and former USSR republics feel the need to see in historical Russia the source of their misfortunes. One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country. One should not attribute this to the "sick psychology" of the Russians, as is often done in the West. All these regimes in Russia could only survive by imposing a bloody terror. We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.

Q: To accept one's guilt presupposes that one has enough information about one's own past. However, historians are complaining that Moscow's archives are not as accessible now as they were in the 1990s.
Solzhenitsyn: It's a complicated issue. There is no doubt, however, that a revolution in archives took place in Russia over the past 20 years. Thousands of files have been opened; the researchers now have access to thousands of previously classified documents. Hundreds of monographs that make these documents public have already been published or are in preparation. Alongside the declassified documents of the 1990s, there were many others published which never went through the declassification process. Dmitri Volkogonov, the military historian, and Alexander Yakovlev, the ex-member of the Politburo – these people had enough influence and authority to get access to any files, and society is grateful to them for their valuable publications.
As for the last few years, no one has been able to bypass the declassification procedure. Unfortunately, this procedure takes longer than one would like. Nevertheless the files of the country's most important archives, the National Archives of the Russian Federation [GARF], are as accessible now as in the 1990s. The FSB sent 100,000 criminal-investigation materials to GARF in the late 1990s. These documents remain available for citizens and researchers. In 2004-2005 GARF published the seven-volume History of Stalin's Gulag. I co-operated with this publication and I can assure you that these volumes are as comprehensive and reliable as they can be. Researchers all over the world rely on this edition.
Q: About 90 years ago, Russia was shaken first by the February Revolution and then by the October Revolution. These events run like a leitmotif through your works. A few months ago you reiterated your thesis: Communism was not the result of the previous Russian political regime; the Bolshevik Revolution was made possible only by Kerensky's poor governance in 1917. If one follows this line of thinking, then Lenin was only an accidental person, who was only able to come to Russia and seize power here with German support. Have we understood you correctly?
Solzhenitsyn: No. Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. Lenin and Trotsky were exceptionally nimble and vigorous politicians who managed in a short time to use the weakness of Kerensky's government. But allow me to correct you: the "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West. On 25 October 1917, a violent 24-hour coup d'état took place in Petrograd. It was brilliantly and thoroughly planned by Leon Trotsky – Lenin was in hiding to avoid being brought to justice for treason. What we call "the Russian Revolution of 1917" was the February Revolution.
The reasons driving this revolution do indeed have their source in Russia's pre-revolutionary condition, and I have never stated otherwise. The February Revolution had deep roots – I have shown that in The Red Wheel. First among these was the long-term mutual distrust between those in power and the educated society, a bitter distrust that rendered impossible any constructive solutions for the state. And the greatest responsibility falls on the authorities: who if not the captain is to blame for a shipwreck? So you may indeed say that the February Revolution in its causes was "the results of the previous Russian political regime".
But this does not mean that Lenin was "an accidental person" by any means; or that the financial participation of Emperor Wilhelm was inconsequential. There was nothing natural for Russia in the October Revolution. Rather, the revolution broke Russia's back. The Red Terror unleashed by its leaders, their willingness to drown Russia in blood, is the first and foremost proof of it.

Q: To paraphrase something you once said, the dark history of the 20th century had to be endured by Russia for the sake of mankind. Have the Russians learnt the lessons of the two revolutions and their consequences?
Solzhenitsyn: They are starting to. A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century are evidence of a growing demand. Recently, the state TV channel Russia aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
And since February [2007] I have been surprised by the heated discussions that my now republished article on the February Revolution has provoked. I was pleased to see the wide range of opinions, since they demonstrate the eagerness to understand the past, without which there can be no meaningful future.

Q: How do you assess the period of Putin's governance in comparison with those of Yeltsin and Gorbachev?
Solzhenitsyn: Gorbachev's administration was amazingly politically naive, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance, but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration of the West only strengthened his conviction that his approach was right. But let us be clear that it was Gorbachev, and not Yeltsin, as is now being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of our country.
Yeltsin's period was characterised by a no less irresponsible attitude to people's lives, but in other ways. In his haste to have private rather than state ownership as quickly as possible, Yeltsin started a mass, multi-billion-dollar fire sale of the national patrimony. Wanting to gain the support of regional leaders, Yeltsin called for separatism and passed laws that encouraged the collapse of the Russian state. This deprived Russia of its historical role for which it had worked so hard, and lowered its standing in the international community. All this met with even more hearty Western applause.
Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralised people. And he started to do what was possible – a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favourably by other governments.

Q: It has become clear that the stability of Russia is of benefit to the West. But one thing surprises us in particular: when speaking about the right form of statehood for Russia, you were always in favour of civil self- government, and you contrasted this model with Western democracy. After seven years of Putin's governance we can observe totally the opposite phenomenon: power is concentrated in the hands of the president, everything is oriented toward him.
Solzhenitsyn: Yes, I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England.
In your question you confuse local self-government, which is possible on the most grassroots level only, when people know their elected officials, with the dominance of a few dozen regional governors, who during Yeltsin's period were only too happy to join the federal government in suppressing local self-government.
I continue to be extremely worried by the slow development of local self-government. But it has started. In Yeltsin's time, local self-government was barred, whereas the state's "vertical of power" (ie, Putin's top-down administration) is delegating more and more decisions to the local population. Unfortunately, this process is still not systematic in character.

Q: But there is hardy any opposition.
Solzhenitsyn: An opposition is necessary for the healthy development of any country. You can scarcely find anyone in opposition, except for the communists. However, when you say "there is nearly no opposition", you probably mean the democratic parties of the 1990s. But if you take an unbiased look at the situation, there was a rapid decline of living standards in the 1990s, which affected three quarters of Russian families, and all under the "democratic banner". Small wonder, then, that the population does not rally to this banner any more. And now the leaders of these parties cannot even agree on how to share portfolios in an illusory shadow government. It is regrettable that there is still no large-scale opposition in Russia. The growth and development of an opposition will take more time and experience.

Q: During our last interview you criticised the election rules for state Duma deputies, because only half of them were elected in their constituencies, whereas the other half, representatives of the political parties, were dominant. After the election reform made by Putin, there is no direct constituency at all. Is this not a step back?
Solzhenitsyn: Yes, it is a mistake. I am a consistent critic of "party-parliamentarism". I am for non-partisan elections of true people's representatives who are accountable to their districts, and who in case of unsatisfactory work can be recalled. I do understand and respect the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional and industrial principles, but I see nothing organic in political parties. Politically motivated ties can be unstable and quite often they have selfish ulterior motives. Leon Trotsky said it accurately during the October Revolution: "A party that does not strive for the seizure of power is worth nothing." We are talking about seeking benefit for the party itself at the expense of the rest of the people. This can happen whether the takeover is peaceful or not. Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate. This is the point behind popular representation.

Q: In spite of high revenues from oil and gas, and the development of a middle class, there is a vast contrast between rich and poor in Russia. What can be done to improve the situation?
Solzhenitsyn: I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state. Although many fortunes were amassed in Yeltsin's times by ransacking, the only reasonable way to correct the situation is not to go after big businesses but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and corruption.

Q: Recently, relations between Russia and the West have got somewhat colder. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?
Solzhenitsyn: The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.
This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.
So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West's reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

Q: The West associated it with the ex-superpower, the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn: Which is too bad. But even before that, the West deluded itself – or maybe conveniently ignored the reality –by regarding Russia as a young democracy, whereas there was no democracy. Russia is not a democratic country yet; it is just starting to build democracy. It is all too easy to take Russia to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes.
But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West's irrational refusal of this hand. No sooner did the US accept Russia's critically important aid in Afghanistan than it started making newer and newer demands. As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears.
Isn't it a luxury for the West to be pushing Russia aside now, especially in the face of new threats? In my last Western interview before I returned to Russia [for Forbes magazine in April 1994] I said: "One can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the US will be in dire need of Russia as an ally."

Q: What is, in your opinion, the situation in Russian literature today?
Solzhenitsyn: Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad. Modern Russian literature is no exception. The educated reader today is much more interested in non-fiction. However, I believe that justice and conscience will not be cast to the four winds, but will remain in the foundations of Russian literature, so that it may be of service in brightening our spirit and enhancing our comprehension.

Q: In 1987 you said it was really hard for you to speak about religion in public. What does faith mean for you?
Solzhenitsyn: For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.

Q: Are you afraid of death?
Solzhenitsyn: No. When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me – and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

Q: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.
Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don't. It's enough.
Q: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.
Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don't. It's enough.

2. Background from {[https://www.i

2. Background from {[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/lifeinfocus/alexander-solzhenitsyn-gulag-soviet-russia-writer-one-day-dissident-putin-a8502976.html/]}
A Life in Focus: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident writer whose account of life in the gulag exposed the tyranny of Soviet Russia
The Independent revisits the life of a notable figure. This week: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tuesday 5 August 2008
Mark Le Fanu
Saturday 25 August 2018 16:35

Alexander Solzhenitsyn bestrode Russian literature for decades and would in December mark his 100th year. His obituary follows.
For much of the 20th century, large sections of the populace of one of the greatest nations of the earth were held in virtual slavery by their own government. That modern system of serfdom – far more rigorous and extensive than any Siberian exile – was known as the gulag, after its Soviet acronym. Its historian and unmasker was the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. With his death comes to the end an important chapter in the long tradition of Russian moral prophecy.
Solzhenitsyn’s book Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago), a three-volume work setting out the history of the Russian labour camps since the time of Lenin up to the present, was a bombshell on its publication in 1973. For the first time, the full history of the regime’s repressions was chronicled in intense detail, with no extenuation given to “later aberrations”: Lenin was blamed for the débâcle as much as his evil successor Stalin. The literary and political importance of the work’s appearance as an event in the history of the epoch can scarcely be exaggerated. In fact, it is not implausible to measure from this date the beginnings of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa town in the northern Caucasus where his maternal grandfather, a self-made Ukrainian millionaire, owned a large villa. The Solzhenitsyns themselves were of Russian peasant stock. Following the southern expansion of the empire in the 19th century, they had settled in the region of Stavropol, east of the Crimea, where successive generations cultivated the land. Various ancestors had been narodniki, supporters of the free peasant movement: left-liberal in sentiment, though mainly patriotic and God-fearing, with sympathies directed more towards Tolstoy than towards Marx.
Solzhenitsyn never knew his father, Isaak, a Moscow university graduate and officer in the Tsar’s army who was killed in a hunting accident three months before the boy was born. His mother Taissia brought the child up in Rostov-on-Don, a port city retaining something of the colourful cosmopolitan character of its origins throughout the civil war and during the subsequent victory of Bolshevism. Despite poverty (Taissia never remarried), the atmosphere of the household was cultivated and, through the influence of a beloved aunt, Irina, sympathetic towards Christian orthodoxy.
The child Alexander was precociously clever. By the age of 11 he had read a large swathe of the Russian classics including War and Peace. As he grew into late adolescence he became firmly converted to Marxism and to the justice of the Soviet cause, though this seems never to have interfered with his first and overriding childhood ambition, to make a name for himself in the field of literature. Already by 1936, aged only 18, he was sketching an epic historical canvas on the subject of 1917, the year of revolutions – something that, with appropriate changes in outlook and incident, would eventually transmute into the longest (if not the greatest) of his adult works, Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel, completed in 1993).
Literature, however, was at this stage a secret or at best a leisure-time occupation. With a strongly practical bent of mind inherited from his mother’s side of the family, Alexander Solzhenitsyn chose mathematics and physics as university subjects – in his home town of Rostov, rather than travelling, as he might have done, to Moscow. His years at university coincided in the wider Soviet sphere with the full onslaught of the Red Terror. Although privately disenchanted with Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was not yet in any real sense a critic of the state: long into his imprisonment he was to remain strictly speaking a Leninist, arguing that while the outcome of the revolution had been perverted, the project had been sound, even noble.
As a young man he was dashing and popular. His stay at university was conventionally successful and crowned with academic honours. Thus it was something of a surprise to his contemporaries that he chose on graduation to take up a comparatively humble teaching post as a village schoolmaster in Morozovsk, a sleepy provincial backwater where he settled with his young bride Natalya Reshetovskaya at the beginning of 1941.
Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June of that year reawakened in Solzhenitsyn his intense boyhood patriotism. He served briefly and without distinction in a Cossack regiment (his ignorance of horses giving rise to mockery), then succeeded in transferring himself to officer training college, graduating lieutenant of artillery in late 1942 with a speciality in the acoustic pinpointing of gunfire.
During two subsequent years of active service, Solzhenitsyn took part in the great counter-offensive which, in the wake of Stalingrad, saw the German army slowly pushed back through the conquered territories of Ukraine and Belorussia, up to the borders of Germany and beyond. He was present at the Battle of Orel, the second great Russian victory of the war (in August 1943).
Lenin knew that revolution wouldn’t happen overnight
In quieter moments he continued to write poems and short stories and to correspond with family and friends, including a friend from schooldays, Nikolai Vitkevich (“Koka”) whom he had met up with again for a brief period in the months of mobilisation. Almost light-heartedly, it seems, the pair had concocted a “a society for the reform of Russian customs”, complete with parliamentary manifesto (“Resolution No 1”) and a blueprint for bringing Russia out of feudalism.
Letters between the friends referring to Stalin disparagingly as “the mustachio’d one” and “pakhan” (“big shot”) fell into the hands of the political authorities. Thus it came about that in February 1945 at his forward billet in Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his officer’s epaulettes and charged under article 58 of the Soviet criminal code with “taking part in anti-Soviet propaganda” along with “funding an organisation hostile to the state”.
How far were Solzhenitsyn’s dissident views at this stage of his life typical of his training and cadre? It is difficult to be sure. On the one hand, although he hated Stalin, the more savage aspects of Soviet Communism had passed him by. Like a surprisingly large number of his fellow countrymen, he knew nothing at first hand of the mass arrests, the tortures and the forced deportations that had characterised Soviet life in the Thirties.
On the other hand, he was a writer and therefore an observer. And he had managed to retain from childhood – what may have been rare in Soviet society – both a religious outlook and an irreducible belief in the individual. Of the 30 officers in his battalion, he was one of only two who throughout the war declined to become a member of the Communist Party. His scepticism seems to have been as ingrained as his patriotism.
Solzhenitsyn was transferred under guard to Moscow. (He himself directed his Smersh minders – out-of-town provincials – to the gates of the Lubyanka.) In view of the gravity of the charges against him, it is perhaps surprising he received a sentence of “only” eight years’ hard labour, handed out by a Soviet special court. Before the war, he would have been shot. There was a certain chaos around and, a final piece of luck, his interrogator was lazy – omitting to examine, for instance, the incriminating diaries that fell into his hands along with Solzhenitsyn’s personal effects.
So began Solzhenitsyn’s journey to the gulag: from the Lubyanka via a series of transit camps – Butyrki, Krasnaya Presnya, Kaluga Gate – in each of which he encountered some new graduated rigour (at the same time some new facet of human personality, some fresh example among inmates of courage and endurance) before ending up, in 1950, in the harsh camp of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, where, as he later said, he “touched bottom” in both the good and the bad senses of the phrase. (This was the camp whose regime he was to describe unforgettably in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962 – first published in the journal Novy Mir as “Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha”.)
Meanwhile, though, there had been cushioning spaces on the road: intervals, even, of comparative freedom. In one of the questionnaires sent round the prison system by a regime hungry for technical specialists, Solzhenitsyn claimed a knowledge of atomic physics. In fact this knowledge was almost non-existent: he had merely read an American book on the subject. But the hint was enough to have him transferred to a special research prison, Marfino, housed in a former seminary on the outskirts of Moscow – where, however, instead of pursuing high-level research, he at first busied himself perfecting a scrambling device for Stalin’s personal telephone service.
It was in Marfino that he met and became friends with two extraordinary individuals, Lev Kopelev and Dmitri Panin, characterised respectively as the ideological opponents Rubin and Sologdin in V kruge pervom (The First Circle, 1968), the novel that earned Solzhenitsyn the 1970 Nobel prize. In the debates which the inmates engaged in during their leisure-time on the relative merits and demerits of Marxism, Solzhenitsyn came to feel he had stumbled into a magic circle, “by accident, one of the freest places in the whole of the Soviet Union”. Panin was the more important of the two from the point of view of Solzhenitsyn’s political education, persuading the writer that it was Marxism itself – the doctrine of Communism – rather than its subsequent mutation into Stalinism, which was the aberration from human norms, and the root cause of his country’s catastrophe.
Panin had another significance for Solzhenitsyn in his personal life, as a model of unswerving ascetic steadfastness. The material privileges enjoyed by the prisoner-intellectuals in Marfino could be withdrawn at the first sign on non-cooperation. But the threat of their removal seems not to have impressed either Panin or Solzhenitsyn. Following a showdown with the authorities, the pair were pitched back into the gulag, continuing their journey together as far as Ekibastuz.
The regime there was the harshest Solzhenitsyn encountered, both in terms of physical toil – gruelling labour as a bricklayer and then as a smelter’s mate – and of the dehumanising treatment meted out by the authorities. (Names had been dispensed with and prisoners were referred to solely by numbers.) At the same time Solzhenitsyn became afflicted by cancer – the first of two bouts – and had to endure the horrors of prison surgery and its makeshift aftermath.
Still, in other ways there was hope in the air for the first time since his capture. Tremendous camp rebellions in 1951 succeeded, against the odds, in improving conditions and, above all, morale. Just as important, it was in this period that Solzhenitsyn finally returned fully to the Christian faith which was to succour his literary ambitions and to mark forever his mature view of history.
Solzhenitsyn’s release from jail, in fact, coincided with Stalin’s death. He heard the news within the first week of his sentence of “perpetual exile” in the little town of Kok Terek in Kazakhstan, where in due course he succeeded in finding work as a schoolteacher. The years from 1953 to 1961 were spent in lonely isolation, completing first drafts of the novels that were later to make him famous. The background to this endeavour – what allowed it to take place – was the steadily improving political climate that came after Stalin’s death, and especially in the wake of the 20th Party Congress of October 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev famously denounced his predecessor’s crimes. Solzhenitsyn’s sentence of exile was lifted in 1956; he settled in Ryazan with his wife Natalya. Pardon from the state came a year later – but no monetary recompense or apology: as there was to be none for the thousands of his fellow inmates recently let out of camps or still languishing there.

Vladimir Voinovich: Dissident who lampooned the Soviets and Putin
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, on Khrushchev’s personal recommendation, in late 1962, and instantly shot Solzhenitsyn to fame. Yet almost in the same month the state began the slow move away from relative liberalism (the end of the “thaw”) which was to mark the changeover from the Khrushchev to the Brezhnevite era. Rakovyi korpus (Cancer Ward), completed in 1962, was more radically critical of the regime than Ivan Denisovich, and The First Circle more outspoken than either of these. By 1965 it was becoming clear that neither of these later works had much chance of publication on home ground. (The battles surrounding Solzhenitsyn’s attempts to get published, and his relations with the great Novy Mir editor Alexander Tvardovsky, are recounted in his highly readable memoir Bodalsya telenok s dubom, (The Oak and The Calf, 1975.)
Nineteen sixty-five also saw the confiscation of Solzhenitsyn’s archive by the KGB, minus, miraculously, his drafts for Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago). From now on it was only a matter of time before a showdown with the authorities – though Solzhenitsyn was protected by the genuine popularity he enjoyed across all ranks of Soviet society, and also by a certain innate cautiousness that prevented him, for example, from speaking out as forcefully as he might have done in favour of contemporary dissidents like Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel.
The great question of the hour was whether, being denied an opening on the home market, he should publish abroad. (It was the decision to go for this latter option that had caused Sinyavsky and Daniel to be dubbed traitors.) Solzhenitsyn prevaricated. Manuscript copies of his major works including The Gulag Archipelago were all safely in the hands of western sympathisers by mid-1968, but still Solzhenitsyn was pressing for home publication – at least of Cancer Ward, and maybe also for a slightly expurgated version of The First Circle. It wasn’t to be. Events took on their own momentum. An English translation of Cancer Ward was published “without personal authorisation” in August 1968, followed a few months later (with much greater fanfare) by the appearance in America of The First Circle. Solzhenitsyn’s fame was now worldwide.
The authorities at first contented themselves with low-level sniping. By a series of Byzantine manoeuvres, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1969. The following year, support came from the West in the shape of the Nobel Prize for Literature. But Solzhenitsyn refused to travel to Stockholm to receive it, rightly fearing that, once out of the country, he might never be allowed to return. Such an outcome was not part of his aim at this stage. The huge work he had embarked on, a history of the immediate years leading up to the 1917 revolution, required further researches “on the spot”. And besides, as a patriotic Russian to the core, he had no wish to desert his native soil.
So, in the years up to 1974, Solzhenitsyn lived perpetually on the brink of re-arrest; but he found protection in powerful friendships (for example, with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich), and also by virtue of the fact of his international pre-eminence. In official circles it was the beginning of détente; the non-persecution of Solzhenitsyn, and of Solzhenitsyn’s friend the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, was for a while the price the Soviet Union paid for having its peaceable aims taken seriously.
Even so, there were limits to the authorities’ patience. Solzhenitsyn realised the game was up the moment, in September 1973, when it came to his ears that the KGB had – finally – discovered a concealed manuscript copy of The Gulag Archipelago. Through intermediaries, he immediately authorised the publication of the Russian text of the work in Paris, followed by English translations in America shortly afterwards.
Orchestrated press campaigns in the pages of Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta vilified Solzhenitsyn as a traitor and enemy of the people. On 12 February 1974, he was arrested for the second time, interrogated in Lefortovo Prison, and the following day bundled onto an aeroplane out of the country, into an exile that was to last for 20 years.
Solzhenitsyn’s long sojourn in the West – first in Germany, subsequently in a remote farmhouse in Vermont, in the United States – was taken up in the private sphere with the completion of his sprawling epic of the pre-revolutionary years: he worked on it every day without fail. At the same time, the years saw the re-establishing of a happy family life in the company of his second wife Natalya Svetlova and their children. In the public sphere, Solzhenitsyn became known for his continuing fierce denunciations of the Soviet regime, and his equally caustic scorn for Western materialism.
The period of glasnost ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms saw the vindication and triumph of Solzhenitsyn’s life work in the publication, in his homeland, of his major works – including The Gulag Archipelago – accompanied by enormous discussion. In the wake of the reforms and, in particular, of the failed coup d’état of August 1991, he determined to return to Russia. (There had been an open invitation from Boris Yeltsin.)
However, delays in completing The Red Wheel, combined with difficulties in finding a suitable apartment in Moscow, put off the actual date until 1994, by which time the impact of his arrival was somewhat lessened. None the less, his long train ride from Vladivostok back to Moscow was an event of national importance, widely covered also by the world press.
Solzhenitsyn continued to publish widely, mainly in Novy Mir, to which he contributed an acerbic memoir of his years in the West, castigating the many helpers who had somehow or other failed to live up to his expectations. (Of his collaborators, only his much-loved second wife seemingly escaped this inevitable final disappointment.)
His two-volume history of the Jews in Russia, Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together, 2002), caused renewed controversy, resuscitating charges of covert antisemitism that had appeared now and again (usually maliciously) throughout his career. In fact his view on the subject was a complex and nuanced one, as was only to be expected of a man whose second wife was Jewish, and whose three sons from that marriage had been brought up in the Judaic faith.
The purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s return, of course, was to lend his authority to his country’s renewal after the nightmare; but obstinately the nightmare continued. Crime, poverty, the grosser forms of materialism, conflict with Chechnya: on each of these issues Solzhenitsyn had important things to say, but the country at large became less and less inclined to listen to him. A fortnightly television programme on which Solzhenitsyn “aired his views” was discontinued in the late Nineties on account of poor ratings.
Boris Yeltsin, as mentioned, had always admired Solzhenitsyn, and offered him honours which were refused. Vladimir Putin, when in turn he came to power, visited the sage in his house on the outskirts of Moscow and Solzhenitsyn received undoubted pleasure from this visit, in later years speaking with approval of Putin’s policies. In June last year he accepted the Russian State Prize from Putin.
The public image of Solzhenitsyn had something biblical and prophetic about it. His Christianity was of the Old Testament variety; he was unafraid to call his fellow countrymen to repentance. His appearance was fittingly austere: tall, bearded, with a slight schoolmaster’s stoop, he had attractive blue eyes, and a straightforward, open, trusting countenance which inspired confidence and drew people towards him. From the moment after his release when he began seriously bearing witness to his times, he seemed to live not quite for himself, but as it were “in trust” for those who had perished in the purges.
To this end, his spare time was rationed to the most stringent specifications. Every moment of the working day was precious. Every moment not spent writing was seen as a derogation of duty. This made him seem inhuman to some; and the loyalty he inspired from those around him was sometimes bought at a cost. His enemies (of whom there were many) dubbed him fanatical, an accurate epithet.
Judgement about the literary quality of his writing has always been mixed. The personal, sarcastic bent of his style has been thought overdone or rhetorical. Others, however, see him as one of the giants of Russian prose. His literary vocabulary was extensive and always growing. He was fascinated by Russian proverbs and by the lost, demotic pre-revolutionary speech which he sought to reintroduce into common currency, along with the famous “slang” of the camps. Elsewhere – in Cancer Ward and The First Circle – his literary model was Tolstoy and the tradition of seamless, spacious Russian storytelling, enlivened however, in his later writings, by modernist “collage” effects taken raw from documents and newspapers of the time.

The unresolved literary question about Solzhenitsyn lies in the value of The Red Wheel, the massive documentary novel in four parts covering the history of Russia from 1914 to the collapse in 1917 of the provisional government. It was composed over a period of 30 years, mainly in isolation in rural Vermont. Few modern readers, perhaps, have the time or energy to spare on a novel of 5,000 pages – especially about a time in the past that has already been covered elsewhere by historians. Only history will decide whether the book succeeds in asserting its authority.
Solzhenitsyn’s overall importance, however, is finally as a moral rather than a literary phenomenon. He was a writer, but above all a prophet, a figure on the world historical stage. He contributed massively to the destruction of an ideology – the most powerful belief system of the early 20th century. The prestige of the Communist experiment had a surprisingly long duration both in the Soviet Union and among intellectuals abroad. After Solzhenitsyn, it became impossible to ignore both the moral infamy of Soviet Communism, and its categorical ineptness as a system of government.
Of course, there have been other witnesses to say this too. But Solzhenitsyn’s was the overpowering presence. It was in his voice, and in his accents, that the indictment was classically formulated.
Alexander Isayevitch Solzhenitsyn, writer, born 11 December 1918; died 3 August 2008"

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Interesting article!

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for reminding us that on August 3, 2008 Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89.

Great Souls: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
https://youtu.be/YLEPQ7evzdU

Images:
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in Kazakhstan, 1953
2. Battery commander Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and commander of Artillery Reconnaissance Division E. Pshechenko, February 1943
3. The 'MARFINO' SHARASHKA (Secret Research Prison). Prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn WORKED here from 1947 to 1950.
4. Teaching Physics at Mezinovka School 1956-57

Biographies
1. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alexander-solzhenitsyn-his-final-interview-885152.htm
2. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/lifeinfocus/alexander-solzhenitsyn-gulag-soviet-russia-writer-one-day-dissident-putin-a8502976.html

1. Background from {[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alexander-solzhenitsyn-his-final-interview-885152.html}]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: His final interview
Rebel, prisoner, poet and hero: half a century since they were published, Solzhenitsyn's searing accounts of Stalin's labour camps remain among the most profound works of modern literature. Last summer, as his health began to fail, he looked back on his extraordinary life with Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp
Tuesday 5 August 2008 00:00

Q: Alexander Isayevich, when we came in we found you at work. It seems that even at the age of 88 you still feel this need to work, even though your health doesn't allow you to walk around your home. What do you derive your strength from?
Solzhenitsyn: I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work – to work and to the struggle.

Q: In your book My American Years, you recollect that you used to write even while walking in the forest.
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Solzhenitsyn: When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

Q: And your strength did not leave you even in moments of desperation?
Solzhenitsyn: Yes. I would often think: whatever the outcome is going to be, let it be. And then things would turn out all right. It looks like some good came out of it.

Q: I am not sure you were of the same opinion when, in February 1945, you were arrested by the military secret service in Eastern Prussia. In your letters from the front, you were unflattering about Joseph Stalin, and the sentence for that was eight years in the prison camps.
Solzhenitsyn: It was south of Wormditt. We had just broken out of a German encirclement and were marching to Königsberg [now Kaliningrad] when I was arrested. I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.

Q: What views?
Solzhenitsyn: Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.

Q: All your life you have called on the authorities to repent for the millions of victims of the gulag and communist terror. Was this call really heard?
Solzhenitsyn: I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.

Q: Putin [then President] says the collapse of the Soviet Union was the largest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and that it is high time to stop this masochistic brooding over the past, especially since there are attempts "from outside", as he puts it, to provoke an unjustified remorse among Russians. Does this not just help those who want people to forget everything that took place during the county's Soviet past?
Solzhenitsyn: Well, there is growing concern all over the world as to how the United States will handle its new role as the world's only superpower, which it became as a result of geopolitical changes. As for "brooding over the past", alas, that conflation of "Soviet" and "Russian", against which I spoke so often in the 1970s, has not passed away in the West, or in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. The elder political generation in communist countries was not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.

Q: Including the Russians.
Solzhenitsyn: If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates now among the less affected part of our society. Nor would the Eastern European countries and former USSR republics feel the need to see in historical Russia the source of their misfortunes. One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country. One should not attribute this to the "sick psychology" of the Russians, as is often done in the West. All these regimes in Russia could only survive by imposing a bloody terror. We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.

Q: To accept one's guilt presupposes that one has enough information about one's own past. However, historians are complaining that Moscow's archives are not as accessible now as they were in the 1990s.
Solzhenitsyn: It's a complicated issue. There is no doubt, however, that a revolution in archives took place in Russia over the past 20 years. Thousands of files have been opened; the researchers now have access to thousands of previously classified documents. Hundreds of monographs that make these documents public have already been published or are in preparation. Alongside the declassified documents of the 1990s, there were many others published which never went through the declassification process. Dmitri Volkogonov, the military historian, and Alexander Yakovlev, the ex-member of the Politburo – these people had enough influence and authority to get access to any files, and society is grateful to them for their valuable publications.
As for the last few years, no one has been able to bypass the declassification procedure. Unfortunately, this procedure takes longer than one would like. Nevertheless the files of the country's most important archives, the National Archives of the Russian Federation [GARF], are as accessible now as in the 1990s. The FSB sent 100,000 criminal-investigation materials to GARF in the late 1990s. These documents remain available for citizens and researchers. In 2004-2005 GARF published the seven-volume History of Stalin's Gulag. I co-operated with this publication and I can assure you that these volumes are as comprehensive and reliable as they can be. Researchers all over the world rely on this edition.
Q: About 90 years ago, Russia was shaken first by the February Revolution and then by the October Revolution. These events run like a leitmotif through your works. A few months ago you reiterated your thesis: Communism was not the result of the previous Russian political regime; the Bolshevik Revolution was made possible only by Kerensky's poor governance in 1917. If one follows this line of thinking, then Lenin was only an accidental person, who was only able to come to Russia and seize power here with German support. Have we understood you correctly?
Solzhenitsyn: No. Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. Lenin and Trotsky were exceptionally nimble and vigorous politicians who managed in a short time to use the weakness of Kerensky's government. But allow me to correct you: the "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West. On 25 October 1917, a violent 24-hour coup d'état took place in Petrograd. It was brilliantly and thoroughly planned by Leon Trotsky – Lenin was in hiding to avoid being brought to justice for treason. What we call "the Russian Revolution of 1917" was the February Revolution.
The reasons driving this revolution do indeed have their source in Russia's pre-revolutionary condition, and I have never stated otherwise. The February Revolution had deep roots – I have shown that in The Red Wheel. First among these was the long-term mutual distrust between those in power and the educated society, a bitter distrust that rendered impossible any constructive solutions for the state. And the greatest responsibility falls on the authorities: who if not the captain is to blame for a shipwreck? So you may indeed say that the February Revolution in its causes was "the results of the previous Russian political regime".
But this does not mean that Lenin was "an accidental person" by any means; or that the financial participation of Emperor Wilhelm was inconsequential. There was nothing natural for Russia in the October Revolution. Rather, the revolution broke Russia's back. The Red Terror unleashed by its leaders, their willingness to drown Russia in blood, is the first and foremost proof of it.

Q: To paraphrase something you once said, the dark history of the 20th century had to be endured by Russia for the sake of mankind. Have the Russians learnt the lessons of the two revolutions and their consequences?
Solzhenitsyn: They are starting to. A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century are evidence of a growing demand. Recently, the state TV channel Russia aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
And since February [2007] I have been surprised by the heated discussions that my now republished article on the February Revolution has provoked. I was pleased to see the wide range of opinions, since they demonstrate the eagerness to understand the past, without which there can be no meaningful future.

Q: How do you assess the period of Putin's governance in comparison with those of Yeltsin and Gorbachev?
Solzhenitsyn: Gorbachev's administration was amazingly politically naive, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance, but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration of the West only strengthened his conviction that his approach was right. But let us be clear that it was Gorbachev, and not Yeltsin, as is now being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of our country.
Yeltsin's period was characterised by a no less irresponsible attitude to people's lives, but in other ways. In his haste to have private rather than state ownership as quickly as possible, Yeltsin started a mass, multi-billion-dollar fire sale of the national patrimony. Wanting to gain the support of regional leaders, Yeltsin called for separatism and passed laws that encouraged the collapse of the Russian state. This deprived Russia of its historical role for which it had worked so hard, and lowered its standing in the international community. All this met with even more hearty Western applause.
Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralised people. And he started to do what was possible – a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favourably by other governments.

Q: It has become clear that the stability of Russia is of benefit to the West. But one thing surprises us in particular: when speaking about the right form of statehood for Russia, you were always in favour of civil self- government, and you contrasted this model with Western democracy. After seven years of Putin's governance we can observe totally the opposite phenomenon: power is concentrated in the hands of the president, everything is oriented toward him.
Solzhenitsyn: Yes, I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England.
In your question you confuse local self-government, which is possible on the most grassroots level only, when people know their elected officials, with the dominance of a few dozen regional governors, who during Yeltsin's period were only too happy to join the federal government in suppressing local self-government.
I continue to be extremely worried by the slow development of local self-government. But it has started. In Yeltsin's time, local self-government was barred, whereas the state's "vertical of power" (ie, Putin's top-down administration) is delegating more and more decisions to the local population. Unfortunately, this process is still not systematic in character.

Q: But there is hardy any opposition.
Solzhenitsyn: An opposition is necessary for the healthy development of any country. You can scarcely find anyone in opposition, except for the communists. However, when you say "there is nearly no opposition", you probably mean the democratic parties of the 1990s. But if you take an unbiased look at the situation, there was a rapid decline of living standards in the 1990s, which affected three quarters of Russian families, and all under the "democratic banner". Small wonder, then, that the population does not rally to this banner any more. And now the leaders of these parties cannot even agree on how to share portfolios in an illusory shadow government. It is regrettable that there is still no large-scale opposition in Russia. The growth and development of an opposition will take more time and experience.

Q: During our last interview you criticised the election rules for state Duma deputies, because only half of them were elected in their constituencies, whereas the other half, representatives of the political parties, were dominant. After the election reform made by Putin, there is no direct constituency at all. Is this not a step back?
Solzhenitsyn: Yes, it is a mistake. I am a consistent critic of "party-parliamentarism". I am for non-partisan elections of true people's representatives who are accountable to their districts, and who in case of unsatisfactory work can be recalled. I do understand and respect the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional and industrial principles, but I see nothing organic in political parties. Politically motivated ties can be unstable and quite often they have selfish ulterior motives. Leon Trotsky said it accurately during the October Revolution: "A party that does not strive for the seizure of power is worth nothing." We are talking about seeking benefit for the party itself at the expense of the rest of the people. This can happen whether the takeover is peaceful or not. Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate. This is the point behind popular representation.

Q: In spite of high revenues from oil and gas, and the development of a middle class, there is a vast contrast between rich and poor in Russia. What can be done to improve the situation?
Solzhenitsyn: I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state. Although many fortunes were amassed in Yeltsin's times by ransacking, the only reasonable way to correct the situation is not to go after big businesses but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and corruption.

Q: Recently, relations between Russia and the West have got somewhat colder. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?
Solzhenitsyn: The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.
This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.
So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West's reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

Q: The West associated it with the ex-superpower, the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn: Which is too bad. But even before that, the West deluded itself – or maybe conveniently ignored the reality –by regarding Russia as a young democracy, whereas there was no democracy. Russia is not a democratic country yet; it is just starting to build democracy. It is all too easy to take Russia to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes.
But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West's irrational refusal of this hand. No sooner did the US accept Russia's critically important aid in Afghanistan than it started making newer and newer demands. As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears.
Isn't it a luxury for the West to be pushing Russia aside now, especially in the face of new threats? In my last Western interview before I returned to Russia [for Forbes magazine in April 1994] I said: "One can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the US will be in dire need of Russia as an ally."

Q: What is, in your opinion, the situation in Russian literature today?
Solzhenitsyn: Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad. Modern Russian literature is no exception. The educated reader today is much more interested in non-fiction. However, I believe that justice and conscience will not be cast to the four winds, but will remain in the foundations of Russian literature, so that it may be of service in brightening our spirit and enhancing our comprehension.

Q: In 1987 you said it was really hard for you to speak about religion in public. What does faith mean for you?
Solzhenitsyn: For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.

Q: Are you afraid of death?
Solzhenitsyn: No. When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me – and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

Q: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.
Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don't. It's enough.
Q: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.
Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don't. It's enough.

2. Background from {[https://www.i

2. Background from {[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/lifeinfocus/alexander-solzhenitsyn-gulag-soviet-russia-writer-one-day-dissident-putin-a8502976.html/]}
A Life in Focus: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident writer whose account of life in the gulag exposed the tyranny of Soviet Russia
The Independent revisits the life of a notable figure. This week: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tuesday 5 August 2008
Mark Le Fanu
Saturday 25 August 2018 16:35

Alexander Solzhenitsyn bestrode Russian literature for decades and would in December mark his 100th year. His obituary follows.
For much of the 20th century, large sections of the populace of one of the greatest nations of the earth were held in virtual slavery by their own government. That modern system of serfdom – far more rigorous and extensive than any Siberian exile – was known as the gulag, after its Soviet acronym. Its historian and unmasker was the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. With his death comes to the end an important chapter in the long tradition of Russian moral prophecy.
Solzhenitsyn’s book Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago), a three-volume work setting out the history of the Russian labour camps since the time of Lenin up to the present, was a bombshell on its publication in 1973. For the first time, the full history of the regime’s repressions was chronicled in intense detail, with no extenuation given to “later aberrations”: Lenin was blamed for the débâcle as much as his evil successor Stalin. The literary and political importance of the work’s appearance as an event in the history of the epoch can scarcely be exaggerated. In fact, it is not implausible to measure from this date the beginnings of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa town in the northern Caucasus where his maternal grandfather, a self-made Ukrainian millionaire, owned a large villa. The Solzhenitsyns themselves were of Russian peasant stock. Following the southern expansion of the empire in the 19th century, they had settled in the region of Stavropol, east of the Crimea, where successive generations cultivated the land. Various ancestors had been narodniki, supporters of the free peasant movement: left-liberal in sentiment, though mainly patriotic and God-fearing, with sympathies directed more towards Tolstoy than towards Marx.
Solzhenitsyn never knew his father, Isaak, a Moscow university graduate and officer in the Tsar’s army who was killed in a hunting accident three months before the boy was born. His mother Taissia brought the child up in Rostov-on-Don, a port city retaining something of the colourful cosmopolitan character of its origins throughout the civil war and during the subsequent victory of Bolshevism. Despite poverty (Taissia never remarried), the atmosphere of the household was cultivated and, through the influence of a beloved aunt, Irina, sympathetic towards Christian orthodoxy.
The child Alexander was precociously clever. By the age of 11 he had read a large swathe of the Russian classics including War and Peace. As he grew into late adolescence he became firmly converted to Marxism and to the justice of the Soviet cause, though this seems never to have interfered with his first and overriding childhood ambition, to make a name for himself in the field of literature. Already by 1936, aged only 18, he was sketching an epic historical canvas on the subject of 1917, the year of revolutions – something that, with appropriate changes in outlook and incident, would eventually transmute into the longest (if not the greatest) of his adult works, Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel, completed in 1993).
Literature, however, was at this stage a secret or at best a leisure-time occupation. With a strongly practical bent of mind inherited from his mother’s side of the family, Alexander Solzhenitsyn chose mathematics and physics as university subjects – in his home town of Rostov, rather than travelling, as he might have done, to Moscow. His years at university coincided in the wider Soviet sphere with the full onslaught of the Red Terror. Although privately disenchanted with Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was not yet in any real sense a critic of the state: long into his imprisonment he was to remain strictly speaking a Leninist, arguing that while the outcome of the revolution had been perverted, the project had been sound, even noble.
As a young man he was dashing and popular. His stay at university was conventionally successful and crowned with academic honours. Thus it was something of a surprise to his contemporaries that he chose on graduation to take up a comparatively humble teaching post as a village schoolmaster in Morozovsk, a sleepy provincial backwater where he settled with his young bride Natalya Reshetovskaya at the beginning of 1941.
Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June of that year reawakened in Solzhenitsyn his intense boyhood patriotism. He served briefly and without distinction in a Cossack regiment (his ignorance of horses giving rise to mockery), then succeeded in transferring himself to officer training college, graduating lieutenant of artillery in late 1942 with a speciality in the acoustic pinpointing of gunfire.
During two subsequent years of active service, Solzhenitsyn took part in the great counter-offensive which, in the wake of Stalingrad, saw the German army slowly pushed back through the conquered territories of Ukraine and Belorussia, up to the borders of Germany and beyond. He was present at the Battle of Orel, the second great Russian victory of the war (in August 1943).
Lenin knew that revolution wouldn’t happen overnight
In quieter moments he continued to write poems and short stories and to correspond with family and friends, including a friend from schooldays, Nikolai Vitkevich (“Koka”) whom he had met up with again for a brief period in the months of mobilisation. Almost light-heartedly, it seems, the pair had concocted a “a society for the reform of Russian customs”, complete with parliamentary manifesto (“Resolution No 1”) and a blueprint for bringing Russia out of feudalism.
Letters between the friends referring to Stalin disparagingly as “the mustachio’d one” and “pakhan” (“big shot”) fell into the hands of the political authorities. Thus it came about that in February 1945 at his forward billet in Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his officer’s epaulettes and charged under article 58 of the Soviet criminal code with “taking part in anti-Soviet propaganda” along with “funding an organisation hostile to the state”.
How far were Solzhenitsyn’s dissident views at this stage of his life typical of his training and cadre? It is difficult to be sure. On the one hand, although he hated Stalin, the more savage aspects of Soviet Communism had passed him by. Like a surprisingly large number of his fellow countrymen, he knew nothing at first hand of the mass arrests, the tortures and the forced deportations that had characterised Soviet life in the Thirties.
On the other hand, he was a writer and therefore an observer. And he had managed to retain from childhood – what may have been rare in Soviet society – both a religious outlook and an irreducible belief in the individual. Of the 30 officers in his battalion, he was one of only two who throughout the war declined to become a member of the Communist Party. His scepticism seems to have been as ingrained as his patriotism.
Solzhenitsyn was transferred under guard to Moscow. (He himself directed his Smersh minders – out-of-town provincials – to the gates of the Lubyanka.) In view of the gravity of the charges against him, it is perhaps surprising he received a sentence of “only” eight years’ hard labour, handed out by a Soviet special court. Before the war, he would have been shot. There was a certain chaos around and, a final piece of luck, his interrogator was lazy – omitting to examine, for instance, the incriminating diaries that fell into his hands along with Solzhenitsyn’s personal effects.
So began Solzhenitsyn’s journey to the gulag: from the Lubyanka via a series of transit camps – Butyrki, Krasnaya Presnya, Kaluga Gate – in each of which he encountered some new graduated rigour (at the same time some new facet of human personality, some fresh example among inmates of courage and endurance) before ending up, in 1950, in the harsh camp of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, where, as he later said, he “touched bottom” in both the good and the bad senses of the phrase. (This was the camp whose regime he was to describe unforgettably in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962 – first published in the journal Novy Mir as “Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha”.)
Meanwhile, though, there had been cushioning spaces on the road: intervals, even, of comparative freedom. In one of the questionnaires sent round the prison system by a regime hungry for technical specialists, Solzhenitsyn claimed a knowledge of atomic physics. In fact this knowledge was almost non-existent: he had merely read an American book on the subject. But the hint was enough to have him transferred to a special research prison, Marfino, housed in a former seminary on the outskirts of Moscow – where, however, instead of pursuing high-level research, he at first busied himself perfecting a scrambling device for Stalin’s personal telephone service.
It was in Marfino that he met and became friends with two extraordinary individuals, Lev Kopelev and Dmitri Panin, characterised respectively as the ideological opponents Rubin and Sologdin in V kruge pervom (The First Circle, 1968), the novel that earned Solzhenitsyn the 1970 Nobel prize. In the debates which the inmates engaged in during their leisure-time on the relative merits and demerits of Marxism, Solzhenitsyn came to feel he had stumbled into a magic circle, “by accident, one of the freest places in the whole of the Soviet Union”. Panin was the more important of the two from the point of view of Solzhenitsyn’s political education, persuading the writer that it was Marxism itself – the doctrine of Communism – rather than its subsequent mutation into Stalinism, which was the aberration from human norms, and the root cause of his country’s catastrophe.
Panin had another significance for Solzhenitsyn in his personal life, as a model of unswerving ascetic steadfastness. The material privileges enjoyed by the prisoner-intellectuals in Marfino could be withdrawn at the first sign on non-cooperation. But the threat of their removal seems not to have impressed either Panin or Solzhenitsyn. Following a showdown with the authorities, the pair were pitched back into the gulag, continuing their journey together as far as Ekibastuz.
The regime there was the harshest Solzhenitsyn encountered, both in terms of physical toil – gruelling labour as a bricklayer and then as a smelter’s mate – and of the dehumanising treatment meted out by the authorities. (Names had been dispensed with and prisoners were referred to solely by numbers.) At the same time Solzhenitsyn became afflicted by cancer – the first of two bouts – and had to endure the horrors of prison surgery and its makeshift aftermath.
Still, in other ways there was hope in the air for the first time since his capture. Tremendous camp rebellions in 1951 succeeded, against the odds, in improving conditions and, above all, morale. Just as important, it was in this period that Solzhenitsyn finally returned fully to the Christian faith which was to succour his literary ambitions and to mark forever his mature view of history.
Solzhenitsyn’s release from jail, in fact, coincided with Stalin’s death. He heard the news within the first week of his sentence of “perpetual exile” in the little town of Kok Terek in Kazakhstan, where in due course he succeeded in finding work as a schoolteacher. The years from 1953 to 1961 were spent in lonely isolation, completing first drafts of the novels that were later to make him famous. The background to this endeavour – what allowed it to take place – was the steadily improving political climate that came after Stalin’s death, and especially in the wake of the 20th Party Congress of October 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev famously denounced his predecessor’s crimes. Solzhenitsyn’s sentence of exile was lifted in 1956; he settled in Ryazan with his wife Natalya. Pardon from the state came a year later – but no monetary recompense or apology: as there was to be none for the thousands of his fellow inmates recently let out of camps or still languishing there.

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A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, on Khrushchev’s personal recommendation, in late 1962, and instantly shot Solzhenitsyn to fame. Yet almost in the same month the state began the slow move away from relative liberalism (the end of the “thaw”) which was to mark the changeover from the Khrushchev to the Brezhnevite era. Rakovyi korpus (Cancer Ward), completed in 1962, was more radically critical of the regime than Ivan Denisovich, and The First Circle more outspoken than either of these. By 1965 it was becoming clear that neither of these later works had much chance of publication on home ground. (The battles surrounding Solzhenitsyn’s attempts to get published, and his relations with the great Novy Mir editor Alexander Tvardovsky, are recounted in his highly readable memoir Bodalsya telenok s dubom, (The Oak and The Calf, 1975.)
Nineteen sixty-five also saw the confiscation of Solzhenitsyn’s archive by the KGB, minus, miraculously, his drafts for Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago). From now on it was only a matter of time before a showdown with the authorities – though Solzhenitsyn was protected by the genuine popularity he enjoyed across all ranks of Soviet society, and also by a certain innate cautiousness that prevented him, for example, from speaking out as forcefully as he might have done in favour of contemporary dissidents like Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel.
The great question of the hour was whether, being denied an opening on the home market, he should publish abroad. (It was the decision to go for this latter option that had caused Sinyavsky and Daniel to be dubbed traitors.) Solzhenitsyn prevaricated. Manuscript copies of his major works including The Gulag Archipelago were all safely in the hands of western sympathisers by mid-1968, but still Solzhenitsyn was pressing for home publication – at least of Cancer Ward, and maybe also for a slightly expurgated version of The First Circle. It wasn’t to be. Events took on their own momentum. An English translation of Cancer Ward was published “without personal authorisation” in August 1968, followed a few months later (with much greater fanfare) by the appearance in America of The First Circle. Solzhenitsyn’s fame was now worldwide.
The authorities at first contented themselves with low-level sniping. By a series of Byzantine manoeuvres, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1969. The following year, support came from the West in the shape of the Nobel Prize for Literature. But Solzhenitsyn refused to travel to Stockholm to receive it, rightly fearing that, once out of the country, he might never be allowed to return. Such an outcome was not part of his aim at this stage. The huge work he had embarked on, a history of the immediate years leading up to the 1917 revolution, required further researches “on the spot”. And besides, as a patriotic Russian to the core, he had no wish to desert his native soil.
So, in the years up to 1974, Solzhenitsyn lived perpetually on the brink of re-arrest; but he found protection in powerful friendships (for example, with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich), and also by virtue of the fact of his international pre-eminence. In official circles it was the beginning of détente; the non-persecution of Solzhenitsyn, and of Solzhenitsyn’s friend the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, was for a while the price the Soviet Union paid for having its peaceable aims taken seriously.
Even so, there were limits to the authorities’ patience. Solzhenitsyn realised the game was up the moment, in September 1973, when it came to his ears that the KGB had – finally – discovered a concealed manuscript copy of The Gulag Archipelago. Through intermediaries, he immediately authorised the publication of the Russian text of the work in Paris, followed by English translations in America shortly afterwards.
Orchestrated press campaigns in the pages of Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta vilified Solzhenitsyn as a traitor and enemy of the people. On 12 February 1974, he was arrested for the second time, interrogated in Lefortovo Prison, and the following day bundled onto an aeroplane out of the country, into an exile that was to last for 20 years.
Solzhenitsyn’s long sojourn in the West – first in Germany, subsequently in a remote farmhouse in Vermont, in the United States – was taken up in the private sphere with the completion of his sprawling epic of the pre-revolutionary years: he worked on it every day without fail. At the same time, the years saw the re-establishing of a happy family life in the company of his second wife Natalya Svetlova and their children. In the public sphere, Solzhenitsyn became known for his continuing fierce denunciations of the Soviet regime, and his equally caustic scorn for Western materialism.
The period of glasnost ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms saw the vindication and triumph of Solzhenitsyn’s life work in the publication, in his homeland, of his major works – including The Gulag Archipelago – accompanied by enormous discussion. In the wake of the reforms and, in particular, of the failed coup d’état of August 1991, he determined to return to Russia. (There had been an open invitation from Boris Yeltsin.)
However, delays in completing The Red Wheel, combined with difficulties in finding a suitable apartment in Moscow, put off the actual date until 1994, by which time the impact of his arrival was somewhat lessened. None the less, his long train ride from Vladivostok back to Moscow was an event of national importance, widely covered also by the world press.
Solzhenitsyn continued to publish widely, mainly in Novy Mir, to which he contributed an acerbic memoir of his years in the West, castigating the many helpers who had somehow or other failed to live up to his expectations. (Of his collaborators, only his much-loved second wife seemingly escaped this inevitable final disappointment.)
His two-volume history of the Jews in Russia, Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together, 2002), caused renewed controversy, resuscitating charges of covert antisemitism that had appeared now and again (usually maliciously) throughout his career. In fact his view on the subject was a complex and nuanced one, as was only to be expected of a man whose second wife was Jewish, and whose three sons from that marriage had been brought up in the Judaic faith.
The purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s return, of course, was to lend his authority to his country’s renewal after the nightmare; but obstinately the nightmare continued. Crime, poverty, the grosser forms of materialism, conflict with Chechnya: on each of these issues Solzhenitsyn had important things to say, but the country at large became less and less inclined to listen to him. A fortnightly television programme on which Solzhenitsyn “aired his views” was discontinued in the late Nineties on account of poor ratings.
Boris Yeltsin, as mentioned, had always admired Solzhenitsyn, and offered him honours which were refused. Vladimir Putin, when in turn he came to power, visited the sage in his house on the outskirts of Moscow and Solzhenitsyn received undoubted pleasure from this visit, in later years speaking with approval of Putin’s policies. In June last year he accepted the Russian State Prize from Putin.
The public image of Solzhenitsyn had something biblical and prophetic about it. His Christianity was of the Old Testament variety; he was unafraid to call his fellow countrymen to repentance. His appearance was fittingly austere: tall, bearded, with a slight schoolmaster’s stoop, he had attractive blue eyes, and a straightforward, open, trusting countenance which inspired confidence and drew people towards him. From the moment after his release when he began seriously bearing witness to his times, he seemed to live not quite for himself, but as it were “in trust” for those who had perished in the purges.
To this end, his spare time was rationed to the most stringent specifications. Every moment of the working day was precious. Every moment not spent writing was seen as a derogation of duty. This made him seem inhuman to some; and the loyalty he inspired from those around him was sometimes bought at a cost. His enemies (of whom there were many) dubbed him fanatical, an accurate epithet.
Judgement about the literary quality of his writing has always been mixed. The personal, sarcastic bent of his style has been thought overdone or rhetorical. Others, however, see him as one of the giants of Russian prose. His literary vocabulary was extensive and always growing. He was fascinated by Russian proverbs and by the lost, demotic pre-revolutionary speech which he sought to reintroduce into common currency, along with the famous “slang” of the camps. Elsewhere – in Cancer Ward and The First Circle – his literary model was Tolstoy and the tradition of seamless, spacious Russian storytelling, enlivened however, in his later writings, by modernist “collage” effects taken raw from documents and newspapers of the time.

The unresolved literary question about Solzhenitsyn lies in the value of The Red Wheel, the massive documentary novel in four parts covering the history of Russia from 1914 to the collapse in 1917 of the provisional government. It was composed over a period of 30 years, mainly in isolation in rural Vermont. Few modern readers, perhaps, have the time or energy to spare on a novel of 5,000 pages – especially about a time in the past that has already been covered elsewhere by historians. Only history will decide whether the book succeeds in asserting its authority.
Solzhenitsyn’s overall importance, however, is finally as a moral rather than a literary phenomenon. He was a writer, but above all a prophet, a figure on the world historical stage. He contributed massively to the destruction of an ideology – the most powerful belief system of the early 20th century. The prestige of the Communist experiment had a surprisingly long duration both in the Soviet Union and among intellectuals abroad. After Solzhenitsyn, it became impossible to ignore both the moral infamy of Soviet Communism, and its categorical ineptness as a system of government.
Of course, there have been other witnesses to say this too. But Solzhenitsyn’s was the overpowering presence. It was in his voice, and in his accents, that the indictment was classically formulated.
Alexander Isayevitch Solzhenitsyn, writer, born 11 December 1918; died 3 August 2008"