Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Paradigmatic Zek

Front Page ^ | 9/2/13 | Vladimir Tismaneanu

[Nachum]

Five years have passed since the demise, on August 3, 2008, of the great novelist, dissident, and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Forty-five years ago, on August 25, 1968, seven people demonstrated in the Red Square heroically against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, thus ushering in an era of open dissent and ruthless persecutions, including forcible internments into psychiatric institutions. More than twenty years ago, in December 1991, the ideocratic empire called the USSR collapsed. As historian Boris Souvarine, who wrote an unsurpassed Stalin biography, noticed mordantly:

“USSR, four letters, four lies. It was neither a free union, nor Soviet, in the sense of councils’ democracy. Neither was it socialist, if socialism involves social equality, nor a set of republics, in the etymological sense of the term, res publica, an object of civic commitment.”

The Solzhenitsyn effect, associated with the publication in the West of his non-fiction monument titled “The Gulag Archipelago,” a most devastating indictment of Sovietism, engendered a mutation in the global perception of communism and contributed to the inexorable de-legitimization of totalitarianism. The Soviet myth was dealt a mortal blow. Communist “humanism” turned out to be similar to the Nazi one. The Bolshevik “conscience” was not different from the Fascist one.

[Nachum]

Who is our Solzhenitsyn today?

[allendale]

We have no Solzhenitsyn. However people should read his great and prophetic novel “August 1914”. Sadly few will.

[skinkinthegrass]

!

[elcid1970]

Solzhenitsyn belongs to all in this world who read his works and reflect on what he was trying to tell us.

He spoke to America in 1978 & no one listened.

[arasina]

Who is our Solzhenitsyn today?

We sure do need one. We need someone who can get through to the people who have been blinded by technology.

[VRW Conspirator]

The Bolshevik “conscience” was not different from the Fascist one.

Solzhenitsyn was "born" in a time when the Soviets crushed anything that looked like, talked like, walked like a dissenter. The truth survived the iron hammer and the sharpened sickle, and pointed a finger at the real Soviet Union.

[Nextrush]

I’m not sure where that person is but Solzhenitsyn could cut
through the crap.

Read all three volumes of “Gulag Archipelago” like I did.

Its lays out the nature of the system from the prison camps to the ideology.

Solzhenityn explained that ideology became more important than math and science in education.

He noted that Communism emptied the prisons of the Soviet Union of criminals because it believed that societal conditions caused crime.

He also noted that people got punished in the USSR for defending themselves from the criminals let back out on the street.

The robbers and thieves made it back to jail as the trustees helping the warders to deal with the political prisoners who were given the harshest sentences.

He lays it out and one cannot help but notice symptoms of communism in our country today based on his descriptions of the USSR.

[aimhigh]

Who is our Solzhenitsyn today?

Good question. I'm waiting for a Chinese version of Gulag Archepeligo.

[Popman]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn