Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life

By D.M. Thomas

Little, Brown and Company, 1998. 583 pp., $45.00 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/17239

February 9, 1945, was the turning point in the life of Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn. An officer in the Red Army, commanding an artillery unit in the Soviet Union's drive to Berlin, a successful physics-maths university graduate with a career as an engineer ahead of him, a loyal activist in the Komsomol (the Communist Party youth organisation) — all seemed rosy, until his arrest on that fateful day for some unwise criticisms of the Stalin cult.

There followed interrogation in the infamous Lubyanka prison of the political police, eight years' penal servitude in the labour camps, permanent internal exile, release by Khrushchev and censorship by Brezhnev, and rearrest and deportation in 1974.

A victim of Stalinist repression, Solzhenitsyn was also witness to its crimes in his famous works on the labour camps — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and the monumental The Gulag Archipelago.

The anticommunist west lapped up the dissident Solzhenitsyn like a cat its cream, his books becoming part of the arsenal of horror stories about the brutality of socialism. Gulag became a synonym for the evils of Marxism. The novelist D.M. Thomas is the latest to join the chorus with his biography of Solzhenitsyn.

From a wealthy family fallen on hard times, the young Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, developed a talent for maths and a love of literature. Academic success started him on the ladder to success in Stalin's Russia, but he was aware of the snakes that had brought others down and the arbitrary throw of the dice that could change one's fortunes overnight.

He did not act on his doubts, however. There was fascism to defeat in World War II and a career to pursue. Nevertheless, he was critical of the introduction of education fees as contrary to the spirit of socialist egalitarianism, and he laughed at the falsity of the gushing praise for the Father of the People and the Fountain of All Wisdom.

His mistake was to write this in letters to his friends. The all-seeing secret police pounced, arresting him for anti-Soviet propaganda and counter-revolutionary organisation.

Tortured in the Lubyanka cells, he was sentenced to eight years in corrective labour camps, first in a special prison for scientists near Moscow and then in a labour camp for political offenders in Kazakhstan, before being released into permanent internal exile.

Under Khrushchev's limited de-Stalinisation policy, Solzhenitsyn's sentence was annulled, his exile lifted and the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich allowed.

This was to be his only novel to see the light of uncensored day. Khrushchev's liberalising reforms could go forward only by challenging the power and the material privileges of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in 1964 found its defender in Brezhnev, who put the de-Stalinisation campaign on ice.

Solzhenitsyn's options were now only underground (samizdat) and overseas publication. The Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 made Solzhenitsyn even more embarrassing, and threatening, to the Stalinist regime. After the publication in the west of The Gulag Archipelago, he was arrested and deported.

The US welcomed him with open ideological arms: what better spokesperson could there be than the courageous survivor of the gulag to demonstrate that any attempt at radical social change is doomed in advance?

Solzhenitsyn eagerly reciprocated. Changing from someone who believed that Stalin was the perverter of the Revolution (reflected in his early works like The First Circle and Cancer Ward, which, whilst anti-Stalinist, are far from being anticommunist) to someone who now believed that the evil was present at birth in the October Revolution, Solzhenitsyn nailed his new flag was to the mast of nationalism, religion and capitalism.

Marxism was the source of all evil, against which the west must be firm. Solzhenitsyn supported the US war against Vietnam. Thomas, who struggles to find barely half a dozen words (and those in parentheses) to note Solzhenitsyn's view of the imperialist slaughter as "a vital war against communism", obviously thinks a napalmed Vietnamese peasant is less equal than a starved Russian one. Solzhenitsyn mourned western "moral bankruptcy", which he saw in the antiwar movement.

The US is praised as "the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world ... And what do we hear in reply? Reproaches, curses, 'Yankee Go Home'." The defender of the oppressed in the Soviet Union was also the champion of Suharto's mincing machine, which butchered half a million people in Indonesia in 1965.

Solzhenitsyn's literary work now suffers as much as his political credibility. Staking his claim to be the "historian of the Revolution", he goes beyond the role of witness of the camps to moralising opponent of all revolution.

Lenin serves as a handy target for his writing-by-caricature. Lenin In Zurich is a shallow portrait of Lenin as short-tempered, intolerant, ruthless, dogmatic and obsessed, willing, as Thomas gleefully corroborates, to murder 60 million Russians for the sake of Bolshevik power and ideology.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn not only records the sufferings of 220 prisoners but systematically attempts to prove that institutionalised terror began with Lenin's Bolsheviks. Dozens of pages are devoted to the Red Terror of the Civil War but none to the White Terror and western invasion that came first.

Besieged and alone and desperate, the Bolsheviks' response, including their mistakes and temporary retreats from socialist democracy, have a context. Stripped of context by Solzhenitsyn, the actions of the Bolsheviks can be simplistically portrayed as lunacy driven by some metaphysical hatred of humanity.

Solzhenitsyn's one-sided and a-historical account of the Revolution does not strike Thomas as worthy of comment. After all, Thomas believes that the beasts of Bolshevism were thugs, terrorists, drunks, looters and rapists who murdered that nice Mr and Mrs Romanov, whereas tsarism never imprisoned a dissident, murdered a citizen or censored a writer.

No wonder the west loved Solzhenitsyn — until he became a bit of an embarrassment to his liberal supporters with his religious fundamentalism, his explicit support for authoritarianism, and his wild attacks on rationalism and humanism. After retiring to a quiet retreat in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn returned to "post-communist" Russia, where Yeltsin's oligarchical rule on behalf of the nouveaux riches felt the heat of the returned dissident's tongue.

Solzhenitsyn is a favourite with Thomas, whose booming denunciations of the Bolshevik Revolution create enormous din and whose shrill anticommunist whining hinders a political understanding of Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn showed exemplary courage in fighting the Stalinist bureaucracy and his works stand as permanent reminders of the crimes of Stalin. Solzhenitsyn, however, did not know the real October, what had been lost from it and how.

In a backward country, starved, invaded and politically isolated, the revolutionary proletariat, annihilated in the Civil War and devoured by the administrative apparatus, was too demoralised to resist the stagnation of its democratic soviets and the growth of the bureaucracy, which found its political henchman in Stalin to protect its material privileges.

The Leninism that Solzhenitsyn thought he believed in as a young adult in the 1930s was the sterile, bastardised child of Stalin. When he fell foul of the machine, he rejected socialism, which to him looked the same as Stalinism. Stalin's great lie was to claim that what existed in his Soviet Union was socialism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's failing was to believe it.