I’ve been reading a great (updated) biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by Joseph Pearce, published recently by Ignatius Press. This is truly wonderful read about one of the great, heroic, noble figures of the 20th century.
I’m not a big fan of Christopher Hitchens, but this was a great tribute he wrote upon the writer’s death in 2008:
Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsynhaving to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.
To have fought his way into Hitler’s East Prussia as a proud Red Army soldier in the harshest war on record, to have been arrested and incarcerated for a chance indiscretion, to have served a full sentence of servitude and been released on the very day that Stalin died, and then to have developed cancer and known the whole rigor and misery of a Soviet-era isolation hospital—what could you fear after that? The bullying of Leonid Brezhnev’s KGB and the hate campaigns of the hack-ridden Soviet press must have seemed like contemptible fleabites by comparison. But it seems that Solzhenitsyn did have a worry or a dread, not that he himself would be harmed but that none of his work would ever see print. Nonetheless—and this is the point to which I call your attention—he kept on writing. The Communist Party’s goons could have torn it up or confiscated or burned it—as they did sometimes—but he continued putting it down on paper and keeping a bottom drawer filled for posterity. This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name. The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived “as if.” Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on “as if” he were a free citizen, “as if” he had the right to study his own country’s history, “as if” there were such a thing as human dignity.
Read the full article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2196606/
Here is the audio of his famous 1978 commencement speech at Harvard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Bndt2Yd4U
And here is a fascinating video on Lenin & the Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhdiAfzFM0&feature=fvsr
I’m currently reading The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. This passage stuck out:
“In their own countries Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious. How could they, in their decline from 1941 to 1945, fail to secure any guarantees whatever of the independence of Eastern Europe? How could they give away broad regions of Saxony and Thuringia in exchange for the preposterous toy of a four-zone Berlin, their own future Achilles’ heel? And what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender? They say it was the price they paid for Stalin’s agreeing to enter the war against Japan. With the atom bomb already in their hands, they paid Stalin for not refusing to occupy Manchuria, for strengthening Mao Tse-tung in China, and for giving Kim Il Sung control of half Korea! What bankruptcy of political thought! And when subsequently, the Russians pushed out Mikolajczyk, when Benes and Masaryk came to their ends, when Berlin was blockaded, and Budapest flamed and fell silent, and Korea went up in smoke, and Britain’s Conservatives fled Suez, could one really beleive that those among them with the most accurate memories did not at least recall that episode of the Cossacks?”
The episode referred to, which Mr. Solzhenitsyn calls “an act of double-dealing consistent with the spirit of traditional English diplomacy,” was when “Churchill… turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men… and wagonloads of old people, women, and children who did not want to return to their native Cossack rivers.” He continues, “This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.” No wonder this giant was as little popular in the West as he was in Soviet Russia.