The Other Solzhenitsyn

The Other Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 12/11/2018.

 

The 100th anniversary of possibly the greatest writer of the tortured 20th century has predictably and justly given rise to numerous encomiums such as this one from one of the great man’s best interpreters. There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn, if not St. John, to whom he has been compared, in his epochal struggle with communist totalitarianism, at the very least drove a key nail in the coffin of communist inhumanity. What he did without any doubt was to open the eyes of the West to the reality of the murderous Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, but also in Eastern Europe, China and wherever communism had triumphed. And expose it he did in all of its genocidal fury, the Left’s unwillingness to fess up to it notwithstanding.

 

All of this is well-established and Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as a giant among writers is secure and unshakeable. Yet, there is another side to him that justifies us in breaking the Latin admonition “de mortius nihil bonnum.” And contrary to what some in the West have argued, it is not his criticisms of the messiness of democracy or the libertinism of western society that is at issue here, but much graver errors of judgment, such as denying the holodomor, which he called a “loony fable”, years after Robert Conquest’s magisterial “Harvest of Sorrow” established the facts of this Stalinist genocide in Ukraine beyond doubt. Or the fact that for over a 100 million Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Romanians, Bulgarians and other Eastern Europeans, Solzhenitsyn remains a Russian imperialist, par excellence, and as such a moral danger of the first order. Nor is his devotion to the Russian Orthodox church, for which he is praised by many, a great virtue. That church has always been and remains under Putin a fateful servant of Russian imperialism.

 

If one was to mark the great writer’s sad descent into an apologist for the thugs ruling over Russia today, a good place to start is his return to Russia in the Summer of 1994. Traveling by train from Vladivostok to Moscow, Solzhenitsyn accepted to be squired everywhere by militia cars with blazing sirens and lights like a communist mandarin and then to settle in the exclusive dacha settlement Sosnovka for Soviet leaders and oligarchs.(in Russian). Things went downhill fast from there. Solzhenitsyn first denounced the reformers Yeltsin and Gaidar as thiefs and then threw his support behind Putin after 2006. And did so in words that barely distinguished him from Putin’s own malignant propaganda. In just one example, Solzhenitsyn parroted Putin’s nonsense about NATO’s willful encirclement of Mother Russia that was just about to rob it of its sovereignty. In doing this, willingly or not, the famous author contributed to the creeping re-Stalinization of Russia under Putin.

 

The end result of all of this is that as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the greatest intellectual enemy of communist totalitarianism, fewer and fewer people remember him or read his books. A recent Russian poll indicates that only 44% of the 18 to 24 cohort have ever heard of Stalin’s murderous repressions, 43% of those that have agree that they were justified and 63% agree to have Stalin’s bust displayed in Russia. The author of the Gulag Archipelago may be turning in his grave, but there is no question that he is at least partly to blame for this sad outcome.

 

By Alex Alexiev

Leave a comment

More
The Ideology of Radical Islam

The Ideology of Radical Islam

  This article is based in part on Alex Alexiev, Radical Islam and its Threat to the West and the…
On the issue of migration and economic “equality”

On the issue of migration and economic “equality”

The unanswerable question is what the contemporary world is going to do with the people without any place in the…
MIND THE GAP AND DON’T SUCCUMB TO TRANSATLANTIC FEVER

MIND THE GAP AND DON’T SUCCUMB TO TRANSATLANTIC FEVER

  It is too early to forecast the long-term impact of the pandemic on Atlanticism but not too soon to…