Who was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?
"Untouched by the breath of God, unbounded by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The year was 2003, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had the exact words to say to the interviewer, Joseph Pearce . A decade earlier, the Soviet Union and its bloc over Eastern Europe had collapsed. This was Alexander's birthplace at a time when he spent almost 50 years of his life, before being formally banished from the then Soviet Politburo. He spent two decades as a stateless political refugee throughout the West, eventually returning to his ancestors in 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He would die six years shy of two decades after this return, in 2008. He lived a long life of 89 years.
Alexander's memory rests comfortably in the halls of famous Russian novelists and political dissidents born of authoritarian regimes in the 1920s. He was a soldier, a writer, a cancer survivor, a Nobel laureate and a fervent Orthodox Christian to begin with. And most famously, a political dissident who was eventually forced to flee his homeland after continued persecution, which included everything from blacklisting to an alleged poisoning attempt on his life by the KGB secret police.
Birth after the revolution
He was born on December 11, 1918; a year after the October Revolution. Aleksandr grew up in Stavropol Krai of Ukrainian mother Taisiya Zakharovna and the Cossack man Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn , who bravely served as a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army . Shortly after she became pregnant, Alexander's mother was a widow, and her husband died in a hunting accident. This drove Aleksandr into an early life by being raised by his single mother and aunt in a poverty-stricken home.
During the 1930s, Solzhenitsyn remembers the mother who hid the truth about her father's past in the imperial army, in order to prevent the family from walking the damp and cold black carpet of the gulags. She encouraged her young son to learn to read and write. Her guidance of him was under the wing of the Russian Orthodox believe in a time of progress of secularism. Her untimely death came in 1944, leaving Solzhenitsyn to enter a world of pain he would soon become all too familiar with. She never remarried after the death of her husband.
War is coming for Aleksandr
The World War II wanted to see Aleksandr serve as commander of the Red Army and receives two decorations. Awarded with Red Star Order for an attack on German artillery batteries, there was little doubt as to who he was loyal to. The years after his glory, however, were to prove otherwise. While serving as an artillery officer, Alexander testified about war crimes committed against German civilians by Soviet command during a time of total war on the Eastern Front, and this shook his allegiance.
He became well acquainted with the atrocities of the war, when he saw that non-combatants and the elderly were deprived of the small possessions they had after the death of their combatant third kingdom. Sights of young German women who were brutalized would mark his memory well of the severe time spent during the war. In the years that followed in the gulag, he described in detail the gang rape of a Polish woman by Soviet troops involving a German fighter. In his prophetic compendium, the Gulag archipelago , Solzhenitsyn wrote the following;
“There is nothing that helps the awakening of omniscience in us like insistent thoughts about our own transgressions, mistakes, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such pondering for many years, when I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in the captain's shoulder board and the battery's advancing march through East Prussia, shrouded in fire, and I say .. . so we were better? "
Time in the Gulags
In February 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the anti-intelligence organization SMERSH for certain comments in private letters to a friend regarding the conduct of the war. He openly mocked Stalin by giving him the thorough label " Khozyain Balabos ", Which is Hebrew for" the lord of the house ", and which also indicates that there must be a change of regime. Solzhenitsyn was accused of anti-Soviet activity and taken to Lubyanka prison in Moscow to answer for his crimes. Put in a cell with metallic musk from many iron bars around him, it was announced that Germany had surrendered. The war was won, the whole of Moscow broke out in celebration and from his cell in Lubyanka with other prisoners, Solzhenitsyn recalls with joy;
"Over the snout of our window, and from all the other cells in Lubyanka, and from all the windows in Moscow prisons, we also saw, former prisoners of war and former soldiers in the front line, the Moscow sky, patterned with fireworks and crossed with beams "There was no joy in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. No ... that victory was not ours."
On July 7, 1945, Aleksandr was sentenced to an eight-year term in a gulag. He was probably wondering what was more absurd; only nonsense passed between two soldiers who guaranteed imprisonment for close to ten years, or that such a punishment would fall on the back of a decorated soldier like him who gave blood and meat to his country. The same country that now thanked him for this service with a stay in a labor camp (!)
In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" designated for political prisoners. During his stay he was a miner, mason and foundry master. His experiences and observations of life in this place would serve as the main inspiration for his book "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Solzhenitsyn would later testify to forgetting many details about the time in the gulag decades ago, but that he remembers well the many hours I have spent writing. After having nothing, without music to soften his ears or weapons to fire, he found a place of comfort to write and devoted his life to the pen.
Exile and cancer
When the verdict ended in March 1953, Solzhenitsyn was sent into "internal exile" for LIFE in a village occupying the southern region of Kazakhstan, in Birlik. Eight years had passed, and not much of Alexander's life had changed except for the distant longing for a new horizon, with a deep sense that something was wrong in his world. In 1953, however, he was diagnosed with cancer and was treated at a hospital in Tashkent , Uzbekistan.
His experiences in a hospital bed on the brink of death and memories of the years that passed served as the basis for his new novel, Cancer Ward . It was during this violent decade of political, mental and physical imprisonment that he began to develop a deep resentment over Marxis t learn that dominated Soviet society.
Alexander's loss of eight years in the Gulag, the fears he witnessed committed by his own countrymen, and no doubt the fight against cancer, resulted in him developing a renewed fervor for Christianity. Not unlike the sweeping gambling novel Dostoevsky , with which Solzhenitsyn has long been compared. It was in the gulag where he began to see his face in the grimace of every watchtower and every soldier who patrolled the place to imprison people like him. The words " then we are better Began to call more and more prophetically for each day that went by reflecting on his, and indeed his country's, less than fortunate difficulties.
Life after Stalin, and the first book
In the same year 1953 as Alexander's cancer diagnosis, Stalin died. He was succeeded by Khrushchev , who issued a Secret Speech in 1956 who acquitted Solzhenitsyn of his crimes, of which he was convicted by the previous regime. For the first time in over a decade, he could once again set foot on earth in the Russian motherland, for all the good it did him. He spent the next five years writing the drafts of the now infamous novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich while moonlight as a middle school teacher.
During 1960, he met a man named Aleksandr Tvardovsky , who was a poet of commerce and editor of the Russian Novyi Mir magazine. Aleksandr approached him with the manuscript of his ongoing novel, which was later published in 1962. The production inevitably reached the West, and he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work after it became a smash hit for Western readers who were wary of foreign life during communism. in the East. In his acceptance speech for the award, he wrote:
"In all the years leading up to 1961, I was not only convinced that I would never see a single line in print during my life, but I also dared not let any of my close acquaintances read anything I had written because I was afraid this would become known. "
He received explicit approval from Nikita Khrushchev himself, the then leader of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was a new face in Russia when he advocated a rather liberalized socialism doctrine for a post-war Russia that was finally at peace after decades of conflict since the tsarist regime's violent rule. He reverently defended his work and, citing its criticism of Stalinist Russia, he added;
"It's a Stalinist in each of you; there is even a Stalinist in me. We must eradicate this evil. "
Alexander and Khrushchev
Khrushchev's overtly liberal reforms and " de-Stalinization "By the Soviet Union, together with the approval of Solzhenitsyn as a true literary critic (as opposed to an anti-Soviet agitator) are seen by many as the most important factors that led to his removal and thus linked to the sequence of events. which led to the fall of the Soviet Union itself in the late 1920s. In any case, it can well be said that Solzhenitsyn landed an effective brick through the window of the dirty house that kept him trapped for so long in the face of green pasture outdoors.
To the great delight of Aleksandr, the book was quickly sold out and grew to become an immediate hit. During Khrushchev's tenure as leader, he even studied in Soviet schools. The book, which describes a single day in the life of an ordinary prisoner, was a historic event in Soviet literary history as it gave an unprecedented account of Stalinist repression to the masses, under a strict regime that would have previously punished some of them as political dissidents. for having even read such a book.
It seems that Solzhenitsyn's junk letter to his friend ended up in the strangest places ... right at the wooden tables of Russian children. The book also reached Western audiences, and Soviet heads of government gradually began to recognize it as an internal threat to stability. And then further publications by Solzhenitsyn were shot down by the Association of Authors after the removal of Solzhenitsyn's comrade-in-arms, Khrushchev. For a brief moment, a rusty window was opened for discussion, so that fresh air could be blown before it was shut off by the forces.
Persecution and the Gulag Archipelago
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Union of Writers. The following year, in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but could not receive the prize in person for fear that he would not be allowed to return to the Soviet Union if he went to Stockholm…. Stockholm Syndrome ”arose!
Solzhenitsyn's publishing work quickly ceased to function, and he had the job routinely seized by the KGB . Despite this, the old writer began working on a personal manifesto for his life, which became known as The Gulag Archipelago. In the years 1965-67, the drafts of it were transferred to one of his friends' homes in Estonia . Solzhenitsyn had become friends with lawyer and former Minister of Education Arnold Susi and upon completion, the original script was successfully kept hidden from the KGB by Susi's daughter until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, after which it was published and made available to the public.
The Gulag archipelago was the testimony of 256 former prisoners, along with Solzhenitsyn's own personal experience of life in the Gulag. In the book, he describes interrogation procedures, transport of prisoners, daily life in the camps, prisoner uprisings and the practice of internal exile.
The Gulag archipelago received minimal publication in the Soviet Union, for obvious reasons. Aleksandr soon hid and was shielded by a man named Msitislav Rostoprovich, who was eventually banished for protecting Aleksandr. In August 1971, the KGB made an attempt on Alexander's life when they allegedly tried to assassinate him with an unknown biological agent. He survived, but the incident left him in poor health and with even worse pride for his nation. The motherland was looking for the head, and he was a headless man who walked.
Aleksandrs deportation og livet i Vesten
KGB chief Yury Andropov made the final decision to deport Alexander to West Germany, and so it was. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day to Frankfurt, deprived of his Soviet citizenship for good. More than 30 years after witnessing Europe's death, Alexander went to sunbathe in the remains.
Solzhenitsyn lived in West Germany, then moved to Switzerland before receiving a settlement invitation from the United States University of Stanford. He eventually moved to the state of Vermont in 1976, and two years later received an honorary degree in literature from Harvard University. Despite spending almost the next two decades in the United States, he did not become fluent in English.
One would expect Alexander to be happy to enter America, the opposite of Communist Russia. But Alexander actually spent most of his time as a stateless refugee, criticizing the new world around him. In particular, he spoke harshly about what was in his eyes, the "stupid" and "decadent" Western pop culture. He ridiculed what he perceived as the material and consumerist lifestyle that many ignorant Americans lived through. Aleksandr believed that the lack of moral core values made the average American unaware of any outside threats. He had this to say about American culture around the end of the 20th century;
"... the human soul longs for things that are higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass habits ... by television stupor and by intolerable music."
Alexander was cut off from the same cloth as many other Soviet dissidents like Yuri Bezmenov, who similarly fled the Soviet Union, with America as their new home. But when they were there, they became dissatisfied with the domestic situation on the spot they looked up to as long as a positive settlement to the "godless communists" in the east. And then the intellectual life of them shifted from criticizing the Soviet Union to criticizing the West, which they thought was in a declining state and thus failed to keep the current effective against communist expansionism. In a keynote address by Solzhenitsyn at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, he urged the West not to lose sight of its values and traditions in the face of cultural change at such a crucial and central point in history.
Aleksandr's death
Alexander's Russian citizenship was finally restored after the collapse of communism in 1991 and three years later he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia. However, their sons would stay in the United States. Aleksandr and Natalia would continue to live in a dacha in western Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexander dedicated himself to creating change and called for the establishment of a strong republic that would be balanced by local self-government to avoid tyranny.
After all this ... a humble life in the wilderness, a forgotten love, a war, a prison, a hospital, books and exile, he returned to where he came from. He struggled endlessly and few of us can say so much about our own lives, but he won over the odds. He met the end on August 3, 2008 when he collapsed from heart failure at the age of 89. A funeral was held in a monastery he had chosen himself. Russia would weep for the death of this hope .... This ancient novelist who changed the world with a single letter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn