From rebel to zealot

Submitted by Anon on 26 September, 2008 - 10:12 Author: Tom Unterrainer

“In lawlessness, in the committing of crimes, the point must be remembered at which a man becomes a cannibal!” Statement of A. I. Solzhenitsyn in defence of Zhores Medvedev, June 1970

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure on 3 August 2008. Born in 1918 to a widowed mother, Solzhenitsyn served in the Red Army during World War II. He studied mathematics at university and took correspondence courses in literature and philosophy. The content of these courses, highly ideological and more like basic training courses in Stalinism than a course in free enquiry, defined many of his later views. These Stalinist ideas were to become the “Marxism” that he later renounced. Solzhenitsyn himself admits that he did not question the validity of the Stalinist state ideology at the time. Events turned his view of the world upside down.

In February 1945 Solzhenitsyn was arrested for breaching Article 58, paragraph 10 of the Soviet Criminal Code. His “crime” was to make pedestrian but derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter home from the Prussian front. Whilst imprisoned in the Lubyanka in Moscow, he was sentenced to eight years in the labour camps followed by permanent exile – a sentence not many people would survive.

His heavy-handed treatment at the hands of the state censors is lampooned in his later work. One memorable passage from The Gulag Archipelago stands out:

“The small hall echoed with ‘stormy applause, rising to an ovation.’ For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the ‘stormy applause, rising to an ovation,’ continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? ...

“With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! ... Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat.”

The punishment for being the first to sit down? The Gulag. The lesson? “Don’t ever be the first to stop clapping”

His experiences, portrayed in horrific detail in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and other works, transformed his view of the Stalinist system and the Russian Revolution. The books also provide perhaps the most powerful literary indictments of the crimes and contradictions of Stalinism. Where Orwell experienced the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War and viewed developments from afar, Solzhenitsyn experienced murderous totalitarianism in the very belly of the beast.

Cancer Ward, a semi-autobiographical novel (after his sentence was commuted in the 1950s, Solzhenitsyn received treatment for a benign cancer), describes the loss of “faith” in “Marxism” and the stoic acceptance of the traditional, orthodox Christian values of pre-Revolutionary Russia. This new religious/philosophical view of the world meant that upon his eventual exile to the West, Solzhenitsyn was as uncomplimentary about capitalist society as he had been about Stalinist Russia.

Just as he saw a direct, straight-line relationship between the actions of Lenin and Trotsky during the civil war (the “original sin”) and the entrenched brutality of bureaucratic collectivism, in his later years Solzhenitsyn attacked the decadence and decay of the West as the result of abandoning patriotism and religion.

Those who hold up Solzhenitsyn’s novels, short stories and essays as indisputable proof of the rotten origins of the Bolshevik Revolution would do well to examine the seeds of his other attitudes. He became a reactionary crank who melded Russian mysticism, anti-Semitism, religious orthodoxy, anti-communism and denunciations of Western society with, in his later years, praise for Putin and the other masters of the new Russian oligarchy.

He died an intolerant, nationalistic, religious zealot. He died a great literary figure, a powerful critic of the day-to-day brutality of Stalinism but a compromised critic of Bolshevism and, as these things go, capitalism. His more unpleasant views came to define him. How and when his own intellectual “lawlessness” and “crimes” developed should be clear. His journey to “cannibalism” does not diminish the force of his early work, but certainly weakens his later pronouncements.

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