His words helped destroy evil
Aug 13, 2008 at 21:33 | Yuriy Lukanovr the death of distinguished Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He died from a stroke at the age of 89 in Moscow. He was buried on Aug. 6 in Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.
In life, Soviet leaders persecuted Solzhenitsyn. He was exiled from the country and lived in the United States for many years. In death, Russian leaders came to say goodbye to him.
This is ironic because, with his work, he condemned the inhumane regime of the Soviet Union, whose collapse has been called “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century” by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
But times change.
Tomorrow in Russia Solzhenitsyn might be crucified as a traitor. I came to this conclusion after reading comments about Solzhenitsyn’s death. He was called a mudslinger, a twister of the Soviet reality and the like.
Similar things are happening on Ukrainian forums, except the motivation behind the Ukrainian comments is different. Some people here say that he was a chauvinist, KGB stool pigeon and Ukraine hater.
The life and work of Solzhenitsyn once again confirms that humans are made of many contradictions. First, he exposed the Soviet regime. Later, he made statements that were heavily criticized by anticommunists.
His book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” described the life of a prisoner in those dreadful northern camps. His description of a single person’s life summarizes the fates of millions of innocent people exiled by Stalin. The story was lucky enough to get published in the Soviet Union during a shortlived liberalization of the regime in 1960s.
The author received a Nobel Prize for it. But his main masterpiece is the multivolume Gulag Archipelago. He created a complete portrait of a country that mercilessly punished anyone it considered an enemy. The enemy status was given not just to the real opponents, but to masses of Soviet citizens.
They were tortured mercilessly – not just literally, but in the social sense as well. The social torture was confiscation of property. Villagers were forced into collective farms that were economically inefficient. There were artificial famines when people lost their minds for lack of food and ate other people – even their own children – but couldn’t survive anyway.
There were real literal tortures behind the walls of Soviet secret service headquarters where people were seated opposite a very bright light, and they felt as if their brain was being filled with liquid lead. Their fingers were crushed with doors. They were thrown naked into punishment cells with no room for sitting and lying, and in one centimeter deep cold water.
Because publishing activity was strictly censored at that time by the government, its opponents circulated their works through the underground samizdat. They were printed on a regular typewriter, or even copied by hand, and spread around in tens or hundreds of copies – at best.
Gulag Archipelago was printed by samizdat, and then ended up in the West. It was then reprinted and aired on Radio Liberty. A good few opponents of the Communist system were brought up on this book. It played a key role in formulating their view of the world.
For Ukrainians, what was important in this book was the description of fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). For years, it was portrayed by Soviet propaganda as a nationalistic gang serving Hitler. Even now some Ukrainians continue repeating the communist stereotypes that were forced on them about the army that fought during World War II for an independent Ukraine, against both the Soviets and the Germans.
The organized armed anticommunist resistance survived in Ukraine until 1950, much longer than in other republics. Some fighting even occurred at the beginning of 1960s. The Ukrainian partisans were sent straight to GULAG (abbreviation for Main Department for Prison Camps) from forests where they had been caught.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that the imprisoned independence fighters were horrified by the spirit of slavery that reigned in camps. He said Ukrainians inspired and organized a series of revolts in camps. His positive description of the Ukrainian rebels was an inconceivable sin from the point of view of Soviet ideologists.
After his return to the USSR just before its collapse, Solzhenitsyn stopped being a consistent critic of the Soviet system and suddenly started speaking against the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
Shortly before the Ukrainian proclamation of independence on August 24, 1991, Solzhenitsyn came to Kyiv to try and persuade the citizens that the proindependence movement was a communist trick.
He met with activists of the nationalistic Rukh (Movement) organization that pushed for independence. Among them were some political prisoners who spent even more time in Soviet camps than the author of the Gulag Archipelago.
Later, one of these prisoners who spent 26 years in camps, Levko Lukianenko, said Solzhenitsyn had been recruited by the secret services, and one of his reports foiled a rebellion planned by Ukrainian inmates.
A few months ago, Solzhenitsyn made a statement which said that the 1932-33 famine was not an act of genocide against Ukrainians. He was then accused of chauvinism. It’s interesting that earlier, in his Gulag Archipelago, he truthfully described many horrors of that famine.
Maybe one day, in another world, all our truthful and faulty deeds will be put on scales and one of the sides will outbalance the other. I think that the Gulag Archipelago will outweigh everything else that was done by Solzhenitsyn. Because this very book helped tear down the evil that its author later tried to save. It helped tear down the USSR.
Yuriy Lukanov is a freelance journalist and writer. He can be reached at lukanov@ukr.net.