The Soul That Barbed Wire Was No Match for

An interesting coincidence: last Sunday the world got the news of the death of Alexander Isaievich Solzhenitsyn at the age of 89.

When the news came about Solzhenitsyn, I was roughly three-fourths of the way through a summer re-read of Tolstoy's War & Peace.

I'd just reached the chapters where Napoleon's army has entered Moscow and the city is burning.

I have a message for all of my friends back in Russia who, on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's death this week, would deride his memory, downplay his greatness, dismiss him as an eccentric and a scold, or in the worst case, vilify him as a traitor to his country.

I love you all. And you can all shove it up your shuba.

The title of this posting is borrowed from Solzhenitsyn's most significant work, the massive "experiment in literary investigation" which was published in 1973 as The Gulag Archipelago. The late Kenneth Tynan called it "The most devastating attack on a political system to be leveled in modern times." Gulag, published in English in three volumes, traced in minute detail the evolution of the Soviet Union's massive chain of forced labor camps and bore witness to the fates of the millions who were imprisoned in them. Solzhenitsyn himself was what Russians call a "zek," an alumnus of the Gulag Archipelago who spent eight years in the Siberian labor camps, was released, shortly thereafter survived cancer, and went on to generate a body of literary work that would be instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago was the centerpiece of that body of work.

Although Solzhenitsyn only dabbled in theater, among his works was a play entitled Candle In The Wind. When I heard that Elton John had borrowed that title for a song about Marilyn Monroe, I was at first utterly disgusted at such a vulgar gesture. Solzhenitsyn's play was concerned with much higher and more serious business than the fate of a blonde movie idol. But the more I thought about it, the more I was inclined to just let it go. I can't say to what extent Marilyn Monroe could be described as a "candle in the wind." Some say she was tougher than she appeared. But I do know this: "candle in the wind" was an appelation that could never be applied to Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a tower of granite in the wind.

He drove Leonid Brezhnev and the gerontocracy who ran the Kremlin from 1964 to 1985 absolutely bonkers. For that alone we should be grateful. Ultimately they didn't know what to do with him. They couldn't kill him or throw him back in prison; once he had won the Nobel Prize in 1970, his world fame was too great for that to be an option. Contrary to what some may think, the Soviets were concerned about world opinion, as would be anyone whose political system was based on a revolutionary, if crack-brained, idea that their ideology told them they were to spread to the world. He didn't dare go to Sweden in 1970 to collect his prize; he knew that the ancient thugs running the show in Moscow wouldn't let him come home if he did. He played a game of cat-and-mouse with them, and he was much smarter than they were.

But by 1973 the jig was up. Solzhenitsyn had intended to postpone publication of his enormous broadside against the Soviet security organs and their "archipelago" of prison camps spread over Russia's far east until the right moment. But he learned that the KGB had interrogated his typist and gotten hold of a copy of the manuscript. He had already smuggled copies of it on microfilm out of the USSR, and he gave the green light for it to be published, in Russian, in West Berlin.

Almost immediately he was picked up by the KGB, bundled into an airplane and exiled. His Soviet citizenship was revoked. He lived in Switzerland for a time, was the guest of German novelist Heinrich Boell for a short while, and then ultimately came to the United States and settled in Cavendish, Vermont. There he stayed in relative solitude for most of the next 20 years, emerging now and then to condemn both the totalitarian Soviet Union and what he saw as its probable victim, the morally spineless west, and got on with what he regarded to be his mission in life: chronicling the entire Soviet catastrophe.

That's the historical context, which everyone knows. But blogs are about personal context, and this is mine.

1973, the year in which the Russian-language edition of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Berlin, was also the year I graduated from high school. It was the year I turned 18. For most of us, our teen years are the time of life when we are most inclined toward hero-worship. In our teens we're defining the sort of people we want ultimately to be, and we put our best models for that purpose on pedestals.

Solzhenitsyn was one of my heroes. In my pantheon of heroes he was right up there with Beethoven and Lord Byron.

I came of age during the cold war, and in my own eyes, no more fierce anti-communist existed in the world than myself. Also, I wanted to be a writer. One day when I was about 17, I was roaming the stacks in the old Chula Vista Public Library when I came across a title that somehow rang a bell: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by someone named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had never read a word of his, but somewhere, somehow, even at that tender age, I had heard of this book. No surprise there, as I would learn later. The publication of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, in a single issue of the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir, had been hailed as a major event in the Soviet Union. Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev had personally authorized the publication of this searing novella about one day in the life of a prisoner in one of Stalin's forced-labor camps. Kruschchev had several years earlier embarked on a campaign of attacking the memory of the murderous Stalin, and the publication of Solzhenitsyn's first book was part of that campaign. No doubt I'd seen a reference to it in a newspaper somewhere.

In any case, I took it home and read it. As a dedicated anti-communist I was outraged by the narrative, and as a wannabee writer I was stunned by the tour-de-force of it.

As only a high-school senior can, I had a new hero.

Ironic though it may sound to some, I was both an anti-communist and a Russophile. As much as I hated the Soviet regime and everything it stood for, I had been fascinated by Russia and everything Russian since my early teens. When I was in the eighth grade I got some Russian-language phonograph records out of my school library and decided I was going to teach myself Russian. I didn't get very far, but it stood me in good stead a few years later when I enrolled in a Russian-language class in college and didn't have to bother learning the cyrillic alphabet; I already knew it. I read War & Peace (an abridged version) at age 13 and wrote a book report about it for my reading class. In the ninth grade, my friend Mark and I collaborated on a comprehensive report for our social studies class about Russia. We each addressed a series of topics and took turns making our presentations to the class. I remember one of my topics was the Soviet space program, which was a toughie because everything the Russians did in those days, they kept it a secret, and therefore information about the Soviet space program was hard to come by, but I did my best.

So I was a russophile, a commie-hater, and now a fan of Solzhenitsyn. In the months that followed I read everything by Solzhenitsyn I could get my hands on. Cancer Ward. The First Circle. The recently-published August, 1914, the first volume of his huge cycle of novels called The Red Wheel which would trace the history of the Soviet experience through the decades. A new biography of Solzhenitsyn appeared in the library. I greedily snatched and devoured it.

Most of my heroes were dead. This one was still alive and kicking, somewhere in Russia. With all the zeal of a 17-year-old fan, I wrote to Harper & Row, his American publishers, and asked if they had an address where I could send him fan mail. They answered in the negative of course; all of their dealings with him were in the third person.

It goes without saying that I kept an eye on the newspapers for anything having to do with my guy. When, early in 1974, I saw a headline in the old San Diego Union that read, "New Solzhenitsyn Book Accuses Secret Police," I grabbed it right away and read every word. Something big was going on.

Indeed. Just a few weeks later another headline hit the front page of the Union: "Soviet Exiles Solzhenitsyn To West, Ends Citizenship."

I carried that newspaper clipping in my wallet for years.

A few days later a wrenching photograph appeared in the paper, a truly great moment in photojournalism. Solzhenitsyn, eyes lowered in sorrow, faced the cameras, giving a press conference in Zurich. Immediately behind him, with a wrenching look of sadness and pity on his face, was his fellow Nobel Prize laureate and temporary host, German novelist Heinrich Boell, whose own masterpiece, Group Portrait With Lady, I had just recently read. I clipped that, too.

The Kremlin thought it had solved the problem of Solzhenitsyn by removing him and declaring him what George Orwell called an "un-person." Had the KGB assassinated him, the anti-communist cause would have had a martyr and Brezhnev knew it. So they flicked him away as you would a troublesome flea, hoping that he would sink into obscurity somewhere in the west and never be heard of again.

And oh, what an embarrassment he was to my liberal friends, accustomed as they were to glossing over or politely ignoring any criticism of the Soviet Union or of Communism in general. Since the 1950s, anti-communism had been perceived as a "Republican" thing, never mind that one of the most dedicated cold warriors of all time was JFK. To criticize Communism, liberals reflexively feared, would make one sound too much like a Republican. And besides, there was that thing going on in Vietnam. You wouldn't hear a Democrat mention the USSR unless it was in the context of a visit by the Bolshoi Ballet to the U.S. or of Van Cliburn to Moscow. Bring up Stalin and they'd change the subject, or remind you that the U.S. had once embraced him as an ally against Hitler.

But Solzhensitsyn was too big an elephant in the living room even for them to ignore. My former high school civics teacher, Mr. McLean, was a genuine '70s lefty, from the big sideburns to the vote for McGovern in '72. But I went back to visit my old high school that spring, and I showed that newspaper clipping about Solzhenitsyn's exile from Russia to Mr. McLean.

"We may differ on this or that," I said, "but don't you think this is revolting?"

"I think that's revolting," he said candidly.

Gradually, over the years, many of Mr. McLean's fellow lefties on both sides of the Atlantic would ruefully admit that Solzhenitsyn's case against the Soviets was too big to brush away, and sympathy for Communism, particularly in Europe, largely evaporated.

The news media rushed in. Solzhenitsyn gave a one-hour interview through an interpreter which was broadcast all over the non-Communist world. In the spring of 1974 my family formed a circle around the television set to watch it. There was my hero, on camera, talking to the world. I was thrilled. "What a charming man!" my older sister declared when it was over.

A budding poet, I sat down and wrote some verses. A Song For Solzhenitsyn. Lost now, thank God.

Later that spring, word came out that The Gulag Archipelago was soon to be published in English. With all the zeal of an 18 year-old, I called the book department at Walker Scott (no Amazon.com in those days, no Barnes & Noble either) and, unnecessarily, reserved a copy. On June 20, 1974 I drove out to Lemon Grove in my mother's old Chevy and picked up my copy of Gulag. I still have it -- a genuine first edition, so marked. 660 pages in all, in 1974 it cost $12.50 brand-new.

I took it home and plunged into it. I must say it certainly wasn't entertaining reading; the documentation was exhaustive, the case histories told in detail. Entertaining no, but harrowing. I stayed with it all the way through to the end and emerged from the experience an even more fiercely-convinced enemy of Communism than I was when I began.

By the following year Solzhenitsyn had taken up residence in Cavendish, Vermont, 147 miles from St. Albans, where I was born. Word was that he chose Vermont as a place to live because its plenitude of birch trees reminded him of home. (Russians consider the birch tree to be their national symbol.)

As the world knows, the curmudgeonly Solzhenitsyn had no interest in acclimating to life in America. He kept to himself, ventured out only now and then to give a speech like the notorious barn-burner he delivered at Harvard's commencement ceremonies in 1978, declined to become an American citizen, refused even to learn English. Clearly, he didn't see himself as an expatriate, but as a sort of Russian government-in-exile. And of course he became something of an embarrassment to his host government and to western liberals in general, because it turned out that he had no more particular use for bourgeois democracy than he had for Marx and Lenin. Solzhenitsyn saw the west as weak, decadent, morally flabby and no doubt destined to be overrun by the barbarous forces from east of the Iron Curtain if someone didn't do something about it. As far as he was concerned, someone was going to do something about it. He would. If the America of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter didn’t have the balls to stand up to the Soviets, Solzhenitsyn did. “How many divisions has the pope?” Stalin famously joked. Like the pope, Solzhenitsyn commanded no divisions. But he didn’t need them to fight his particular enemy. Solzhenitsyn wasn’t fighting the USSR’s military might. He was fighting the gigantic network of lies, lies and more lies that the entire communist edifice was built on.

Someone once asked Solzhenitsyn what he regarded as the world’s greatest evil. “Falsehood!” he snapped. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are the two political figures most often associated with the west’s victory in the cold war. But Solzhenitsyn was also a key player in that his relentless exposure of Soviet lies, oppression and injustice did much to undermine the moral authority of communism throughout Europe. Eurocommunism, a viable political movement in the 1970s and early ‘80s, gradually dissolved, while in eastern Europe, and even in Russia, democracy movements became bolder and louder until the velvet revolutions of 1989 and the spectacular fall of the Berlin Wall. Then finally the collapse of the USSR itself in 1991 brought about the final triumph of what an obscure mathematics teacher in a little town called Ryazan, 100 miles or so southeast of Moscow, had initiated when Novy Mir published a novella in 1962 based on his own prison experiences.

Like all oversized personalities, he was difficult. He had an almost messianic sense of mission (having applied the word “messianic” to Solzhenitsyn, one almost can’t help but smile hearing it applied to Barack Obama) and was focused on it to the exclusion of almost all else. He alienated friends, took people for granted, and was frequently downright rude. His old friend Lev Kopelev, the model for the character Lev Rubin in The First Circle, broke with him in 1985. He had simply had enough of his old friend’s prickly personality.

In 1990 Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev moved to have Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship restored. When I saw the announcement on the front page of the Washington Post, I went back into my notebooks and scrapbooks and dug up that other newspaper clipping, the one I had been saving for 16 years, announcing his 1974 exile from the Soviet Union. I scotch-taped the two newspaper clippings next to each other in my journal, the old one in black-and-white, the new one in color, and wrote underneath, “Change is glacial, but change is change.” (Again, I think of Obama and how he’s bandying about the word “change,” and I want to laugh.)

Solzhenitsyn had a contrarian streak in him. He was a Russian nationalist, some say even a monarchist. Russian liberals were disappointed by his approval of Vladimir Putin’s hamfisted rule. I have no doubt that, if Solzhenitsyn had ever stumbled upon H.G. Wells’ time machine, he would have climbed in, set the ol’ Wayback for 1812, and climbed out to go and fight for Tsar Alexander I against Napoleon.

“You were silly like us; your gift survived it all,” W.H. Auden wrote on the passing of William Butler Yeats. Solzhenitsyn, too, could be silly, and in a much more outsized way than “us.” Because he wasn’t “us.” No more than Tolstoy, Pushkin or Beethoven were. His life, personality, times and achievement were as big as theirs. He was called by his contemporaries in the 1960s, “our classic.” And he was the only one. He may have been the last one.