Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (; 11 December
1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist,
historian, and short story writer.
He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union
and communism and helped to raise global awareness
of its Gulag forced labor camp system.
He was allowed to publish only one work in
the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich (1962), in the periodical Novy
Mir.
After this he had to publish in the West,
most notably Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914
(1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973).
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize
in Literature "for the ethical force with
which he has pursued the indispensable traditions
of Russian literature".
Solzhenitsyn was afraid to go to Stockholm
to receive his award for fear that he would
not be allowed to reenter.
He was eventually expelled from the Soviet
Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994
after the state's dissolution.
== Biography ==
=== Early years ===
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR
(now in Stavropol Krai, Russia).
His mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak),
was of Ukrainian descent.
Her father had risen from humble beginnings
to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a
large estate in the Kuban region in the northern
foothills of the Caucasus.
During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow
to study.
While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich
Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial
Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow
native of the Caucasus region.
The family background of his parents is vividly
brought to life in the opening chapters of
August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.In
1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr.
On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was
confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting
accident.
Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother
and his aunt in lowly circumstances.
His earliest years coincided with the Russian
Civil War.
By 1930 the family property had been turned
into a collective farm.
Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother
had fought for survival and that they had
to keep his father's background in the old
Imperial Army a secret.
His educated mother (who never remarried)
encouraged his literary and scientific learnings
and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith;
she died in 1944.As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn
began developing the characters and concepts
for a planned epic work on World War I and
the Russian Revolution.
This eventually led to the novel August 1914;
some of the chapters he wrote then still survive.
Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov
State University.
At the same time he took correspondence courses
from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature
and History, at this time heavily ideological
in scope.
As he himself makes clear, he did not question
the state ideology or the superiority of the
Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
=== World War II ===
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the
commander of a sound-ranging battery in the
Red Army, was involved in major action at
the front, and was twice decorated.
He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on
8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery
batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire
onto them, resulting in their destruction.A
series of writings published late in his life,
including the early uncompleted novel Love
the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience
and his growing doubts about the moral foundations
of the Soviet regime.While serving as an artillery
officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed
war crimes against local German civilians
by Soviet military personnel.
The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed
of their meager possessions and women and
girls were gang-raped to death.
A few years later, in the forced labor camp,
he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights"
about these incidents.
In this poem, which describes the gang-rape
of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers
mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person
narrator comments on the events with sarcasm
and refers to the responsibility of official
Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote,
"There is nothing that so assists the awakening
of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts
about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes.
After the difficult cycles of such ponderings
over many years, whenever I mentioned the
heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats,
the cruelty of our executioners, I remember
myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and
the forward march of my battery through East
Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So
were we any better?'"
=== Imprisonment ===
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia,
Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing
derogatory comments in private letters to
a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct
of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called
"Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish
rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master
of the house").
Also he had talks with the same friend about
the need of a new organisation against the
Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under
Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal
code, and of "founding a hostile organization"
under paragraph 11.
Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison
in Moscow, where he was interrogated.
On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany
had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out
in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights
illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory
in the Great Patriotic War as Russians call
the war with Germany.
From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn
remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window,
and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka,
and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons,
we too, former prisoners of war and former
front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens,
patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed
with beams of searchlights.
There was no rejoicing in our cells and no
hugs and no kisses for us.
That victory was not ours".
On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence
by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year
term in a labour camp.
This was the normal sentence for most crimes
under Article 58 at the time.The first part
of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several
different work camps; the "middle phase",
as he later referred to it, was spent in a
sharashka (i.e., a special scientific research
facility run by Ministry of State Security),
where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based
the character of Lev Rubin in his book The
First Circle, published in a self-censored
or "distorted" version in the West in 1968
(an English translation of the full version
was eventually published by Harper Perennial
in October 2009).
In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for
political prisoners.
During his imprisonment at the camp in the
town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked
as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman.
His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis
for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion
Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent
some of his time at Ekibastuz writing.
While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed.
His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn
was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik,
a village in Baidibek district of South Kazakhstan
region of Kazakhstan (Kok-terek rural district).
His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the
end of the year, he was close to death.
In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in
a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went
into remission.
His experiences there became the basis of
his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo
in the short story "The Right Hand".
It was during this decade of imprisonment
and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism
and developed the philosophical and religious
positions of his later life, gradually becoming
a philosophically-minded Eastern Orthodox
Christian as a result of his experience in
prison and the camps.
He repented for some of his actions as a Red
Army captain, and in prison compared himself
to the perpetrators of the Gulag: "I remember
myself in my captain's shoulder boards and
the forward march of my battery through East
Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So
were we any better?'"
His transformation is described at some length
in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago
("The Soul and Barbed Wire").
The narrative poem The Trail (written without
benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps
between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed
in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also
provide crucial material for understanding
Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual
odyssey during this period.
These "early" works, largely unknown in the
West, were published for the first time in
Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in
2006.
=== Marriages and children ===
On 7 April 1940, while at the university,
Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya.
They had just over a year of married life
before he went into the army, then to the
Gulag.
They divorced in 1952, a year before his release,
because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss
of work or residence permits.
After the end of his internal exile, they
remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time
in 1972.
The following year Solzhenitsyn married his
second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova,
a mathematician who had a son from a brief
prior marriage.
He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons:
Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan
(1973).Solzhenitsyn's adopted son Dmitri Turin
died on March 18, 1994, aged 32, at his home
in New York City due to a heart attack.
=== After prison ===
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956,
Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated.
Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn
was, while teaching at a secondary school
during the day, spending his nights secretly
engaged in writing.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote
that "during all the years until 1961, not
only was I convinced I should never see a
single line of mine in print in my lifetime,
but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my
close acquaintances to read anything I had
written because I feared this would become
known."In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr
Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of
the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript
of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
It was published in edited form in 1962, with
the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev,
who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo
hearing on whether to allow its publication,
and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of
you; there's even a Stalinist in me.
We must root out this evil."
The book quickly sold out and became an instant
hit.
In the 1960s, while he was publicly known
to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously
writing The Gulag Archipelago.
During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools
in the Soviet Union, as were three more short
works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short
story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963.
These would be the last of his works published
in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought
the Soviet system of prison labour to the
attention of the West.
It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet
Union as it did in the West—not only by
its striking realism and candor, but also
because it was the first major piece of Soviet
literature since the 1920s on a politically
charged theme, written by a non-party member,
indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous
speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication
had been officially permitted.
In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's
story was an almost unheard of instance of
free, unrestrained discussion of politics
through literature.
Most Soviet readers realized this, but after
Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964,
the time for such raw exposing works came
to an end.
=== Later years in the Soviet Union ===
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt,
with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel
Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet
Union.
This had to get the approval of the Union
of Writers.
Though some there appreciated it, the work
ultimately was denied publication unless it
was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements
and anti-Soviet insinuations.After Krushchev's
removal in 1964, the cultural climate again
became more repressive.
Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly
stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person,
and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his
papers, including the manuscript of The First
Circle.
Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly
and feverishly work upon the most well-known
of all his writings, The Gulag Archipelago.
The seizing of his novel manuscript first
made him desperate and frightened, but gradually
he realized that it had set him free from
the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially
acclaimed" writer, something which had come
close to second nature, but which was becoming
increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's
materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the
preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago
were turned into finished typescript in hiding
at his friends' homes in Estonia.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold
Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister
of Education in a Lubyanka Prison cell.
After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original
handwritten script was kept hidden from the
KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli
Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.In
1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union
of Writers.
In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
He could not receive the prize personally
in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid
he would not be let back into the Soviet Union.
Instead, it was suggested he should receive
the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish
embassy in Moscow.
The Swedish government refused to accept this
solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing
media coverage might upset the Soviet Union
and damage Swedish-Soviet relations.
Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at
the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled
from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958
to 1967.
It was a three-volume, seven part work on
the Soviet prison camp system (Solzhenitsyn
never had all seven parts of the work in front
of him at one time).
The book was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own
experience as well as the testimony of 256
former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research
into the history of the Russian penal system.
It discussed the system's origins from the
founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir
Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation
procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp
culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and
the practice of internal exile.
The Gulag Archipelago has sold over thirty
million copies in thirty-five languages.
According to fellow gulag historian Anne Applebaum,
The Gulag Archipelago's rich and varied authorial
voice, its unique weaving together of personal
testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical
investigation, and its unrelenting indictment
of communist ideology made The Gulag Archipelago
one of the most influential books of the 20th
century.Even though The Gulag Archipelago
was not published in the Soviet Union, it
was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled
Soviet press.
An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974
accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites"
and making "excuses for the crimes of the
Vlasovites and Bandera gangs."
According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was
"choking with pathological hatred for the
country where he was born and grew up, for
the socialist system, and for Soviet people."During
this period, he was sheltered by the cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably
for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually
forced into exile himself.In August 1971,
the KGB allegedly made an attempt to assassinate
Solzhenitsyn using an unknown biological agent
(most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based
delivery method.
The attempt left him seriously ill but was
unsuccessful.
=== Expulsion from the Soviet Union ===
In a discussion of its options in dealing
with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo
considered his arrest and imprisonment and
his expulsion to a socialist country.
Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and with
encouraging statements from Willy Brandt,
it was decided to deport the writer directly
to West Germany.
=== In the West ===
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested
and deported the next day from the Soviet
Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped
of his Soviet citizenship.
The KGB had found the manuscript for the first
part of The Gulag Archipelago and, less than
a week later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered
reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn.
U.S. military attaché William Odom managed
to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's
archive, including the author's membership
card for the Writers' Union and Second World
War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently
paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir
Invisible Allies (1995).In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn
lived in Heinrich Böll's house in Langenbroich.
He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before
Stanford University invited him to stay in
the United States to "facilitate your work,
and to accommodate you and your family."
He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover
Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before
moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976.
He was given an honorary Literary Degree from
Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday,
8 June 1978, he gave his Commencement Address,
condemning, among other things, the press,
the lack of spirituality and traditional values
as well as anthropocentrism in Western culture.Over
the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on
his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution
of 1917, The Red Wheel.
By 1992, four "knots" (parts) had been completed
and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the
United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become
fluent in spoken English.
He had, however, been reading English-language
literature since his teens, encouraged by
his mother.
More importantly, he resented the idea of
becoming a media star and of tempering his
ideas or ways of talking in order to suit
television.
Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers
of Communist aggression and the weakening
of the moral fiber of the West were generally
well received in Western conservative circles
(e.g. Ford administration staffers Richard
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's
behalf for him to speak directly to President
Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior
to and alongside the tougher foreign policy
pursued by US President Ronald Reagan.
At the same time, liberals and secularists
became increasingly critical of what they
perceived as his reactionary preference for
Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox
religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what
he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity
of the dominant pop culture of the modern
West, including television and much of popular
music: "...the human soul longs for things
higher, warmer, and purer than those offered
by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor
and by intolerable music."
Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of
the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that
he admired the political liberty which was
one of the enduring strengths of western democratic
societies.
In a major speech delivered to the International
Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on
14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the
West not to "lose sight of its own values,
its historically unique stability of civic
life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability
which grants independence and space to every
private citizen."In a series of writings,
speeches, and interviews after his return
to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn
spoke about his admiration for the local self-government
he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland
and New England.
He "praised 'the sensible and sure process
of grassroots democracy, in which the local
population solves most of its problems on
its own, not waiting for the decisions of
higher authorities.'"
Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking.
He called for Russia to "renounce all mad
fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the
peaceful long, long long period of recuperation,"
as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with
Janis Sapiets.
=== KGB operations against Solzhenitsyn ===
On 8 August 1971, Solzhenitsyn was poisoned
with what was later determined to be ricin,
but survived.On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov
approved a large-scale operation to discredit
Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications
with Soviet dissidents.
The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir
Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko
(heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates).
The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris,
Rome and other European cities participated
in the operation.
Among other active measures, at least three
StB agents became translators and secretaries
of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the
poem Prussian Nights), keeping KGB informed
regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.The
KGB sponsored a series of hostile books about
Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published
under the name of his first wife, Natalia
Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed
by Service", according to historian Christopher
Andrew.
Andropov also gave an order to create "an
atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between
Pauk and the people around him" by feeding
him rumors that everyone in his surrounding
was a KGB agent and deceiving him in all possible
ways.
Among other things, the writer constantly
received envelopes with photographs of car
accidents, brain surgery and other frightening
illustrations.
After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn
settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications
with others and surrounded his property with
a barbed wire fence.
His influence and moral authority for the
West diminished as he became increasingly
isolated and critical of Western individualism.
KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that
he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary
views and intransigent criticism of the US
way of life", so no further active measures
would be required.
=== Return to Russia ===
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored,
and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his
wife, Natalia, who had become a United States
citizen.
Their sons stayed behind in the United States
(later, his oldest son Yermolai returned to
Russia).
From then until his death, he lived with his
wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west
Moscow between the dachas once occupied by
Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin
Chernenko.
A staunch believer in traditional Russian
culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment
with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding
Russia, and called for the establishment of
a strong presidential republic balanced by
vigorous institutions of local self-government.
The latter would remain his major political
theme.
Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part
short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures"
or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years
in the West (The Grain Between the Millstones),
among many other writings.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a
television talk show program.
Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering
a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was
discontinued in 1995.
Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir
Putin who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical
view towards the Russian Revolution.All of
Solzhenitsyn's sons became US citizens.
One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor.
Elder son Yermolai works for the Moscow office
of McKinsey & Company, a leading management
consultancy firm, where he is now a senior
partner.
== Death ==
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow
on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89.
A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery,
Moscow, on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.
He was buried the same day in the monastery
in a spot he had chosen.
Russian and world leaders paid tribute to
Solzhenitsyn following his death.
== Legacy ==
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center supports
explorations into the life and writings of
the author and hosts the official English-language
site dedicated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The center strives to advance the legacy of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the English-speaking
world through the promotion of a better understanding
of his life, thought, and works.
== Views on history and politics ==
=== "Men have forgotten God" ===
Regarding atheism, Solzhenitsyn declared:
Over a half century ago, while I was still
a child, I recall hearing a number of old
people offer the following explanation for
the great disasters that had befallen Russia:
"Men have forgotten God; that's why all this
has happened."
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years
working on the history of our revolution;
in the process I have read hundreds of books,
collected hundreds of personal testimonies,
and have already contributed eight volumes
of my own toward the effort of clearing away
the rubble left by that upheaval.
But if I were asked today to formulate as
concisely as possible the main cause of the
ruinous revolution that swallowed up some
60 million of our people, I could not put
it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have
forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
=== On Russia and the Jews ===
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation
in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn called
for Russian Gentiles and Jews alike to take
moral responsibility for the "renegades" from
both communities who enthusiastically created
a Marxist–Leninist police state after the
October Revolution.
In a November 13, 1985, review of Solzhenitsyn's
novel August 1914 in The New York Times, Jewish
American historian Richard Pipes commented:
"Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism.
In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial.
It has nothing to do with blood.
He's certainly not a racist; the question
is fundamentally religious and cultural.
He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
who was a fervent Christian and patriot.
Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip
of the Russian extreme right's view of the
Revolution, which is that it was the doing
of the Jews".In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse,
Solzhenitsyn excoriated the Russian extreme
right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic
conspiracy theories.
Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote
that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too
honest, too courageous, too great a writer"
to be an anti-Semite.In 2001, however, Solzhenitsyn
published a two-volume work on the history
of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years
Together 2001, 2002).
A bestseller in Russia, the book triggered
renewed accusations of anti-Semitism.
Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together
and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in
the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed
to Solzhenitsyn, has led to inference that
he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages.
Solzhenitsyn himself claims that the essay
consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and
then manipulated, forty years ago.
However, according to the historian Semyon
Reznik, textological analyses have proven
Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
=== On post-Soviet Russia ===
In some of his later political writings, such
as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in
Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the
oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy,'
while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism.
He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism
(as opposed to extreme nationalism), urged
local self-government to a free Russia, and
expressed concerns for the fate of the 25
million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad"
of the former Soviet Union.
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn
expressed disappointment that the "conflation
of 'Soviet' and 'Russian', against which I
spoke so often in the 1970s, has not passed
away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries,
or in the former Soviet republics.
The elder political generation in communist
countries is not ready for repentance, while
the new generation is only too happy to voice
grievances and level accusations, with present-day
Moscow [as] a convenient target.
They behave as if they heroically liberated
themselves and lead a new life now, while
Moscow has remained communist.
Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy
phase will soon be over, that all the peoples
who have lived through communism will understand
that communism is to blame for the bitter
pages of their history."
=== 
Criticism of the West ===
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply
criticized the West.
In his commencement address at Harvard University
in 1978, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of
the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved
in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in
a genocide and in the suffering today imposed
on 30 million people there.
Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans
coming from there?"Solzhenitsyn criticized
the Allies for not opening a new front against
Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World
War II.
This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression
of the nations of Eastern Europe.
Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies
apparently cared little about how many died
in the East, as long as they could end the
war quickly and painlessly for themselves
in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard
University in 1978, he called the United States
spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism.
Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through
a translator, suffered from a "decline in
courage" and a "lack of manliness."
Few were willing to die for their ideals,
he said.
He condemned both the United States government
and American society for its "hasty" capitulation
in the Vietnam War.
He criticized the country's music as intolerable
and attacked its unfettered press, accusing
it of violations of privacy.
He said that the West erred in measuring other
civilizations by its own model.
While faulting Soviet society for denying
fair legal treatment of people, he also faulted
the West for being too legalistic: "A society
which is based on the letter of the law and
never reaches any higher is taking very scarce
advantage of the high level of human possibilities."
Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred
in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous
character and therefore never understood it".In
2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying
to bring Russia under its control; he claimed
this was visual because of its "ideological
support for the 'colour revolutions' and the
paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests
on Central Asia".
In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated
"This was especially painful in the case of
Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia
is defined by literally millions of family
ties among our peoples, relatives living on
different sides of the national border.
At one fell stroke, these families could be
torn apart by a new dividing line, the border
of a military bloc."
=== 
Criticism of Communism and pan-Slavism ===
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly
more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian
regime, in comparison to the Russian Empire
of the House of Romanov.
He asserted that Imperial Russia did not practice
any real censorship in the style of the Soviet
Glavlit, that political prisoners typically
were not forced into labor camps, and that
the number of political prisoners and exiles
was only one ten-thousandth of those in the
Soviet Union.
He noted that the Tsar's secret police, or
Okhrana, was only present in the three largest
cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian
Army.Shortly before his return to Russia,
Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Lucs-sur-Boulogne
to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the
Vendée Uprising.
During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's
Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Party during the
French Revolution.
He also compared the Vendean rebels with the
Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who
rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that
both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary
despotism.
However, he commented that, while the French
Reign of Terror ended with the toppling of
the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien
Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued
to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of
the 1950s.According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians
were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union.
He believed that all the traditional culture
of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed
in favor of an atheism and Marxist–Leninism.
Russian culture was even more repressed than
any other culture in the Soviet Union, since
the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings
among Russian Christians than among any other
ethnicity.
Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism
and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded
as a threat by the West but rather as allies.In
"Rebuilding Russia," an essay first published
in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda Solzhenitsyn
urged Russia to grant independence to all
the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were
sapping the Russian nation and he called for
the creation of a new Slavic state bringing
together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts
of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.According
to Daniel J. Mahoney, "...if one opens almost
any page of Solzhenitsyn's 1994 essay "The
Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth
Century" one finds Solzhenitsyn attacking
the cruelties and injustice of serfdom, faulting
Tsarist authorities for their blindness about
the need for political liberty in Russia,
and for their wasting of the nation's strength
in unnecessary and counterproductive foreign
adventures.
Moreover, he attacks Pan-Slavism, the idea
that Russia had a mission to unite Slavic
peoples and to come to the defense of the
Orthodox wherever they were under threat,
as a 'wretched idea'."
=== The Holodomor ===
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in
Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975, where he
mentioned how the system created by Bolsheviks
in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet
Union.
He described how this system "in time of peace,
artificially created a famine, causing 6 million
people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933."
Following this, he stated that "they died
on the very edge of Europe.
And Europe didn't even notice it.
The world didn't even notice it—6 million
people!" Solzhenitsyn opined on 2 April 2008
in Izvestia that the 1930s famine in the Ukraine
was no different from the Russian famine of
1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery
of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements.
He claimed that the "provocatory shriek about
a 'genocide' was started in the minds of Ukrainian
chauvinists decades later, who are also viciously
opposed to 'Moskals.'"
The writer cautioned that the genocidal claim
has its chances to be accepted by the West
due to the general western ignorance of Russian
and Ukrainian history.
== In popular media ==
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role
in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character
previously kept ignorant and subservient is
illegally educated, and is shown reading and
quoting his works.
=== TV documentaries on Solzhenitsyn ===
In October 1983, French literary journalist
Bernard Pivot made an hour-long TV interview
with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont,
U.S. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the
evolution of his language and style, his family
and his outlook on the future—and stated
his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime,
not just to see his books eventually printed
there.
Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed
on separate occasions by two British journalists,
Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.In 1998,
Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov shot TV
documentary Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues
with Solzhenitsyn) of four parts.
The documentary shot in Solzhenitsyn's home
shows his everyday life and covers his reflections
on Russian history and literature.On 12 December
2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K showed
the French television documentary L'Histoire
Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag [The Secret
History of the Goulag Archipel] made by Jean
Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated
into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya
"Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Secret History: The Gulag
Archipelago).
The documentary covers events related to creation
and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
== Published works and speeches ==
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Sources ==
Ericson, Edward E. Jr.; Klimoff, Alexis (2008).
The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction
to Solzhenitsyn.
ISI books.
ISBN 1-933859-57-1.
Ericson, Edward E, Jr; Mahoney, Daniel J,
eds. (2009).
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential
Writings, 1947–2005.
ISI Books.
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist?
A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary
Writings, Historical Interpretations, and
Political Ideas.
Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
ISBN 978-3-8382-0589-2
Moody, Christopher (1973).
Solzhenitsyn.
Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.
ISBN 0-05-002600-3.
Scammell, Michael (1986).
Solzhenitsyn: A Biography.
London: Paladin.
ISBN 0-586-08538-6.
Thomas, D.M. (1998).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A 
Century in his Life.
New York: St. Martin's Press.
ISBN 0-312-18036-5.
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
(in Russian) Official website
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
The Nobel Prize Internet Archive's page on
Solzhenitsyn
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
by the Stalin Society
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I (1978), A World
Split Apart (commencement address to the graduating
class), Harvard University: OrthodoxyToday.org,
retrieved 9 August 2014.
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
'I Am Not Afraid of Death' Der Spiegel 23
July 2007
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential
Writings, 1947–2005
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Internet Book
List
The Leaders and the Dreamers – Russia Profile
