Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P

AFTER the fall of the Soviet Union--so thunderous, so unexpected--the bystanders wondered who had brought it about. Was it the main actors on the spot, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, pulling sometimes in tandem, more often at loggerheads? Was it Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who rallied the willpower of the West? Was it John Paul II, who inspired the men of iron in Poland?

A case could be made for all of them, but a case could also be made for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). Certainly Solzhenitsyn was the bravest: Gorbachev and Yeltsin were powerful insiders, Reagan and Thatcher possessed nuclear weapons, the pope led a great and ancient church. Solzhenitsyn had a few devoted friends, and his words. With his words, he shook the evil empire.

His literary ambition was to equal the Russian writers of the 19th century, those Easter Island monuments of history and psychology: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Belletrists say that his style is too relentless, too sarcastic to match theirs. But the style of his first work, and first masterpiece, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was as clear as water. This was a novella by a 43-year-old former officer, former political prisoner, and current high-school teacher, describing, from experience and observation, the life of an ordinary Russian serving a ten-year sentence in the gulag. In a brief thaw, the Russian literary journal Novy Mir published it; Nikita Khrushchev praised it. The last lines are some of the simplest and most powerful in all literature. "The end of an unclouded day," Ivan thinks. "Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days"--here it comes--"were for leap years."

Solzhenitsyn's greatness as a witness, and a judge, was that he remembered the leap years. He would be as thorough an anti-Communist as the Communists were jailers. And whereas Communist thoroughness rested on indifference to the lives they brutalized, his rested on a passionate love for them, and outrage over their fate.

The Gulag Archipelago, in three volumes, was a travel book, a Fodor's for the heart of darkness. He added the second word of its title to everyone's vocabulary. Before him, the modern rhetoric of despotism was all drawn from the Nazi experience: Auschwitz stood for all extermination, Gestapo meant any uniformed murderer (or even any cop you disliked). Hitler had lost, so it was safe to hold him up as a bad example. Solzhenitsyn showed the world--which in truth had been shown often enough before, though it had not paid attention--that Communism, which still swaggered, was equally bad; and he showed them by telling this story, and this, and this. Philip Rieff called the Gulag "the greatest book of remembrance, the greatest martyrology, ever written."

His expulsion from his homeland and his acceptance of the Nobel Prize were high drama. This phase of his career peaked with his 1978 commencement address at Harvard. Americans acknowledged a prophet in their midst, but were puzzled by his manner. And indeed he misjudged the latent strengths of his new temporary home, even as he saw, with outsider's eyes, its weaknesses. NATIONAL REVIEW was honored to publish him during his American sojourn. His return to Russia was bittersweet. The old evil had passed, but the road to freedom was long and rocky.

Rest in peace. Other evils will have their day--Islamism, the ChiComs, Putin the tinpot despot. We extend our sympathy to his sons, and our gratitude to God that we saw such a witness, and that his witness was not in vain.

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