An Introduction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn
PART 2: The Gulag
Solzhenitsyn reports that in some camps the men and women were isolated—the Soviets at least had the sense to keep them apart, realizing what would happen if they were together—more sense than our own military has these days. The camp was called Kengir:
Later in Kengir they increased the height of the dividing wall to fifteen feet [between the men’s camp and the women’s camp], and stretched barbed wire, too, along the top. [Obviously the men and women were anxious to get at each other—they kept building the wall higher, finally adding barbed wire!] And then they added a high-voltage wire as well. (How strong that cursed Cupid is!) And in addition to everything else they put watchtowers at both ends as well. This Kengir wall had its own special destiny in the history of the Archipelago (see Part V, Chap.12).
Of the thousands of camps, it was the one camp where there was a rebellion. The prisoners overthrew the guards and camp leaders and took control. For forty days they lived as free human beings. The stories that came out of there were of forty days of graciousness, civility, joy and love. They had their own space and lived freely in it. But it ended when the Soviets heard; they sent in armed forces and killed every last one of them. We can not begin to grasp what it means to have a measure of freedom until we have lived in such circumstances; or, how such freedom can be hated by those totalitarian forces that wish to keep control over everything.
Notes were thrown over the fence, or else left at the factory in prearranged hiding places. The addresses on the notes were coded, so the jailer, if he found them, couldn’t work out who was writing whom.
Galya Venediktova recalls that sometimes people even made one another’s acquaintance blindly, corresponded without seeing each other, and said farewell to one another blindly too, without seeing each other. (Anyone who has ever conducted such a correspondence knows both its desperate sweetness and its hopelessness and blindness.) In that very same Kengir, Lithuanian women were married to Lithuanian men whom they had never seen or met; and the Lithuanian Roman Catholic priest (also, of course, a prisoner in the standard pea jacket) would provide written documentation that so-and-so and so-and-so had been joined for eternity in holy matrimony in the eyes of God. In this marriage with an unknown prisoner on the other side of a wall—and for Roman Catholic women such a marriage was irreversible and sacred—I hear a choir of angels. It is like the unselfish, pure contemplation of the heavenly bodies. It is too lofty for this age of self-interested calculation and hopping-up-and-down jazz.
Magnificent. What he saw in the camps, what he learned through his suffering, made a believer out of him. Let me pause here to make an obvious point: If 20th century literary fashion taught us anything, it was simply that you go along with whatever winds happen to be blowing in your time. Simply be blown by the literary winds and take whatever ideas are out there. Because of this, almost all of the so-called major writers were atheists. What they discuss in their lives is atheism, the meaninglessness of life, how horrible life is, how awful life is, how stupid it is to be alive, how boring the whole process is, how we have no purpose but to endure here and shuffle along, waiting for death to release us into absolute meaninglessness where at least we won’t know it’s meaninglessness anymore since we’ll all just flop into the grave and be blessed with darkness, obscurity, and emptiness for ever and ever.
And these people are honored. They win prizes. Their books win awards. It’s very, very fashionable. Some of them became literary superstars to the point that you could, at the same time Solzhenitsyn was serving his time in the Gulag, have gone to Paris, walked along the St. Germain du Pres, gone to one of the bistros and found, for example, Jean Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist, sitting outside sipping yet another coffee, with his little beret on, spending a pleasant day in the Parisian sunset. Perhaps he was ordering another baguette and putting rich butter on it. Maybe he had a nice glass of Beaujolet. Perhaps a little brie for his bread. And then another glass of Beaujolet. And then a cognac. The whole time, young university women from America flocked to him, threw themselves at his feet and said, “Speak, O wise one!” And he would say “Ah, life is meaningless, it is nothing...It is empty, it is boring...there is no life, there is only death! Thus, in this life, Communism is the ideal.” And this man was considered a serious intellectual, one of the great philosophical thinkers of our age, as he rolled in money, comfort, and acclaim. He became stuffed with pride. I quote Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag: “Pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig.”
All these fine literary men became full of themselves. Their message? Life is meaningless. Meanwhile, in the Gulag, crawling around in conditions that are unimaginable, suffering things that few human beings have ever had to go through, facing endless visions of torment, suffering, and death, a great writer discovered the truth of God’s Word. Nor should we be surprised that he came to the point where he could understand the importance of suffering and the vision of the crucifix. It made clear that the worst punishment of our age is comfort.
Those literary figures, sitting in bars in New York City, or fancy restaurants in Paris, or shuffling about the hills of San Francisco writing their beat poetry, were being punished immeasurably. Every award they won, every time they were acclaimed as one of the great thinkers of the time, or started a revolution in poetic verse—they were being punished. The great gift that God gave to literature and to a literary man was to have him arrested, sentenced and shoved off to the Gulag for nearly a decade. God’s gifts are not the gifts the world seeks. But God, in His infinite wisdom, knows better than we do. He even knows better than those who give out literary awards.
Solzhenitsyn was in the camps from 1945 to 1953 and determined that someone had to tell the truth about what was happening in Russia. He decided that it was his mission, as a writer, for the rest of his days, simply to write the truth: what had happened, what he had seen, what he knew. And that’s what he did.
He was sent into exile as soon as he was released from the camps. They wouldn’t release them right back into society. He was lucky enough simply to get out—millions and millions did not. Solzhenitsyn concurs with the estimates of emigre Professor of Statistics Kurganov that between 1917 and 1959, the iron fist repression within the Soviet Union cost 66,000,000 lives. The exact number, of course, can never be known.
Those who punished them are still spreading their errors throughout the world. Those errors are still being spread. And these 100 to 110 million dead in Russia may just be an example for us—or a warning that the rest of the world, in the billions, has not looked at or understood yet.
In any case, Solzhenitsyn was sent into exile since he could not be trusted. He went to teach mathematics in the middle of nowhere USSR in a tiny village. He again recalled this event as Providential because it meant no one was paying attention to him. And as he lived there, he began writing. He began putting it down. They claim—and I’ve seen it—that his handwriting is microscopic. It is perhaps the smallest handwriting ever on earth. He couldn’t afford paper and he wanted to keep it so small that people couldn’t read it—in case they came across it, they wouldn’t know what it was. He could not keep the manuscripts together; he would write a little bit and then hide it, or bury it in the back yard, or give some to friends. He began writing fiction, novels about the camps and what he had seen there.
But then he was struck with stomach cancer. He went to a cancer institute where he was told there was not much that could be done. They gave him what little treatment they could. He had a tumor in his stomach the size of a baby’s head. It was assumed he was a dead man. He describes returning to his village, sinking to his knees and saying to God, “If you allow me to live, I will write a long nonfiction work that tells all the truth about those camps and Mother Russia.” This was how The Gulag was conceived. The tumor shrank, went away, and never came back.
He began to work on his massive book, The Gulag Archipelago. It is made of seven volumes in three huge books. He began digging through all his memories, what he had seen, whom he had spoken to, etc.
He finished his years in exile and was allowed to return to Moscow. He was still working as a mathematician. He made friends—again, trusting a few people, but not, sadly, his own wife, who one day, at a critical moment, betrayed him to the KGB. It shattered the marriage; the marriage never recovered.
Some of his manuscripts began circulating underground. These were handwritten copies. It’s very interesting because it’s one of the first times I can think of since Scripture itself was passed along in a similar fashion. People could not believe that he was actually telling the story. They knew if those in power got wind of it, he was a dead man. But he didn’t care.
Then, in the 1960’s, came the “Khrushchev Thaw.” After Khrushchev took over, he decided that some little tiny squeak of truth had to come out. He began admitting, in small ways, that maybe Stalin over-reacted. At that moment, he sent the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the most popular literary magazine in the Soviet Union. What happened, as a result, was that he wound up being published. One edition of the magazine was dedicated to this book. It sold out instantly. It hit the Soviet Union like a bombshell. Everyone was talking about it. No one could believe it had been published.
And, at that moment, he began pulling out other work. Next came a novel called The First Circle about the time he spent in the special camp for mathematicians, physicists, chemists and others the Party needed for their brains. They were thus given a little special treatment so that they could live in a little more comfort so their brains wouldn’t die and be useless. The title, of course, comes from Dante. When Dante began to descend into the Inferno, the first circle was where he put all the great classical writers and figures. He couldn’t bear to put them in hell although he knew they had to be in hell; thus, the first circle is essentially the Elysian Fields where they all dwell together in a rather nice castle, having a perpetual picnic in Hell. Solzhenitsyn took the phrase “The First Circle” because those who were lucky enough to be scientists or mathematicians lived as if they were picnicking in Hell. It’s a very great novel and I recommend it to you.
He also wrote a novel called Cancer Ward. This is obviously about his time dealing with cancer. It’s in fiction form, about people he met while he was being treated for cancer, and what went on in those hospitals, trying to treat cancer while living in a totalitarian state—not an easy thing to do. But, of course, the cancer itself becomes a metaphor for Communism: It is deadly, growing, and cannot be stopped. It is spreading everywhere, and just as cancer kills the body, Communism was killing Russia. It’s a powerful novel and a great book.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the only one of his works to be published in Russia during those years, went out to the West. It was published and acclaimed instantly as one of the greatest works of all time, one of the masterpieces of Russian literature. He was proclaimed an heir to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the other great Russian writers. He had the other works smuggled out as well since he couldn’t simply box and ship them.
There are two magnificent autobiographical books by Solzhenitsyn, but not autobiographies as most writers write them. They are about what it took to get his books published, and the impossibility of writing in that State. The first volume is called The Oak and the Calf, named after an old Russian proverb where the calf keeps butting the oak, but the oak never moves. The allegory is obviously Solzhenitsyn butting the Russian State. Then, at a later date, came Invisible Allies, about those who helped him with the typing, who protected and smuggled the manuscripts out to the West, etc.
It became clear in the West, after they were published, that this man was a literary genius. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Of course, at that point, the Communist authorities allowed him to go to Sweden for the prize. In fact, they encouraged him. And he knew that as soon as he set foot outside his country, he would never be allowed back in. They wanted to be done with him. He refused to go and accept the prize. In an open letter to the Nobel Committee, he said: “Thank you for the honor, but if I come to collect it, I will be in exile the rest of my days. My own country would not allow me to return.” It wasn’t until many years later that he actually collected the prize he won in 1970.
The big work, The Gulag Archipelago, was completed although, as he said, at no time was the entire manuscript on his desk as a unified whole. He’d write a bit of it, give it to a friend, hide some, etc. It is a massive, long, overpowering work. I seriously call it, “The Great Work of the 20th Century.” If the Greeks had Homer, the Romans had Vergil, the Middle Ages had Dante, and the Renaissance had Shakespeare, we had Solzhenitsyn and his great work, The Gulag Archipelago.
It is a work about everything which defined the 20th century: totalitarianism, brutality, murder, horror, the triumph of the human spirit, and the fact that God watches over all of it. It is an extraordinary piece of work. It is a history, an autobiography, a collection of true short stories, a work of philosophy, and more. I will later quote some of his philosophical thinking, which, unlike Sartre, isn’t simply nonsense. It is grounded in something real.
There had been rumors all over that this book existed. The KGB wanted to find it. But how do you locate a book that you can’t prove even exists? A book that, when you say to the author, “We know you’ve writing a book; give us a copy,” you receive the reply, “What book?” He infuriated them. They tried to track it down. They made his life impossible.
At this point, he married a woman who helped him through all of this after his first wife turned him over to the KGB. I won’t comment on this for I don’t know enough. It’s in God’s hands.
They began to make his life so impossible that he had nowhere to live. No one would give him a place to live. Eventually, Mstislav Rostropovich, the great Russian cellist, and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, the leading soprano in the Bolshoi Opera, invited him to live with them in a small house they had on their property. It was an incredible act of courage. The day after, all over Rostropovich’s tours were cancelled. (I was supposed to hear him at Indiana University that year, but did not as his tour was canceled as a result of his sheltering Solzhenitsyn.) They would only allow him to occasionally play in the provinces of Russia. He was the greatest cellist in the world.
His wife went the night after to the Bolshoi Opera to sing Madama Butterfly. She learned that she would be singing Suzuki, the maid, instead. She turned around, walked out, and never set foot in the Bolshoi Opera again. The next day, in the record stores, on every recording she had ever made in her career her name had been blacked out. She became a non-person, a non-singer. But it didn’t stop them; they kept Solzhenitsyn with them. Finally, he felt so guilty for what he had done to their careers that he left of his own accord. They were still not allowed to perform afterward.
There may not be much good to say about the Kennedys, but here’s a good Kennedy story: Teddy Kennedy and his (then) wife Joan–whom I believe was dumped and has since died, God rest her soul—went to Moscow and were guests of Brezhnev. There was a big State dinner, and Brezhnev was hitting the vodka heavily. He just so happened to be seated next to the lovely Mrs. Kennedy and said: “Lovely lady, you have charmed me so. This last night in my country, if there is anything you want, ask it and it is yours.” Probably expecting that she would ask for a car or a mink coat or two pounds of caviar to take home, she turned to him and said, “Let Rostropovich go.” The next day he signed the order and Rostropovich was free to tour again. Shortly thereafter he and Vishnevskaya left the country. There are amazing stories from these years.
In any case, the KGB kept pursuing this book that may or may not exist according to them. Finally they brought in an elderly woman, a friend of Solzhenitsyn’s who had a fragment of the book buried in her backyard. They did not allow her to sleep for three nights. They tortured her. At the end of these three days of sleeplessness and torture, she said: “Yes, the book exists. Yes, I can prove it. Some of the manuscript is buried in my own yard.” The KGB went, dug it up, took it to the authorities, who read it and said it was worse than expected. The woman went home and hanged herself, believing she had betrayed not merely a friend but all the souls who had died in the Gulag. Again, God will judge.
Word came to Solzhenitsyn that the KGB had the manuscript. He packed a little bag, said goodbye to his wife and family, and prepared to be sent to prison where he would be killed. But before he went, he made a phone call to Paris and said, “Let the presses roll.” The whole manuscript was in the West; he had not allowed it to be printed until then out of fear for repercussions for other people mentioned in the book.
I remember the day. It was on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Nobody knew this book existed. He had already won the Nobel Prize. This is 1974. Suddenly it was revealed that Solzhenitsyn had written a massive exposé of the Soviet slave labor camps. It was incredible. Excerpts appeared on the front page of every newspaper.
Then, indeed, he instantaneously disappeared. The authorities got him but did the smartest thing they could have done: they put him on a plane and sent him to the West. He landed first in Germany, went to Switzerland, traveled around a bit, and finally came to rest in Vermont, where he would live for 20 years.
When he arrived in Vermont, he went to the first town meeting that took place once he bought his estate—which he surrounded with brick and barbed wire. At the town meeting he said, “I wish I could be a good neighbor; unfortunately, that is not possible. I have come to your community and I am glad to be among you, but I am still not free. The KGB is threatening me, my wife, and my children. I have to live behind brick and barbed wire for their safety and for my own. I hope to finish all my writing while I’m here and therefore I cannot walk among you. Please know, however, that I think of you and am very happy to be here with you.” They applauded him, cheered him, and for the next 20 years, covered his tracks. If you went up there and tried to find where he was, they would send you on a wild goose chase. This was important because there were, in essence, literary pilgrimages being made. Every one wanted to see him, meet him, talk with him, etc.
He worked. From sun-up to sun-down. He had a small chapel built-in at his home. An Orthodox priest regularly came to the house to offer the Liturgy. He listened to a little music. And he worked. That was his life. Period.
He wrote a massive four-novel sequence about the Russian Revolution called The Red Wheel. Only the first two parts have been translated into English; the rest is available in Russian. The literary establishment dumped on it although it is a great book. Why was it so roundly critiqued by the establishment?
Solzhenitsyn became as big a burr under the saddle of the West as he had been to the Communists. In 1978 he was invited by Harvard to give the Commencement Address. He began by saying, “Harvard’s motto is Veritas, truth. Were I in my own country there are many hard truths I would have to utter to them, but since I am here and have been living among you for four years now, I have a few truths to tell you about the West.”
He proceeded to savage liberal democracy, materialism, and, most particularly, the media. The next morning he became a non-person in the West. Every editorial page in the country dumped all over him, attacked him, and, from that point on, stopped covering him. He was never invited to the White House by any American president during his 20 years here. It would have “looked bad,” after all.
As he said, he finished his major life’s work, Communism supposedly “fell,” they began publishing more of his works in Russia, and in 1994 he returned there. He made a very famous whistle-stop tour. He came in from the West and took a train the whole way across, stopping at all the little villages.
But what happened, of course, was that the ideas, the errors, of Communism did not fall. They were not stopped. It was simply that those materialists who simply had no material finally opened up to the materialists who had lots of material. What came pouring in, in the words of Solzhenitsyn himself, was “the raw sewage of Western culture.” In came McDonalds, Coca-Cola, modern music, Hollywood movies, and, perhaps most interestingly, Stephen King novels. At the time when the Russian people could have freely read their greatest writer, they started reading Stephen King. The bookstores themselves started to be closed down and replaced by supermarkets that traded only in cash. Don’t ever be fooled: Russia has not been converted.
Solzhenitsyn didn’t say much after he returned to Russia. He did have a television show briefly, but nobody watched it; they preferred American sitcoms. In an interview in 2000, much of what he said was very frightening. At the time, he claimed Russia was worse off then it was ten years earlier and that lies dominated the country:
Our decline has lasted through 70 years under the Communists and 10 years after that. We must not permit the death of Russia as a nation. A rebirth is always far more difficult; it will take at least 100 years. The demographic trends in our country are frightening. The nation loses nearly a million people a year, so greatly does the death rate exceed the birth rate. A nation experiences losses like that only in wartime.
Well, there is a war going on: between God and the Devil. The focus, as those of us who are Catholic know, somehow has much to do with Russia. Death, for now, is winning there. But we know that death will not triumph. Russia will be converted.
He remained as feisty as ever towards the end of his life. Read the clarity of his words inn April 1999, while the United States was busy bombing Eastern Europe. This is the man at his best. It’s a voice speaking with a kind of authority that we just hear too rarely today:
Hurling aside the United Nations and trampling its Charter, NATO proclaimed to the whole world and to the next century an ancient law–the law of the jungle: He who is mighty is completely right. If you are technically superior, excel your condemned opponent in violence a hundredfold. And they want us to live in a world like this from now on.
In the sight of humanity, a beautiful country is being destroyed while civilized governments applaud. And desperate people leave bomb shelters and come out as living targets to die for the salvation of Danube bridges. Is this not antiquity? I do not see why Clinton, Blair, and Solana would not tomorrow burn and drown them.
I mentioned Solzhenitsyn’s philosophical side earlier. Let me share one last story which illustrates this, from The Gulag:
Following an operation, I am lying in the surgical ward of a camp hospital. I cannot move. I am hot and feverish, but nonetheless my thoughts do not dissolve into delirium– and I am grateful to Dr. Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, who is sitting beside my cot and talking to me all evening. The light has been turned out–so it will not hurt my eyes. He and I–there is no one else in the ward.
Fervently he tells me the long story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. This conversion was accomplished by an educated, cultivated person, one of his cell mates, some good-natured old fellow like Platon Karataev [from War and Peace]. I am astonished at the conviction of the new convert, at the ardor of his words.
We know each other very slightly, and he was not the one responsible for my treatment, but there was simply no one here with whom he could share his feelings. He was a gentle and well-mannered person. I could see nothing bad in him, nor did I know anything bad about him. However, I was on guard because Kornfeld had now been living for two months in the hospital barracks, without going outside. He had shut himself up in here, at his place of work, and avoided moving around camp at all.
This meant that he was afraid of having his throat cut. In our camp it had recently become fashionable to cut the throats of stool pigeons. This has an effect. But who could guarantee that only stoolies were getting their throats cut? One prisoner had had his throat cut in a clear case of settling a sordid grudge. Therefore the self-imprisonment of Kornfeld in the hospital did not yet prove at all that he was a stool pigeon.
It is already late. All the hospital is asleep. Kornfeld is ending up his story thus:
“And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”
I cannot see his face. Through the window come only the scattered reflections of the lights of the perimeter outside. The door from the corridor gleams in a yellow electrical glow. But there is such mystical knowledge in his voice that I shudder.
These were the last words of Boris Kornfeld. Noiselessly he went out into the nigh-time corridor and into one of the nearby wards and there lay down to sleep. Everyone slept. There was no one with whom he could speak even one word. I went off to sleep myself.
I was wakened in the morning by running about and tramping in the corridor; the orderlies were carrying Kornfeld’s body to the operating room. He had been dealt eight blows on the skull with a plasterer’s mallet while he still slept. He died on the operating table, without regaining consciousness.
And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth, and, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.
But by that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts. I would have been inclined to endow his words with the significance of a universal law of life. However, one can get all tangled up that way. One would have to admit that, on that basis, those who had been punished even more cruelly than with prison, those shot or burned at the stake, were some sort of super-evildoers. And yet the innocent are those who get punished most zealously of all. And what would one then have to say about our so-evident torturers? Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper?
The only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine; they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development holds out hope.1
The section in which this appears, the core of the book, is called “The Soul and Barbed Wire.” He ends it by saying: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.” It is a recognition that, without suffering, he never would have understood the truth.
What do we have here? And why do I call him one of the few great men of the century? His messages are very simple, very clear, and he not only put them on paper—he lived them.
Number one: There is truth. We can know it. When we know it, we must put it forward, whatever the cost. As he himself wrote, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world. The world is falsehood; truth is eternal.”
Number two: We must be courageous in standing up and fighting for the truth. The world will try to shout us down. The world will try to destroy us all the more as we put the truth forward. To put the truth forward in the world at any time demands courage; but to put it forward in the modern world, in the world we find ourselves in today, demands superhuman courage. It demands the grace of God.
This brings us to the third great message: suffering. We will not be worthy of God’s grace unless we suffer. Through this suffering comes health of soul, a better understanding of the truth, and the courage to stand up for it in the world, no matter what the barbarians try to do to us. They can only kill our bodies; they can’t get our souls.
That this man should appear in Russia and send the word out because of what he learned there, in my mind, connects completely with the messages of Fatima. It’s because of that message, and the fact that some will hear it and adhere to it, and that God calls us all to suffer for the truth with real courage, that suggests why one day it will be possible for Russia to be converted, through the grace of God and the action of the Pope, listening finally to the message given to the world through the Blessed Mother. Russia will be converted through devotion to Her Immaculate Heart.
A period of peace will be granted to the world. Can we deserve it? Do we deserve it? God, in His goodness, has promised it to us. But, before we get there, we may all have to spend our time in a place quite distant from the comfortable, modern, material, atheistic world, sipping fine wine in nice restaurants, being adored by the world around us.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008. In his last major interview with Der Spiegel a year before his death he stated, “I am not afraid of death anymore....I feel it is a natural, but by no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.” He was buried in the Cathedral of the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow. Afterwards, large numbers of Russian people mobbed the site, leaving flowers and kissing the temporary wooden cross erected over the grave. Two weeks after his death, Moscow authorities amended an existing rule that only people who had been dead for at least 10 years could be honored with a street name. They announced that a street in the city center would be renamed “Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street” in his honor. The street was formerly known as “Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya” or “Great Communist Street.”
1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), vol. II, part 4.
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