Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Bio, Quotes, Books, Essays, Facts, Life, Education (1998)

• published: 08 Aug 2015
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Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (/ˌsoʊlʒəˈniːtsɪn, ˌsɔːl-/; Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, pronounced [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪˈsaɪvʲɪtɕ səlʐɨˈnʲitsɨn]; 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, historian, and critic of Soviet totalitarianism. He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system. While his writings were long suppressed in the USSR, he wrote many books, most notably The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914 and Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".[4] He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 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,[81] that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps,[82] 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.[83] 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.[84] 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.[5] 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".[85] In an 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."[80] Daniel J. Mahoney, however, has accused those who paint Solzhenitsyn as an uncritical adherent of Tsarism of "traducing" his real philosophy. Mahoney has written, "...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'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn Image by I, Evstafiev [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons