Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn is dead at 89.

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Along with Paul Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevskii and P.J. O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn was one of the authors that paved the way to my becoming a libertarian-conservative, 25 years ago.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS’-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

Sheila O’Malley:

Shaking my head. Strange. How it feels like a personal loss.

The world was a better place, a more honorable place, a place where bravery was possible, and where truth was always louder than lies … because he was in it.

Jay Reding:

His influence helped foster in the end of the Soviet empire and the dawn of a new age of freedom. His willingness to speak out against the evils of the Soviet system helped forge the moral case against Communism. 

Read Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag. Great stories, great lessons – and history that mankind will forget only at its immense peril.

UPDATE:  One thing that’s important to remember about Solzhenitzyn; he was Russian, first and foremost.

While The Gulag was a key motivator that helped bring down the USSR, Solzhenitzyn also endorsed the authoritarian Putin, and supported many of the former KGB officer’s crackdowns and power-grabs.  This is not out of character with the “Russian personality”, of course; in a land that’s been a kick-toy for invaders for millenia, security trumps “liberty” in the traditional western sense, and Solzhenitzyn embodies this trait.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 6:20 am and is filed under A 'n E, Conservatism, History And Its Making, Memoriam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.