The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago


Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 38

Palash Biswas
http://troubledgalaxydetroyeddreams.blogspot.com/


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who exposed the horrors of Soviet-era labor camps, was buried today at the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow in a state funeral attended by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Solzhenitsyn never represented the Great Rusian tradition of Literature we knew.

We may not compare him with Russian gretas like Dostovosky, Tolstoy or Gorky.

He was quite different in content as well as style. We never could digest the bitterness of Truth he showcased so well!Neither we could neglect him. What we did ? We read Solzhenitsyn and right and right rejected him as an US agent in literature! It happened with Pastarnac as well as Sholokhov! We never tried to look into the Concentration camps! We considered that we were amidst the mainstream! Which proved nothing but an Illusion , far from reality!

I had gone through Soviet classics like `Mother’ by Maxim Gorky and `War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy in my school days thanks to Chhoto Kaka. During first year of my undergraduate college life in DSB College Nainital, our studies were closely monitored by Tara Chandra Tripathi. We had to read Aristotle and Socrates, Hobbs,Lock and Russeau, Adam smith, Hegel, Charbak,Chanakya and all basic theories and philosophies. We had to go through the vast volumes of Das Capital as well as `Psychoanalysis’ and `Psychology of Sex. Then, we had separate list in our study circles which included Howard Frost and Julius Fuchik. In those days, we were assigned a course of systematic study of Soviet Literature from Dostoevsky to Alexander Couperin, Chekhov to Mayakovasky. Thus, I read The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn just after we finished Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and have already enjoyed the films like `War and Peace’ as well as ` Dr Zhivago’.After Solzhenitsyn we read Sholokhov. We had a long journey from River Moscova to river Done!

I have to wear the spects once again which I discarded years back. In Nainital, while I was a student in GIC, I was suggested by the doctors of Sitapur Eye hospital to use spects for my studies. I neglected as I always hated spects!

In Kolkata, doctors diagnosed diabetes in 1999. The immediate security measure was to adopt spects. I used spects some time as everyone suggested how I would be losing vision very soon. I came over the fear factor very soon and spects were the first thing which I threw away with most hatred. Nowadays, I feel giddy so soon and had been virtually unable to read any book. Though, I feel at home with my PC., it is very hard to go through the smallest fonts used in Newspapers.Thus, I had to opt for spects once again!

The fact remains, so called ideologies happen to be the greatest spects ever invented. We hated George Orwell for his creations `1984’ and `Animal Farm’. Rather we have been admirers of Victor Hugo,Charles Dickens and Hemingway! We preferred to read Les Miserables to the real History of France! `The Old man and the Sea’ always inspired us. We were spellbound to read `Out Sider’ by Camus. We were fans of Sartre as he refused Nobel Prize. But we did read his works, too.

But the Ideological Spects made us so biased! i never cared to read Ambedkar or anything indigenous before settling in Kolkata and bearing the stings of Manusmriti! Rather we sympathised with Black Brotherhood and Anti Apartheid movement led by nelson Mandela. But seldom we tried to understand the social fabrics and indigenous production system in this divided bleeding subcontinent. We depended so much so on the studies made by RC Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, A.L.Basam, Romila Thapar, Irphan Habib, Sumit Sarkar, Ramchandra Guha and so on! We never tried to know other versions, specially the indigenous first versions of recent history!

As a student of Shakespeare during my post graduation days, I always wore the ideological spects. Thus, I discarded all the conservative critics like Bradley and David Cecil.I always boasted to read the most of Shakespearean works and banked mostly on French and Russian critics. I had never had an excellent command on language as Dr Manas Mukul Das bluntly used to say. But I could scare anyone with my logic and analysis. In my M.A. previous exams I quoted Dr Ram Vilas Sharma, Boris Pasternak, Dorothy vaugngent, Sartre and Camus which proved disastrous for me as I got just the passing marks, only 36. In the final year, it happened with my Fiction paper in which I tried to be an expert and got only 49. While I got seventies in Poetry and Literary criticism. It wiped out my chances in the most sought career in the universities!

I want to insist a point. We read literature,true. But we were biased to go through the lines. I never read Tagore very seriously and discarded Sharat and Bankim. While Manik was my hero. We loved Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya.

I must admit that I was biased to evaluate the works of Orwell, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Sholokhov. We could not tolerate anything against the Soviets, China, Cuba, Central Europe and the Communist movement.

What we see in India now. The polity is transformed in an Animal Farm! Democratic institutions and fundamental rights along with civic and human rights are inflicted with `1984’!

With the damned Manusmriti, Indian subcontinent has been the largest Gulag for thousands and thousands years and the Society itself inflicted with apartheid and caste system has been the largest concentration camp where 85 percent of population is enslaved for time infinite. We are handicapped with inherent injustice and inequality. I wish, I could read all the literature once again!
The so called anti communist writers have a different meaning for me after we saw the failures of insurrections like Nandigram and Singur to convert into a pure infight in between the Power hegemony and Resistance Hegemony of the Polity. Market is sovereign. Nationalities, identities and mother languages are being destroyed. It is an unlimited concentration camp where all the indigenous people have to be annihilated!

Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Winner, Given State Funeral (Update1)

By Torrey Clark

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who exposed the horrors of Soviet-era labor camps, was buried today at the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow in a state funeral attended by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Solzhenitsyn's widow Natalia and their sons stood by the grave under a chilly, overcast sky. White-gloved soldiers fired a salute. The ceremony, attended by hundreds of mourners, was broadcast live on state television.

The author had appealed to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II five years ago to be laid to rest in the monastery's cemetery, state television station Vesti-24 said. Solzhenitsyn's grave is next to that of pre-revolutionary historian Vasily Klyuchevsky.

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure three days ago at the age of 89 after months of ill health. The author, who portrayed dictator Josef Stalin's labor camps and political oppression, was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature at a ceremony he couldn't attend. He lived in Switzerland before moving to the U.S.

Medvedev, who interrupted a working vacation on the Volga River to attend, ordered the government to create scholarships in the author's name and for Moscow to name a street in his honor. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for Solzhenitsyn's works to be studied more extensively in schools as ``a vaccination against tyranny for our society,'' Vesti-24 reported.

Political Prisoner

After returning from exile in 1994, Solzhenitsyn became a critic of Russia's first post-communist leader, Boris Yeltsin. He later praised Yeltsin's successor Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, for restoring Russia's authority in the world.

Solzhenitsyn, who wrote more than 20 books, drew on his own experience as a political prisoner in his early works, including ``One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' and ``The First Circle.'' In 2007, Solzhenitsyn accepted a state award from Putin for outstanding achievement in culture and education.

Medvedev laid red roses on Solzhenitsyn's open casket during the funeral service at the monastery today, as Putin did yesterday during a memorial ceremony at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Putin yesterday praised Solzhenitsyn for giving ``an example of truly selfless devotion and of unselfish service to the people, the fatherland'' and for championing ``the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a4Yx2EQUza9w&refer=muse



The Gulag Archipelago
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Gulag Archipelago (Russian) is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. It is a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a Gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968 (dates given at the end of the book) it was published in the West in 1973, thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its official publication in 1989.

"GULag" is an acronym for the Russian term "Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps" , the bureaucratic name of the Soviet concentration camp main governing board, and by metonymy, the camp system itself. The original Russian title of the book is "Arkhipelag GULag", the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor deployed throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast "chain of islands", known only to those who were fated to visit them.

Structure and factual basis
Structurally, the text is made up of seven sections divided (in most printed editions) into three volumes: parts 1-2, parts 3-4, and parts 5-7. At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the Soviet concentration camp and forced labour system from 1918 to 1956, starting with V.I. Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October Revolution establishing the legal and practical frame for a slave labor economy, and a punitive concentration camp system. It describes and discusses the waves of purges, assembling the show trials in context of the development of the greater GULag system with particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic development.

The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era. Though the speech was not published in the USSR for a long time, it was a break with the most atrocious practices of the concentration camp system; Solzhenitsyn was aware, however, that the outlines of the GULag system had survived and could be revived and expanded by future leaders.

Despite the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront this shameful Soviet system, the realities of the camps remained taboo into the 1980s. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union's supporters in the West viewed the GULag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture — an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project. This view, politically unpopular inside and outside the USSR during the Cold War, because it ascribed to Lenin the theoretical and practical origins of the concentration camp system, has become the prevalent view of informed writers and scholars since the USSR's demise.

Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a zek (political prisoner) through the concentration camp system, starting with arrest, show trial and initial internment; transport to the "archipelago"; treatment of prisoners and general living conditions; slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system (where Andrei Sakharov and his team of prisoner-scientists developed the hydrogen bomb, among other Soviet scientific breakthroughs); camp rebellions and strikes (see Kengir uprising); the practice of internal exile following completion of the original prison sentence; and ultimate (but not guaranteed) release of the prisoner. Along the way, Solzhenitsyn's examination details the trivial and commonplace events of an average zek's life, as well as specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprisings.

Aside from using his experiences as a zek at a scientific prison (a sharashka), the basis of the novel The First Circle (1968), Solzhenitsyn draws from the testimony of 227 fellow zeks, the first-hand accounts which base the work. One chapter of the third volume of the book is written by a prisoner named Georgi Tenno, whose exploits enraptured Solzhenitsyn to the extent that he offered Tenno a position as co-author of the book; Tenno declined.

The sheer volume of firsthand testimony and primary documentation that Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble in The Gulag Archipelago made all subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work useless. Much of the impact of the treatise stems from the closely detailed stories of interrogation routines, prison indignities and (especially in section 3) camp massacres and inhuman practices.

There had been works about the Soviet prison/camp system before, and its existence was known to the Western public since the 1930s. However, never before had the wide reading public been brought face to face with the horrors of the Soviet system in this way. The controversy surrounding this text in particular was largely due to the way Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal and practical origins of the GULag system at Lenin's feet, not Stalin's. According to Solzhenitsyn's testimony, Stalin merely amplified a concentration camp system that was already in place. This is significant, as many Western Communist or Socialist parties in the seventies tended to view the Soviet concentration camp system as a "Stalinist aberration", rather than as an intrinsic component of the Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet government in fact could not govern without the very real threat of imprisonment, and that the Soviet economy depended on the productivity of the forced labor camps, especially insofar as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned.

This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system. In Western Europe the book came, in time, to force a rethinking of the historical role of Lenin. With the text, The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin's political and historical legacy became problematic, and the fractions of Western communist parties who still based their economic and political ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof against them.

Additional remarks
Though the scope of the text ends in 1956, the last prisoners sentenced according to the political paragraphs of the criminal code were quietly released in 1989. The exact number of Soviet citizens who went through the camp system will never be known, especially as key documentation was deliberately destroyed as the USSR was collapsing. But western estimates put the figure at a minimum of 20 million people, probably around 30 million, but no more than 35 million.[citation needed] The number of those who died in the system will also never be known, but a figure of 8-10 million is not exaggerated.[citation needed]

One of the noteworthy elements of Solzhenitsyn's analysis are the seemingly outlandish claims of Soviet brutality, which subsequently turned out to be true - or which in some cases turned out to be more outrageous than Solzhenitsyn had originally stated. For instance, Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Gulag system was so voracious that between 1930 and 1939, a quarter of the population of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was shipped to the Gulag. Post-Soviet scholarship has confirmed that the figure was even higher.[1] This one, seemingly unbelievable event, was reported by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, to skepticism in the West. The collapse of the USSR and subsequent availability of heretofore secret documents (including the secret 1937 Soviet census, which was suppressed because it reflected the negative impact of the Gulag system on the population) have confirmed that Solzhenitsyn's claims and estimates were either true, or even understated.

One of the surprising and noteworthy elements is the powerful humor Solzhenitsyn employs throughout the text. It is one of the reasons the book has remained so popular. Rather than a grim rendering of crimes and atrocities, The Gulag Archipelago is often sarcastic and ironic, quite possibly the darkest gallows humor ever written. Precisely because of this dark humor, the prose often turns human and profoundly moving without ever falling into sentimentality or self-pity.

The work is also a powerful testament to Solzhenitsyn's multi-layered, rhythmic and precise prose art. In interviews he has often stated his wish to use all the resources of the language, old and new, proverbs, prison slang, legal style and poetic images; this variety is masterfully used in The Gulag Archipelago, and carries over even in translation.

Publication

The KGB seized one of only three extant copies of the text still on Soviet soil - this was achieved by torturing a dissident woman, Solzhenitsyn's typist[2] who knew where the typed copy was hidden; within days after she was released by the KGB, she hung herself.[when?]

The book was published by the YMCA Press in Paris.[when?] Solzhenitsyn had been in touch with them about the upcoming publication, which he knew he could not put off much longer, but the final decision was taken by the YMCA Press themselves with the author's implicit approval (two years previously, they had published August 1914).

Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first, but he knew this was impossible under conditions then extant. The international impact of the work was profound; not only did it provoke a very vivid debate in the West, a mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into exile.

Because the Gulag might obviously render anyone who came into contact with it a long prison sentence for 'anti-Soviet activities', Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Due to the KGB's constant surveillance of him, Solzhenitsyn only worked on parts of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the book as a whole into jeopardy if he happened to be arrested. For this reason, he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow and the surrounding suburbs, in the care of trusted friends, and sometimes purportedly visiting them on social calls, but actually working on the manuscript in their homes. During much of this time, Solzhenitsyn lived at the dacha of the world-famous cellist Rostropovich, and due to the reputation and standing of the musician, even with Soviet authorities, he was reasonably safe from KGB searches there.

Solzhenitsyn did not think this series would be his defining work, as he considered it journalism and history rather than high literature (the distance between those two poles is shorter, anyway, in Russian tradition than in many Western European literatures, although an analogy might be drawn between Russian and French-Enlightened publishing traditions by public intellectuals). However, it is by far his most popular work, at least in the West (with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).

Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn's main legal representative, Dr Kurt Heeb of Zürich, to await publication (a later paper copy, also smuggled out, was signed by Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against possible accusations of a falsified work).

Solzhenitsyn was aware that there was a wealth of material and perspectives that merited to be continued in the future, but he considered the book finished for his part. The royalties and sales income for the novel were transferred to the Solzhenitsyn Foundation for aid to former camp prisoners, and this fund, which had to work in secret in its native country, managed to transfer substantial amounts of money to those ends in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the winter of 1974, unbound and mimeographed samizdat copies of The Gulag Archipelago began being surreptitiously passed between Soviet citizens. These initial readers were normally given 24 hours to finish the work before passing it on to the next person, requiring the reader to spend an uninterrupted day and night to get through the work. Years later, this initial generation of Soviet readers could still recall who had given them their copy, to whom they had passed it on, and who they had trusted enough to discuss their thoughts about the book.


Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (IPA: /soʊlʒəˈniːtsɨn/[1] Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, Russian pronunciation: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪˈsaɪvʲɪtɕ səlʐɨˈnʲitsɨn]) (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008)[2] was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's labour camp system, and for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. He was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a well-known conductor and pianist. He died at home after years of declining health on August 3, 2008.[3]

Contents
[hide]
1 Biography
1.1 While in the Soviet Union
1.2 In the West
1.3 Return to Russia
1.3.1 "Two Hundred Years Together" and the accusations of Antisemitism
1.3.2 Other works
1.4 Death
1.5 Legacy
2 Historical and political views
2.1 Historical views
2.1.1 The West
2.1.2 Russian culture
2.1.3 Communism, Russia and nationalism
2.1.4 World War II
2.1.5 Stalinism
2.1.6 Mikhail Sholokhov
2.1.7 The Sino-Soviet Conflict
2.1.8 Vietnam war
2.1.9 Kosovo War
2.1.10 Holodomor as a genocide
2.2 Western culture
2.3 Modern world
3 See also
4 Published works and speeches
5 Notes
6 References
7 External links



[edit] Biography

[edit] While in the Soviet Union
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now Russia) to a young widow, Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (née Shcherbak), whose father had risen, it seems, from humble beginnings, much of a self-made man, and acquired a large estate in the Kuban region by the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, a young army officer, also from the Caucasus region (the family background of his parents is vividly brought alive in the opening chapters of August 1914, and later on in the Red Wheel novel cycle).

In 1918, Taisia became pregnant with Aleksandr. Shortly after this was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr, who had three brothers and a sister,[4] was raised by his widowed mother and 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. Solzhenitsyn stated his mother was fighting for survival and 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 leanings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith;[5] She died shortly before 1940.[6]

On 7 April 1940, Solzhenitsyn married chemistry student Natalya Alekseevna Reshetovskaya.[7] They divorced in 1952 (a year before his release from the Gulag); he remarried in 1957 and divorced again in 1972, the following year marrying his third wife, Natalya Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage.[8] He and Svetlova (b. 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972) and Stepan (1973).[9]

Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University, while at the same time taking 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 before he had spent some time in the camps).

During World War II, he served as the commander of an acoustic recognizance unit in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and twice decorated. In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, he was arrested for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend, N. D. Utkevich, about the conduct of the war by Josef Stalin, whom he called "the whiskered one,"[10] "Khozyain" ("the master") and "Balabos", (Odessa Yiddish for "the master").[11] He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organisation" under paragraph 11.[12] Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police (NKGB) to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.[13]

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, special scientific research facilities run by Ministry of State Security, where he met Lev Kopelev, paragon of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in the West in 1968. 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. While there he had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not then diagnosed.



Solzhenitsyn reenacts being searched in the Gulag, 1953
In March of 1953, Solzhenitsyn sentence was commuted to internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread, until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. However, in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. These experiences 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; this turn has some interesting parallels to Dostoevsky's time in Siberia and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn gradually turned into a philosophically-minded man in prison. He repented for what he did as a Red Army captain and in prison compared himself with 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").

During his years of exile, and following his reprieve and return to European Russia, 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, "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."[14]

Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached Alexander Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Noviy Mir magazine and a politburo member, 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 and declared at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publishing, "There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil". The book became an instant hit and sold-out everywhere. During Khruschev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union and three more novellas of his were 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 a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West—not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the twenties on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, even by a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and still it had not been censored. 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 quietly, but perceptibly, to a close. Solzhenitsyn did not give in but tried, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel, The Cancer Ward, legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to get the approval of the Union of Writers, and though some there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied publication unless it were to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations (this episode is recounted and documented in The Oak and the Calf).

The publishing of his 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 subversive of all his writings, the monumental Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized it had set him free from the pretences and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which had come close to second nature, but which was getting increasingly irrelevant (the circumstances of how he actually survived in this period, without any income from his books, are obscure; he had quit his teaching post when he broke through as a writer).

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn 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, since such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Sweden's relations to the superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been deported from the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. It discussed the system's origins from the very founding of the Communist regime, with Lenin himself having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile. The appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities.


[edit] In the West
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. On February 13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported 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.

In Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house. He then moved to 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, June 8, 1978 he gave his Commencement Address condemning modern western culture.

Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his cyclical 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 an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable outside his homeland.[citation needed]

Despite spending 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[citation needed]. More important, 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, alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian patriotism 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 rock 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."


Return to Russia


Solzhenitsyn boards a train in Vladivostok after returning to Russia from exile. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev
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 to work for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko.

The writer, however, deplored what he considered Russia's spiritual decline, increasingly adopting Western materialistic values, but in the last years of his life he praised President Vladimir Putin for Russia's revival.

After returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn 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).


[edit] "Two Hundred Years Together" and the accusations of Antisemitism
He also published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically lays the blame for the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 on the Jews, but stops short of alleging this to be the work of a "Jewish conspiracy" [15]. He purports to document the predominance of Jews in the early Bolshevik leaderships, excepting Lenin, using unreliable and manipulated figures. At the same time, he calls on both Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime. He also accuses the Jews of wartime cowardice, and evasion of active duty.

The reception of this work confirms Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing figure both at home and abroad. According to his critics, the book confirmed Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations. Professor Robert Service of Oxford University has defended Solzhenitsyn as being "absolutely right", noting Trotsky himself claimed Jews were disproportionately represented in the early Soviet bureaucracy.[16] An important critique of Solzhnitsyn's position (debunking the majority of his claims)was published by the historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Stern[17].

Another famous Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a polemical study "A Portrait Against the Background of a Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he tried to prove Solzhenitsyn's egoism, anti-Semitism, and lack of writing skills. Voinovich had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042 through the self-centered egomaniac character, Sim Simich Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia. Using a more circuitous line of argument, Joseph Brodsky, in his essay Catastrophes in the Air (in Less than One), argued that Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be the outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage of Old Russia and of "the severe spirit of Orthodoxy" (venerated by Solzhenitsyn) and much less due to the more recent (Marxist) political ideology. This somewhat contorted interpretation of his outlook has been seen by many as a defense of Marxism by contrasting it with what they saw as the greater prior evils of the old regime, a view shared by some historians as well - although clearly the revolutionary zeal went far beyond any excesses from the past in terms of the sheer volume and intensity of violence.


[edit] Other works
In his recent 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), argued for the indispensability of 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. He also sought to "protect" the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from other countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show, where he freely expressed his views. The show was cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to maintain a relatively high profile in the media.

All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.


[edit] Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on August 3, 2008, at age 89.[18][19] A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on Wednesday, August 6, 2008.[20] He was buried on the same date at the place chosen by him at Donskoye graveyard.[21]


[edit] Legacy
The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn’s collected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three volumes, already in print, recently took place in Moscow. On June 5, 2007 then Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work. Putin personally visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007 to present him with the award. Like his father, Yermolai Solzhenitsyn is an author and has translated some of his father's works. Stephan Solzhenitsyn is an urban planner in New York. Ignat Solzhenitsyn is the music director of The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.


[edit] Historical and political views

[edit] Historical views
During his years in the west, Solzhenitsyn was very active in the historical debate, discussing the history of Russia, the Soviet Union and communism. He tried to correct what he considered to be western misconceptions.


[edit] The West
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country 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 Vietnam. And 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."[22]


[edit] Russian culture
In his 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn argued over Russian culture, that the West erred in "denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it "[23]


[edit] Communism, Russia and nationalism
It is a popular view that the October revolution of 1917 resulting in a violent totalitarian regime was closely connected to Russia's earlier history of tsarism and culture, especially that of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.[citation needed] Solzhenitsyn claims this is fundamentally wrong and famously denounced the work of Richard Pipes as "the Polish version of Russian history". Solzhenitsyn argues Tsarist Russia did not have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet Union. For instance, in Solzhenitsyn's view, Imperial Russia did not practise censorship; political prisoners were not forced into labour camps and the number of political prisoners was only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union; the Tsar's secret service was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the army. The violence of the Communist regime was in no way comparable to the lesser violence of the Tsars.

He considered it far-fetched to blame the catastrophes of the 20th century on one 16th century and one 18th century czar, when there were many other examples of violence which could have inspired the Bolshevik in other countries earlier in time, especially mentioning similarities with the Jacobins of the Reign of Terror of France.

Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions which affected the outcome.

He also criticized the view that the Soviet Union was Russian in any way. He argued Communism was international and only cared for nationalism as a tool to use when getting into power, or for fooling the people. Once in power, Communism tried to wipe clean every nation, destroying its culture and oppressing its people.

According to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian culture and people were not the ruling national culture in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no ruling national culture. All national cultures were oppressed in favour of an atheistic Soviet culture. In Solzhenitsyn's opinion, Russian culture was even more oppressed than the smaller minority cultures, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russians than among other peoples. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.[24]


[edit] World War II
Main article: World War II
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. While stationed in East Prussia as an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against the civilian German population by Soviet "liberators" as the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women were gang-raped to death. He wrote a poem, "Prussian Nights", about these incidents in which the first-person narrator seems to wholeheartedly approve of these crimes, expressing his desire to take part in the plunder himself. The poem describes the rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German.[25]


[edit] Stalinism
Main article: Stalinism
He also rejected the view Stalin created the totalitarian state, while Lenin (and Trotsky) had been "true communist." He argued Lenin started the mass executions, wrecked the economy, founded the Cheka which would later be turned into the KGB, and started the Gulag even though it did not have the same name at that time.


[edit] Mikhail Sholokhov
Main article: Mikhail Sholokhov
Solzhenitsyn was the most prominent of the Nobel Laureate Mikhail Sholokhov's detractors. He believed that the work which made Sholokhov's international reputation, And Quiet Flows the Don was written by Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920. According to Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov found the manuscript and published it under his own name. The controversy raged for years, without conclusive proof on either side.


[edit] The Sino-Soviet Conflict
Main article: Sino-Soviet split
In 1973, near the height of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Solzhenitsyn sent a Letter to the Soviet Leaders to a limited number of upper echelon Soviet officials. This work, which was published for the general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to

Give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics (a million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if they like. The main source of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great many points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will also melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter possibility and perhaps won't take place at all [author's emphasis].[26]


[edit] Vietnam war
Main article: Vietnam war
In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. did not understand the Vietnam War. He rhetorically asks if the American antiwar proponents now realize the effects their actions had on Vietnam: "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?"[27]

During his time in the West, Solzhenitsyn made a few controversial public statements: notably, he characterized Daniel Ellsberg as a traitor.


[edit] Kosovo War
Main article: Kosovo War
Solzhenitsyn strongly condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia, saying "there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler."[28]


[edit] Holodomor as a genocide
Main article: Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn said that Ukrainian efforts to have the 1930s famine recognised as a Russian genocide against Ukraine is an act of historical revisionism.

In an interview with the newspaper Izvestia, he explained that the famine was caused by the corrupt ideals of the Communist regime, under which all suffered equally. It was not an assault by the Russian people against the people of Ukraine, and that the wish to view it as such is only a recent development.[29]

This provocative outcry of genocide was voiced only decades later. At first, it thrived secretly in the stale chauvinist minds opposing the "bloody Russians". Now it has got hold of political minds in modern Ukraine. It seems they've surpassed the wild suggestions of the Bolshevik propaganda machine. "To the parliaments of the world" - a nice teaser for the Western ears. They have never cared about our history. All they need is a fable, no matter how loony it appears.


[edit] Western culture
Main article: Western World
…there also exists another alliance — at first glance a strange one, a surprising one—but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well - grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new. The very famous Armand Hammer, who is flourishing here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip into Russia, still in Lenin's time, in the very first years of the Revolution.

And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces—in a country which is by contemporary standards poor—they are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—and we have western capital to thank for this also.

Testimony to the U.S. Congress, July 8 1975.[30]

Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it…All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs.


[edit] Modern world
He described the problems of both East and West as "a disaster" rooted in agnosticism and atheism. He referred to it as "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.[31]


The death of Solzhenitsyn
http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/soviet-solzhenitsyn-era-russia

Andrey Kurkov

Published 05 August 2008

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The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on how the author of the Gulag Archipelago, who related the terrible truth about Soviet totalitarianism, outlived his era to become something of a living monument to Russia's past




On the death of such figures as Solzhenitsyn, the phrase ‘end of an era’ is bound to come up, but Alexander Isaevich outlived his era and never truly accepted the new ‘post-soviet’ epoch.

Having sincerely dedicated his life to a desperate struggle against communism, in 1991 Solzhenitsyn suddenly found himself without a battle to fight.

From that moment his activities grew less noticeable. He was less and less asked for his commentary on developments. A note of irony appeared in the use of his nickname: the ‘Vermont Recluse’. Then in 1994 he came out of seclusion and returned to Russia.

He returned to the country he had literally torn apart in 1962 with his short story “A Day In the Life Of Ivan Denisovich”. During a meeting of the Politburo Khrushchev himself insisted on the story’s publication. It contained no direct criticism of the Soviet system. It was a simple but detailed description of one day in a camp prisoner’s life, one almost happy day.

Solzhenitsyn was immediately made a member of the writer’s Union. More of his work was published. He felt his time had come and he tried to write as much as possible, perhaps fearing that any ‘thaw’ would be temporary. However you look at it, Solzhenitsyn was of great use to Krushchev in his efforts to ‘de-Stalinize’ the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn had been sent to a camp three months before the end of the Second World War for having referred to Stalin and Lenin disrespectfully in a letter to an old school friend who was serving on the front line.

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in camps, special prisons, secret KGB institutions and internal exile. During that time he twice overcame cancer.

It seems he was destined to be hardened through the cruellest of suffering. He admitted that having overcome cancer for the second time, he lost all fear of death and after the publication of his first stories he lost his fear of the Soviet system.

Kruschev had been overthrown, but Solzhenitsyn still believed in the possibility of democracy in the Soviet Union. Publication of his work ceased in 1965 and, two year later, in an open letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union of the USSR he said: “I call upon the Congress to demand and insist on the abandonment of all forms of censorship…”

In May 1967 the Soviet authorities decided to ‘deal with’ Solzhenitzyn, but the writer himself saw it the other way round; he was dealing with the Soviet Authorities.

His 1968 novels “Cancer Ward” and “In the First Circle”, which were banned from publication in the USSR, were published abroad. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn smuggled out to the west a microfilmed manuscript of his most important work – the three volumes of research into the Soviet system of repression and punishment, “The Gulag Archipelago”.

A Samisdat (homepublished) copy of this work appeared in my home at the beginning of the eighties. My older brother had managed to get hold of a copy for a couple of days. I remember trying to read it as quickly as possible.

Anyone found by the KGB in possession of it would get five years in a prison camp. By that time the author was already living in Vermont, where he had bought a house with 20 hectares of land around it to guarantee his creative isolation.

He had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974 he had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship and sent into exile as a traitor. This was the “humane face” of the Brezhnev era. After all, instead of a special flight to Germany, he could have been thrown into a train wagon bound for the camps.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn never fell in love with the USA or the west in general and, having returned to his homeland he was disappointed to discover that his compatriots no longer read his books. Disenchantment with the Yeltsin’s form of democracy encouraged pro-Putin sympathies.

Putin himself would go to ‘take tea’ with Solzhenitsyn and discuss what was to be done with Russia. But Putin’s visits were more representative than practical – a ritual attendance at a ‘living monument’ to the fight against Communism and Stalinism.

Solzhenitsyn was unable to influence contemporary Russia, although he did provoke further discussion of the “Jewish question” in one of his last works, “Two Hundred Years Together”. That book will continue to stir emotion within Russia, but on the international plane, Solzhenitsyn will forever remain the author of “Gulag Archipelago” - that terrible and truthful book about the Soviet totalitarian regime.


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4 comments from readers
Pencils
05 August 2008 at 21:49
Is this a parody?

Gideon Polya
06 August 2008 at 01:06
Excellent article. I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" over 40 years ago and was immensely moved. Over the years I then read "The First Circle", "Cancer Ward" and "The Gulag Archipelago".



I came to Solzhenitsyn pre-primed because my Hungarian grandmother's cousin Dr Edith Bone, a British subject, was arrested by the Stalinist secret police in 1949 as a "British spy" while covering an international Socialist conference in Budapest for the London Daily Worker. She survived 7 years solitary confinement in a Hungarian prison (she was released during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956) and wrote an account of her extraordinary physical and mental survival in a book entitled "Seven Years Solitary".



Another such hero was Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag after saving many Hungarian Jews from the Nazis (there is a monument to this wonderful man in Melbourne's busy Kew Junction) .



A key action of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was his May 1967 open letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union of the USSR in which he said: “I call upon the Congress to demand and insist on the abandonment of all forms of censorship…”



Soviet Communism and its censorship has more or less fallen (e.g. my great grandfather Jakab Polya's translation into Hungarian of Adam Smith's classic "An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations" was forbidden to all but specialist economists) but Russian media are still evidently State-dominated.



Solzhenitsyn's message on censorship needs to be taken seriously in the Western Murdochracies in which Monopoly Media (rather than the NKVD, GUGB or KGB) determine what people read and believe and how they vote.



Thus in the "open societies" such as the British Murdochracy, Mainstream media censorship and entrenched lying by omission means that most people are utterly unaware of the carnage in the American Gulag that stretches (with a few interruptions) from Occupied Somalia to Occupied Afghanistan and Predator Robot-bombed Waziristan in formerly "British" Pakistan.



Thus, using estimates from the UN Population Division, UNICEF and top US medical epidemiologists, it is estimated that the continuing Palestinian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide involve post-invasion excess deaths of 0.3 million, 2 million, and 3-6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths of 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively; and refugees totalling 7 million, 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively) (for the latest details and documentation see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19915/42/ ; http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Messages190308.htm#polya ; http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080208.htm; http://www.liberalati.com/?q=node/261 and "Obama, Mccain, Iraqi Genocide & Afghan Genocide": http://www.newsvine.com/qana ).



Indeed many Britons would have been utterly surprised to learn from a January 2008 BBC broadcast involving myself, 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and other scholars that in 1943-45 Britain deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in the man-made Bengal Famine atrocity that has been largely deleted from history in the English-speaking world (see: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.h... ).



Silence kills and silence is complicity. We are obliged to inform others about gross abuses of humanity. We cannot walk by on the other side.

knave
06 August 2008 at 08:53
good article and interesting comment Gideon

Douglas Chalmers
06 August 2008 at 15:31
# "...the story .....was a simple but detailed description of one day in a camp prisoner’s life, one almost happy day..."



It is remarkable how it is the stark experiences which we mostly avoid that bring us the greatest insights. From that experience on, if we survive it, everything we see or feel or hear is aligned with its true worth. There is no more room for illusions or the superficiality of personality. One can then write clearly and with great effect.



# "...Putin..... would go to ‘take tea’ with Solzhenitsyn and discuss what was to be done..."



Interesting how Putin remarked quite seriously after the funeral about the era of "repression" in Russia - especially so coming from the grandson of Joe Stalin's cook. Pity that the West only uses these people for its own propaganda but never applies the lessons to itself.