Alexander Solzhenitsyn
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
10 Aug 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died in Russia last week aged 89. “Alex who?” I can imagine many asking. But Solzhenitsyn was the most influential writer in the twentieth century.
Two of the greatest achievements of the last century were the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War at the cost of 50 million deaths and the collapse of the Communist Empire in Eastern Europe and Russia from 1989 onwards. By a miracle this transition was basically peaceful. More than any other person Solzhenitsyn white-anted Communism, the Evil Empire, by revealing how it was; founded on violence, lies and oppression.
The memory of Communism is vanishing quickly in Australia. Youngsters today have not heard of Stalin, the Russian dictator who died in 1953 and caused more deaths than Hitler.
Lenin came to power in the 1917 Russian revolution and the Communist Empire only started to collapse in 1989, due to the efforts of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. For most of its history, criticizing Communism was as unpopular in many circles even in Australia as criticizing man-made global warming is today!
Born under the Communists in 1918, Solzhenitsyn became a maths teacher, and eventually an artillery captain in the Second World War. A loyal Communist he criticized Stalin in a private letter as “the man with the moustache” and was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp followed by three more years in internal exile. He began to write of his experiences in the slave camps, the “gulag”.
His novel “Cancer Ward” told of his treatment for cancer while in exile in Tashkent and he saw cancer as a metaphor for what was wrong with the Soviet system.
Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s atrocities and allowed the publication of “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, a short masterpiece of Solzhenitsyn, recounting the experience in prison camp of an ex-Soviet soldier.
The novel caused a sensation inside and outside Russia. He followed up with the 3 volume “Gulag Archipelago” revealing how the system which caused 20 million deaths really worked. The pretence of Communist moral legitimacy was destroyed.
Awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from Russia and lived for 20 years in the U.S.A. before being allowed to return home in 1994.
Solzhenitsyn became a Christian believer, claiming that the evils of the century came about because men had forgotten God. He was no admirer of the Western world which he saw as weak and decadent and equally critical of post-Communist Russia’s corruption.
Like the prophets he was often unpopular, unsparing in his denunciations, courageous, outspoken, often appearing wrong-headed to nearly everyone.
But he and the other dissident writers in the then Communist world unmasked the lies. The truth got out and about and their words triumphed over the censorship and oppression; over the violence and killing.
It was a famous victory which should not be forgotten.
