Solzhenitsyn, a giant of Russian and world literature, was the indomitable chronicler of a century full of genocidal exterminations, impregnated with exacerbated cruelty and infamy

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Paradigmatic Zek

By Vladimir Tismaneanu

Five years have passed since the demise, on August 3, 2008, of the great novelist, dissident, and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Forty-five years ago, on August 25, 1968, seven people demonstrated in the Red Square heroically against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, thus ushering in an era of open dissent and ruthless persecutions, including forcible internments into psychiatric institutions. More than twenty years ago, in December 1991, the ideocratic empire called the USSR collapsed. As historian Boris Souvarine, who wrote an unsurpassed Stalin biography, noticed mordantly:

“USSR, four letters, four lies. It was neither a free union, nor Soviet, in the sense of councils’ democracy. Neither was it socialist, if socialism involves social equality, nor a set of republics, in the etymological sense of the term, res publica, an object of civic commitment.”

The Solzhenitsyn effect, associated with the publication in the West of his non-fiction monument titled “The Gulag Archipelago,” a most devastating indictment of Sovietism, engendered a mutation in the global perception of communism and contributed to the inexorable de-legitimization of totalitarianism. The Soviet myth was dealt a mortal blow. Communist “humanism” turned out to be similar to the Nazi one. The Bolshevik “conscience” was not different from the Fascist one.

No one has demonstrated more persuasively than Solzhenitsyn the duplicitous, schizophrenic nature of communism, its absolute moral falsity. His urge for individuals to live within the truth, echoed by Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, founders of Charter 77, was accompanied by his endeavor to expose the terrorist underpinnings of Bolshevism, whatever its incarnations (Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castro-Guevarism, etc). For Solzhenitsyn, the roots of Bolshevik anti-humanism were linked to its proud embrace of a programmatic, militant atheism. It was, as French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy put it, “barbarism with a human face.” Far from being an extenuating circumstance, the humanist pretense was in fact an aggravating one.

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