Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s most-celebrated dissident, is dead

During a dinner conversation with professional colleagues last night, I asked what they thought about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89. 

But when one of them responded reflexively by asking “Who was he?“, I simply could not disguise my stupefaction. And it did not enlighten the conversation when another of them tried to excuse this colleague’s ignorance by accusing me of being an intellectual snob. 

Because this prompted me to assert that “any adult who doesn’t know who Alexander Solzhenitsyn was, is as ignorant as any teenager who doesn’t know who JK Rowling is.”

Thankfully, this proved to be a great segue into a more informed conversation about sports….

Of course, Solzhenitsyn is the Russian writer who exposed the horrors of Stalinism (in such books as The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich).   Indeed, it is arguable that his novels not only undermined the idyllic presumptions of communism but also imbued capitalism with the moral authority that inspired the United States to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Not surprisingly, the Soviets denounced him as a traitor.  And, but for his international celebrity, they would have banished him to a gulag in Siberia instead of allowing him to go into exile in America in 1974. 

But it was a testament to Solzhenitsyn’s uncompromising, if not self-righteous, political views that it wasn’t long before he began decrying capitalism as every bit as “morally corrupt” as communism. (And in far too many respects, it was…and is!)  In fact, he found the American-style democracy Russia adopted in 1992 (after the fall of the Soviet Union) so detestable that he refused repeated invitations to return.

Unfortunately, nothing could have been more ironic than the fact that, after finally doing so in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spent the final years of his life watching President Vladimir Putin turn Russia back into the Stalinist state he railed against in his novels.

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