LEST WE FORGET- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was Born in December, 1918

President Lincoln thought that the 1852  novel, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the literary trigger to the American Civil War; the war which ended slavery in America. That being the case, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel about prison life in Stalin’s concentration camps, the gulags, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH was the literary trigger to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan, St. John Paul II, and all who fought the twilight war, which brought down the Soviet Union, stood on the shoulders of Solzhenitsyn’s exposé and denunciation of the Soviet Union.

(Certain Liberal intellectuals engage in revisionism, and claim that Mikhail Gorbachev was more instrumental than Ronald Reagan in bringing down the Soviet Union; they say that because they still cannot believe that a has-been actor, from a small college, whose last great role was playing second fiddle to a chimp in BEDTIME  FOR BONZO, could bring down a system created by the giants of the 20^th Century, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.  They cannot believe that a washed up actor could do what Hitler and Churchill could not do, bring down Soviet Communism. Yet, Reagan did; as for Gorbachev, his role in History is equivalent to the last Hapsburg Emperor, Karl, nice guy-too late).

As Readers of this Blog know,this Blogger is a Russophile; he is especially enamored of their literature. Russians were grappling with the emotional mysteries of life in their literature 150 years ago.  What is amazing is that the great Russian writers were their nation’s mass entertainers. They wrote  for mass circulation, paid for by the word; they were the Kim Kardashians of their day. Yet they offered explorations of the depth of the human soul that this cartoon age of ours cannot emulate nor even comprehend.

Want to understand the mind of a killer? Read A HERO OF OUR TIME by Lermontov, written in the 1840s, before he was killed in a duel.

Want to understand why Prince Harry married Meghan Markle, a classless D ranked  actress, or the Duke of Windsor married his ugly consort? Read  THE SILVER DOVE by Andrei Bely, published in 1910.

Want to understand the venality of the toxic masculine soul?Read RED CAVALRY by Isaac Babel. A group of Red Cossacks enter a small village during the Russian Civil War; they violate a beautiful young girl, all save one. She is so impressed by that one’s kindness, she cooks him breakfast, mends his clothes, washes his clothes, picks out his lice. The Red Cossacks have to move on, but before they leave, the kind Cossack informs the worshiping victim why he did not violate her.  That moment is an exponential #METOO moment. 

Solzhenitsyn was born in December, 1918; his father was a Cossack; his mother a devout Russian Orthodox. He was an outstanding student, studying Mathematics, Literature and Philosophy. When World War II came, he fought bravely against the Nazis, twice being decorated for his bravery. He won the ORDER OF THE RED STAR.

His Red Army unit fought their way into East Prussia, where he witnessed Red Army soldiers mass raping German women and girls until they died. One rape seemingly had a profound effect on him; he witnessed Red Army soldiers mass raping unto death a Polish girl because they thought she was German. He later wrote a heart wrenching poem about the incident, PRUSSIAN NIGHTS. It is more sobering, humbling and edifying than any edition of the comic book SPIDER MAN.

He had been promoted to Captain because of his battlefield achievements; but he was being watched. Every Red Army unit was accompanied by a Commissar, a Communist Party apparatchik, who monitored the  soldiers for anti-Communist behavior. They noted the Solzhenitsyn was brave, articulate and perhaps religious.

In his masterpiece THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, 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?'

Stalin had decided that once the war had been won, he would arrest all the brave, articulate and religious officers in the Red Army, so that they would not come home and practice their religious bravery on his regime.

Solzhenitsyn’ was arrested, in February 1945, and sentenced to eight years hard labor in Stalin’s concentration camps, the gulags, scattered across Siberia, like islands in a sea,the Gulag Archipelago.

After eight years, he was sent off to internal exile,a dead man walking.

“It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically-minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain…. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire").”

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is a detailed description of the indescribable. One vignette lingers with this Blogger. One day,  a gorgeous woman was brought into the gulag.  She was the epitome of an empowered woman; she had led a partisan band in the forest against the Nazis and now she was Stalin’s prisoner because she was brave and independent.

The Communist Commandant of the Gulag, who seems to have been a combination of Peter Lorre and Harvey Weinstein, drooled all over her. He came on to her, she refused him, publicly. The guards rushed to beat her, but the Commandant stopped them;  he wanted her beauty intact.

He put her in a tent and starved her.

Solzhenitsyn would get up early, and write on scraps of paper by the moon glow on the silver snow. One such morning, while the whole camp was deathly quiet, he saw the empowered woman meekly walk into the Commandant’s cabin with a bowl. Solzhenitsyn was heartbroken at her pragmatism.

When this Blogger was in Leningrad, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, you were warned to bring as much bottled water with you as you could manage. There was a parasite in the Leningrad water supply, which Leningraders had grown use to, but tourists had not; the parasite ravished the innards of tourists.

This Blogger, with his brother, brought in an inordinate amount of bottled water.

One evening, this gorgeous blond from Florida,  who had checked into the hotel right before us, a week before and had not spoken to this Blogger since, knocked on his door.This Blogger opened the door; she smiled sweetly, seductively and said: “I don’t remember your name but I know you are an American……I WILL DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for a bottle of water.”

As this Blogger invited her in for her bottle of water, all this Blogger could think about was that empowered blond in the gulag.This Blogger learned two things from that incident, the power of water, cool fresh water, and the fact desperate women thought of him as a Gulag Commandant.

In 1956, three years after the death of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile, and began teaching.

“In 1960, aged 42,ONE DAY, was published, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

 During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union….”.

After Khrushchev’s fall from power, Solzhenitsyn became a non-person, and, since the Soviet Union was a Communist regime, his assassination was discussed in the highest levels of the Politburo.

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature,; he was worthy but more than his worthiness, the Prize was a way to keep him alive.

“In August 1971, the KGB allegedly made an attempt to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown biological agent with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but was unsuccessful.”

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is a three volume, seven part story of the Communist concentration camp system,written between 1958 to 1967. It has sold over thirty million copies in thirty five languages. It was the book which broke the Soviet Union.

“Solzhenitsyn never had all seven parts of the work in front of him at one time). The book was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discussed the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture…. “

One key lesson from the book is that Solzhenitsyn discovered that Communism had a special affection for criminals, criminals being the ultimate anti-bourgeois individuals; in America, Solzhenitsyn believed that the Liberal affection for criminals rather than victims was caused by an unhealthy Liberal  infatuation with Soviet Communism.

Rather than attempt to kill Solzhenitsyn again, the Soviet hierarchy exiled him. He came to America.

In America, Solzhenitsyn became an Old Testament Prophet, railing against Liberals.

“Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could never resist Communism….. Solzhenitsyn”

He liked the fact Americans had a gun fetish, he thought that kept the American government honest and democratic, see the quote below.

He liked America under Reagan, after Reagan exited, he despaired of America.

“In America, A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. 
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood….

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end ….. Solzhenitsyn”

In 1994, upset with Bill Clinton and noting that The Soviet Union had fallen, Solzhenitsyn returned to the newly emerged ,reborn Russia, to preach Russian Orthodoxy and Courage. His influence was profound. He died in 2008; Vladimir Putin should be seen as his love child,figuratively.

Solzhenitsyn was a profane anti-Semite; he thought Bolshevism was birthed by Jews; he believed that even though the founder of Bolshevism, Lenin, was a bona fide non-Jew, a Russian; Stalin was a non-Jew, a Georgian, who had studied for the priesthood.

This Blogger once sent Solzhenitsyn a letter, when he had returned to Orthodox Russia, telling him if the Jews had killed Jesus, they would have stoned him to death, the Jewish way; but Jesus was crucified unto death, the Roman method of execution, so why was he anti-Semitic?

This Blogger did not get a reply from him; but he received a letter from his secretary thanking me for the insight.

This is the only way, this Blogger can explain  Solzhenitsyn’s Antisemitism.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?...THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO.”