THE OAK AND THE CALF

A Tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn

More than any other person, the great Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn exposed the moral infamy of Soviet Communism. Following Solzhenitsyn’s death, Greyfriars Senior Minister Rob Yule paid this tribute to him in a sermon at Greyfriars Classical Service on 10 August 2008. In the nineteen seventies Rob was secretary of the New Zealand Society for the Study of Religion and Communism (later Keston College New Zealand) — an organisation that publicised the situation of religious believers in Communist societies and defended their human rights.

Solzhenitsyn in old age

There is a Russian proverb about a calf pushing against an oak tree. When the Soviet Union still seemed as immovable as an oak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the calf who pushed against it.

Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow on 3 August at the age of 89. Appropriately for one who had embraced the Russian Orthodox faith — he was buried at the historic Donskoi Monastery on 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration.

Career

Solzhenitsyn was the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century. His novels are strongly autobiographical, faithfully recording his own experiences. The First Circle (1968) — an allusion to Dante’s ‘first circle’ of hell — describes his experience in a sharashka on the outskirts of Moscow, a prison research institute where selected prisoners were kept in better conditions than the camps to work on top security military and industrial projects.

The novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), was based on his subsequent three years in a special camp for political prisoners at Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan. It was the first Russian book to reveal what life was like in a labour camp, and Solzhenitsyn’s only work to be officially published in the Soviet Union, with the permission of Premier Khrushchev himself. In 1970 it was made into a spare but powerful film featuring Tom Courtenay as Shukhov, the central character. Cancer Ward (1968), set in a hospital in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, describes his battle with cancer during subsequent exile in southern Kazakhstan.

But it was the publication of the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s massive three volume work, The Gulag Archipelago (1973-76), which caused the storm of fury that had him thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1974. This made him briefly a celebrity in the West — until his criticisms of Western culture in turn drew the ire of the liberal establishment in Europe and the United States.

Camps

‘GULAG’ was the acronym for ‘Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps’ — the state prison system in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor of an ‘archipelago’ refers to the chain of prisons, interrogation centres, transit points and labour camps dotted across the vast territory of the Soviet Union, the world’s largest country, covering eleven time zones.

These ‘islands’ were joined by interconnecting ‘trade routes’ along which zeks (the Russian word for prisoners) travelled by secretive prisoner transport: in trucks marked ‘Meat’, or railway wagons attached to ordinary passenger trains. As Solzhenitsyn observed — travellers on Soviet railways were seldom aware what human suffering had passed through the same Euclidean space a few seconds before them.

People were imprisoned for the most trivial reasons. Solzhenitsyn himself was arrested when commander of an artillery battery in East Prussia, for making an uncomplimentary reference to Stalin as ‘the mustachio’d one’ in a letter to a friend.

Solzhenitsyn subtitled The Gulag Archipelago ‘An Experiment in Literary Investigation’. Full of camp slang, it arose from a social situation which he believed to be unique in world history. A country’s entire intelligentsia — its writers, artists, clergy, scientists and engineers — found themselves at the bottom of the social heap, observing life in the raw among prisoners and common criminals. ‘The experience of the upper and lower strata of society merged.’

Composition

Moreover, it was written in circumstances which people used to modern comforts and computer, internet and cell phone communication can scarcely imagine. Solzhenitsyn wrote his observations on tiny scraps of paper with concealed stubs of pencil, then committed these to memory and destroyed the scraps lest they be discovered by prison security.

To ensure that he retained these memories he composed rhyming couplets that he would recite with the aid of a makeshift rosary he wore under the padding of his gloves, counting off every ten lines so none were ever forgotten. At the end of his imprisonment he had memorised a colossal 12,000 lines of verse. He tells of meeting a Baptist pastor, Anatoly Silin, who used a similar system and had memorised 20,000 lines of his camp experiences.

Prison brought Solzhenitsyn back to the Orthodox faith of his childhood, which he had rejected for Marxism in adolescence. It was here, ‘rotting on prison straw’, that he became aware that ‘the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.’ So he could exclaim in gratitude for an overruling providence: ‘Bless you prison, for having been in my life!’

Conditions

At the same time Solzhenitsyn was aware how fortunate he was to survive, and his duty to testify on behalf of those who didn’t. Most Westerners have little idea how terrible labour camp conditions were. Camps existed through all seventy five years of the Soviet Union’s existence, from Lenin to Gorbachev. They spread over the entire expanse of the Soviet Union, from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to the Kolyma mountains and Magadan on the Pacific coast, and from the steppes of central Asia to Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world, built entirely by slave labour.

In the Stalin era impoverished prisoners were sometimes dumped by the trainload in the midst of icy wastes and told to build their own camps by their bare hands. Zeks died in the tens of thousands — from cold, hunger, exhaustion, and brutality. Among them were many Christian believers — Orthodox clergy and peasants, Old Believers, Baptists, Eastern-rite Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Anne Applebaum, the leading scholar of the GULAG, conservatively estimates that of the 28.7 million forced labourers in the Soviet Union, 2.7 million died in camps between 1929 and 1953.

If we add the deaths from the Red Terror and the Civil War, the famines that followed forced collectivization, and the mass deportations and mass executions under Stalin, the figures are much greater. The numbers of those who perished through internal repression in the USSR between 1917 and 1959 may not be as high as the émigré figure of 66 million cited by Solzhenitsyn. But the French authors of The Black Book of Communism still estimate an appalling 20 million deaths.

Solzhenitsyn made it his life’s mission to remember — and document — this vast labyrinth of human suffering. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature he spoke of the few steps to the rostrum as the pinnacle of a long flight of steps from the nether world of the camps, which few survived to climb. He saw it as his obligation to them to recount what happened.

Critique

Like the nineteenth century novelist Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn’s literary works are better than his essays and polemical writings. Exiled to the West, he lived for eighteen years in the woods of Cavendish, a small hamlet in the American state of Vermont. There he buried himself in research, twelve or fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, to finish the ‘Red Wheel’ cycle of books that began with August 1914, to tell the story of the demise of Orthodox Russia. He emerged occasionally to give a powerful speech, like his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, which lambasted the West for abandoning its Christian heritage.

Compared with the memorable characters, uplifting description and skilful story telling of his novels, his essays are flat and colourless, marred by a distaste for the West, an uncritical Russian nationalism, and a moralising tone. The consumer culture of the United States, and of post-Communist Russia after his return in 1994, appalled him.

More than any other human being Solzhenitsyn exposed the moral bankruptcy of Marxist Communism, which had as many admirers in the West as enforcers in the Soviet Union. Photographs of him in old age remind us of the prophet Ezekiel — unyielding and uncompromising, with a forehead like the hardest stone (Ezekiel 3:8-9). That forehead pushed against the great oak — and the oak, which in the nineteen seventies hardly seemed to move, is now no more.

Rob Yule, 10 August 2008
© 2008, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church