Alexander Solzhenitsyn

PEOPLE knew it was there: the vast amazing country of Gulag which, “though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country.” Trains went in, and people were sent to administer it from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But until Alexander Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years there, laying bricks and smelting metal in the intensest heat and cold, hearing fellow-inmates, like rats, stealing his food in the dark, wearing wrist-crushing handcuffs for the least infraction, this land was not fully revealed to the outside world. “The Gulag Archipelago” was a book carried out of the camps “on the skin of my back”, to bear witness on behalf of everyone still inside.

Its appearance, in 1973, immediately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. But his work was done. He had exposed the fissures in the system, a truth-telling that had begun, 11 years earlier during the Khrushchev thaw, with the publication in Novy Mir of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. That tale began with the cacophony of reveille for the prisoners, “sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail” through windows coated in frost two fingers thick. With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long; after this, though with desperate slowness, the disintegration of the Soviet state was only a matter of time.

He was not another Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Often the characters in Mr Solzhenitsyn's books were one-dimensional, the tone sardonic, the detail turgid. But his indestructibility gave him, over the years, a prophet's voice. He survived the war, the camps and abdominal cancer that was carelessly treated. He was told he would never have children, but had three sons. He believed he would never return to Russia after his exile, but in 1994 was welcomed back to the post-Soviet state. Each miracle increased his sense of mission. He was not simply a writer, but a visionary who would mend Russia; and, as such, he believed he was on equal terms with Soviet leaders. In 1973, in a letter to them, he laid out his proposals. There was nothing wrong with a Soviet empire; but they had to cast off “this filthy sweaty shirt” of Marxist ideology, all these “arsenals of lies”. Socialism, he wrote, “prevents the living body of the nation from breathing.”

Behind his impassive kulak's face lay intense self-scrutiny, adamantine moral and physical courage and a sometimes unsettling disregard for the smaller and softer things in life. But he did not necessarily think he was better, or wiser, than other men. Only a fluke, he said, had kept him out of the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, when they came recruiting at his university. As for the war, though the Nazis had unleashed atrocities on Russia, “I remember myself in my captain's shoulder-straps and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: ‘So were we any better?'” In one poem, “Prussian Nights”, he wrote:

The little daughter's on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl's been turned into a woman,

A woman turned into a corpse

Salvo after salvo rattled from the Solzhenitsyn typewriter, always interleaved with carbon copies for fear that the secret police would seize the manuscript. Some fell on deaf ears—wilfully deaf, in the case of the European left. The notion that Stalin was a great wartime leader, for example, should never have survived the devastating portrait of sickly paranoia in “The First Circle” (1969). Yet it has persisted to this day.

Though supporters in the West lumped Mr Solzhenitsyn with the rest of the intelligentsia, he stood monumentally alone. A friendship with an Estonian prisoner, Arnold Susi, had exploded his lingering belief in Marxism; but he detested the self-regarding and snooty Russian intellectuals, the “well-read ones”, as he referred to them. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, he had no belief in liberalism or human-rights campaigns. The fact that scientists might be deprived of visas left him unmoved. He cared about the fate of peasants and the general citizenry, Russians in the mass. Ivan Denisovich was not an intellectual: he was a peasant who was horrified to discover, in a letter from his wife, that the farmers in his village were now working in factories rather than haymaking. The creation of Soviet man was the horror Mr Solzhenitsyn chiefly wished to reverse.

Neither East nor West

Yet he had little time for the West either. Bundled on to a plane to West Germany in 1974, he turned his fire on other targets, thundering against materialism, shallowness and the silliness of popular Western culture. He would be no cold-war figurehead against the Kremlin and all its works; he was, to the core, a Russian nationalist. As communism fell he came to loathe Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, seeing him as the author of chaos and humiliation. But bitterness and envy may have played a part, too. Bitterness because his hero's welcome had turned into indifference to this dishevelled, hectoring, old-fashioned figure. And envy because Yeltsin stood in the place he should, he believed, have occupied himself.