Past & Present

Although somber about his passing, I do get pleasure from noting a person such as Solzhenitsyn who clearly shaped history but was nonetheless not in command of armies nor economies. The New York Times did a thorough and enjoyable obituary from which I learned many things. There have also been some mostly awful commentaries by pundits, most of them mangling history to score some points in current political pissing matches. I am sure Alexandr would be stocially disgusted by it all.

I have used Solzhenitayn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in my class on the world history of the twentieth century, and even this tough audience of freshmen non-majors seem to enjoy it and benefit from it.

The point I make about Solzhenitsyn in this class is that his impact and fate was another tell-tale sign that the Soviet regime was doomed. Nikita Khrushchev, although he had Ukraine’s blood on his hands and his smooch marks on Stalin’s rear-end, did sincerely wish to take the Soviet Union on a non-repressive path after Stalin. Khrushchev, when he denounced Stalin in the secret speech of 1956, did earnestly hope that its residents would find a satisfying life within Soviet socialism. Khrushchev was impressed by Solzhenitsyn’s literary skill and decided to allow the publication of One Day, signaling that ideas and art would no longer be bound and gagged. But this gesture, made in 1963, was empty. Khrushchev had already reverted to the easier street of thuggery in dealing with Hungary in 1956, and in conceding the need for the Berlin Wall in 1961.

When Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago shone harsh light in 1973 for the first time on the breadth and depth of the Soviet’s police-state tactics, the successors of Khrushchev arrested and exiled Solzhenitsyn. This crackdown meant that Khrushchev’s loosening of the control on words was not only an empty gesture, but also temporary. And the renewed oppression would prove correct the worrisome assumption that drove Khrushchev to an early, meek attempt at reform: that you can’t coerce a people into creating a successful social system.