Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — Towering figure of the 20th century and his enduring legacy of freedom!
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Exclusive for HaciendaPublishing.com
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Book Review
Published Date:
Wednesday, February 4, 2015 
A Review of The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker by Daniel J. Mahoney (2014)
I agree with the tenets of this important book on the life and philosophy of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, an insightful intellectual profile as recounted by the author Daniel J. Mahoney, a political scientist at Assumption College. Mahoney has in fact written a masterful semi-biographical and inspirational tome on the legacy of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, a legacy of the pursuit of truth, physical and moral courage, literary genius, and man's insatiable thirst for freedom.
Solzhenitsyn was a towering figure in the 20th century, not only for his unique contribution in exposing the immorality of the communist system, in dismantling the totalitarian gulag system and militating the collapse of the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union, but also as a political philosopher, memoirist, and historical novelist of the highest order. All of this is recounted eloquently in this book, particularly Solzhenitsyn's more controversial legacy in the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
As recounted in previous articles, there is no question Solzhenitsyn received superlative accolades early on his career after the publication in the Soviet literary magazine Nova Mir of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). The little novel was even used by Nikita Khrushchev to further dismantle Stalin's cult of personality. With Khrushchev's imprimatur, Western liberals had no qualms about embracing Solzhenitsyn at a distance. Later, in the days of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov (in the KGB), the fame he attained from the little novel protected Solzhenitsyn's life, at least in part, from the Soviet security apparatus that continued to threaten and harass him.
But the truth is Solzhenitsyn's adoration by the Western, particularly American, intelligentsia ended quickly after he was exiled from the USSR, more precisely after he gave the 1978 commencement address at Harvard University. 
He would not be forgiven by the Western liberals, who decried his conservatism when he denounced Western decadence, moral relativism, and even lambasted the anti-war protesters who forced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam, resulting in the communist takeover of that country. Solzhenitsyn still has not been forgiven for these sins by liberals in the West. But it's fortunate that at least in Russia, a nation that experienced the collectivist evil firsthand, he has not been forgotten. Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago (1973), is now required reading in Putin's Russia. And Solzhenitsyn's legacy of freedom and resistance to tyranny is seen by moderates in the Russian Federation as a bulwark against the return of communism.
Liberals in the West abandoned Solzhenitsyn as soon as they found out he was not one of them, a secular humanist liberal. However, more lasting praise for the Russian giant (both in intellect and physical stature) has come from more conservative sources in the West: Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1952) George Kennan, the architect of Truman's policy of communist containment in the late 1940s, called Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” Kennan has never spoken more clearly or better. National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. described Solzhenitsyn as a man of “moral splendor” and “the outstanding figure of the century.” Even Harrison Salisbury, a New York Times journalist and an admirer of Lenin and Mao Zedong, reportedly admitted that Solzhenitsyn was “a worthy successor to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bunin, and Pasternak." But, for the most part since the time of his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn has been maligned, criticized, or simply ignored by the liberal Western intelligentsia. This is one reason Mahoney's book was needed; it supplements Michael Scammell's 1984 authoritative biography entitled Solzhenitsyn. These books are needed of course to combat the apathy and ignorance of the times as it concerns the life and career of a man worthy of remembrance not only for his legacy in the cause of freedom, but also for his literary bequest in the cause of literature. Solzhenitsyn's own struggle for freedom of thought and expression is recounted in his memoirs, The Oak and the Calf.
Mahoney defends Solzhenitsyn against his liberal critics and points out that despite the Russian's criticisms of the West, he by in large admired the Western intellectual tradition, citing for example, Solzhenitsyn's 1993 address to the International Academy for Philosophy in Liechtenstein, where he lavishly recognized Western freedom and the “historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every citizen.” 
Solzhenitsyn's autobiography, The Oak and the Calf; his two installments or “Knots” of The Red Wheel, his series of historical novels about events leading to the 1917 Russian Revolution (e.g., "August 1914" and "November 1916"); along with The Gulag Archipelago are perhaps the greatest of his literary achievements. And yet, the third installment of The Red Wheel series, "March 1917" — dealing with the events that led to the February Revolution (which actually toppled Tsar Nicolas II and temporarily empowered the moderate revolutionaries led by Alexander Kerensky) and the subsequent more tragic events that ushered in the October Revolution and the military coup by Lenin's Bolsheviks — has yet to be translated into English.
Like Mahoney, I have read all of Solzhenitsyn's works that have been translated into English or Spanish and have found them to be genuine literary masterpieces. At least on this count Salisbury was totally correct. I have been waiting eagerly for the translation of the third installment, but it has only been available in Russian and French until now.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel, I have just read a review of Mahoney's book by Brian Anderson in realclearhistory.com in which Anderson states that the Kennan Institute recently announced its plan to translate the remaining volumes of The Red Wheel by the centenary of Solzhenitsyn's birth in 2018. This was music to my ears and it gladdened my heart!
As recounted in The Other Solzhenitsyn by Daniel J. Mahoney and Solzhenitsyn's own The Gulag Archipelago — no one has suffered oppression and survived against all odds; resisted and confronted evil, an evil exercising nearly complete omnipotence against the individual; then defeated the totalitarian evil so thoroughly that it crumbled into dust; and in the end, lived to see himself vindicated and triumphant — as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced!
The Other Solzhenitsyn is a must-read book for anyone interested in the legacy of this towering figure of history and those who relish inspirational works surrounding the legacies of great and courageous historical figures. Additionally, I would recommend reading Solzhenitsyn's own works, at least those mentioned here. They will enrich your existence, give you a new sense of appreciation for life in freedom, and will expand your literary horizons beyond the constraining limitations of contemporary literature and vacuity of popular culture.
Written by Dr. Miguel Faria
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D. is Associate Editor in Chief and World Affairs Editor of Surgical Neurology International. He is the author of Cuba in Revolution — Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002). His website is: www.haciendapub.com or www.drmiguelfaria.com
Copyright ©2015 Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D.
The Other Solzhenitsyn by Daniel J. Mahoney. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014, 256 pages.
The article can be cited as: Faria MA. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — Towering figure of the 20th century and his enduring legacy of freedom! HaciendaPublishing.com, February 4, 2015. Available from: http://www.haciendapub.com/articles/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-%E2%80%94-towering-figure-20th-century-and-his-enduring-legacy-freedom
The photographs used to illustrate this book review came from a variety of sources and do not necessarily appear in Mahoney's The Other Solzhenitsyn. This book review was first published in haciendapublishing on February 4, 2015.
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Opposing mass arrests?
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago — 1918-1956.
The knock on the door...
“That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
"Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: 'It's a mistake! They'll set things right!' And everything which is by now comprised in the traditional, even literary, image of an arrest will pile up and take shape, not in your own disordered memory, but in what your family and your neighbors in your apartment remember: The sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door.
"The insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs. (And what function does this civilian witness serve? The victim doesn't even dare think about it and the operatives don't remember, but that's what the regulations call for, and so he has to sit there all night long and sign in the morning. For the witness, jerked from his bed, it is torture too—to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors and acquaintances.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Not foreseeing Soviet communism and Solzhenitsyn!
To Lenin’s apologists: Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Russian intelligentsia never foresaw the monster they wished for and help create, and he committed suicide. Lenin knew: he created the Cheka; he glorified Terror; he sanctified Lies, such as the end justifies the means and destroyed "bourgeois morality," etc. No excuses for Lenin please. The only thing he regretted was not being able to stop Stalin, not because of justice or a kinder communism, etc. but because ultimately Stalin he foresaw would kill other communists, and most of all, Stalin insulted Nadezhda Krupskaya. (incidentally WIKI has the best picture of her I have ever seen, rivaling Inessa Armand). Read Harrison Salisbury's book, Black Night, White Snow. Although Salisbury is an apologist of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the evil permeates through, especially the part of the intelligentsia and the formation of Lenin's apparatchiks. As I've mentioned, Solzhenitsyn's work, particularly the Gulag Archipelago, is essential, and I really wish you all literati of the 21st Century would read, at least part of it. I consider him the highest figure and the best writer and philosopher of the 20th Century.--- MAF
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Krupskaya could never look like Inessa Armand! I saw the picture, and even though it was taken in the 1890's, it was still too late.
I know that Lenin saw the evil of Stalin when he was ill, and unsuccessfully tried to remove him for the reasons you give. My opinion has always been that the half hearted apology Stalin offered for snapping at Krupskaya was accepted; even Stalin realized that was not a very good move politically, and you see he let Krupskaya live unmolested until her own death in 1939.
But we have previously discussed on Haciendapub about Lenin's lack of personal cruelty. I'm not his apologist, but I think it valid to wonder how the USSR would have evolved if his cerebrovascular tree had been healthy, and he lived out his political and natural life as a healthy man. Remember that while he may have set up the conditions that allowed a Stalin, that doesn't mean there had to be a Stalin. It was one of the crueler tricks of the laws of probability that not only did he die unusually early, but there was such an unusual being as Stalin readily available to take over the reigns of power.--- Dr. Adam Bogart
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It would have been the same. the same. Lenin would have died eventually. Stalin would take over and the same. Had Stalin died, Trotsky would have been slightly less cruel but same (as with the suppression of the mutiny of Battleship Potemkin). Eventually the same collective leadership would develop. The inescapable, long-lived Brezhnev would be there stabilizing things for a while. The ubiquitous KGB would guard the realm until inevitability of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, etc. Until Reagan, Pope John Paul the Great, and Margaret Thatcher would give final push over the edge of history. A true incidence of the realization of historical positivism!---MAF
Gulag Archipelago lessons to remember!
And how we burned in the camps latter, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur --- what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ....We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.--- Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1970)
Resistance to tyranny against all odds?
Dr. Faria: All Solzhenitsyn was saying in those paragraphs is that since people knew they were going to their enslavement, torture, and even deaths first in Lubyanka or Lefortovo, then the gulag, that there should have been more resistance, with knives, pikes, pitchforks, etc. In fact resistance scared the ATF in this country during the Clinton-Janet Reno years. Yes there was Ruby Ridge (1992), but also their fiasco and atrocity of Waco (1993) followed by Oklahoma FBI Alfred P. Murrah building (1995). There was also the less known "Ballad of Carl Drega" event 1997, the Montana Freemen (1996), and Gordon Kahl (1983). I guess you have to live it to understand it. The Soviets wiped out the resistance in the civil war, Cheka arrests, gulag, and intimidated the population, as the Cuban communists did in Cuba by 1965 after the "alzados" were wiped out. We could escape with great difficulty from Cuba, but there was even less chance of escape from the USSR. Just look at the subtitle of the Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago; it tells it all — (1918-1956)! In other words repression began immediately with the Cheka after the October Revolution and continued at a high level until 1956 when Khrushchev allowed him to publish "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." But the "Khrushchev thaw" soon receded and repression resume although at a lower level. After that you must read his subsequent books.
Dr. Bogart: maybe you do have to live it. People have also commented on this phenomenon in Nazi Germany. Victims were relatively placid, so something like the Warsaw Ghetto stands out, even though as a military operation, it was not so impressive. It's just that compared to the rest of the people put on trains destined for death camps, in Warsaw at least they did something.
Since you did live through this kind of thing, give me some insight. What is stopping people who know they are on their way to certain death from taking a few of their killers with them? Yes, please see that is difficult to for me to grasp on a visceral level. I can't see myself not fighting if I were to die anyway, but in all fairness, I don't know what I would do if I were living it.
Dr. Faria: Action depends on the personality and families. You fight, or you surrender to slavery; or you escape if you can. Period. My extended family is a good example. On my mother's side many fought for the Revolution, then against the revolution (as recounted in my book), or escaped as my father and I did. Those who fought died fighting, or got caught and spent years in prison; or they escaped to the US or waited legally for years to emigrate to Spain or Venezuela (bad luck there!). Half of my mother's family side is in Miami, and they rebuilt there. Some were successful; some not as the others. All Republicans! On my father side, most chose to stay in Cuba and still live there in misery. One of my cousins "escaped" legally from Cuba by marrying a Spaniard lady and he is also in Miami now. No other way to explain it.
Resistance to tyranny, when, how?
Dr. Bogart: You have a ton on here and on your website. I have read volumes, just written by you. It can be hard for me to keep up with all of it, but mostly I do! I understand exactly what are saying about your family's experiences in Cuba. Thank you, because that's exactly what I needed to know. If I read it before (likely in your book most recently) it was not coming to my mind... but I needed your reminder.
May I point out that your family had a reason to fight back? It was possible freedom. It is unlikely that killing some NKVD men on their way to make an arrest would accomplish anything. In that case, it is simply a question of why not do it since you are going to die anyway? I find it hard to believe the Soviet citizenry could have gained any freedoms in their situation during the purge years, but I agree that more should have fought back because they had nothing to lose. That is what makes their placidity puzzling. Still, it's different in Cuba, where fighting the authorities gave people a small chance to escape, and this was often enough of a chance that they succeeded.
Dr. Faria: The NKVD should have feared the Soviet people at least killing a few of them each time; as did the ATF, the FBI's bogus "Hostage Rescue Team, the corps of engineer (possessing property, such as wetlands), in (repeat): Oklahoma FBI Alfred P. Murrah building (1995) devastating city bombing; reprisals as in "Ballad of Carl Drega"(1997), the Montana Freemen (1996), Gordon Kahl;s defiance and rebellion (1983), Mohawk Indians in the Northeast, etc. And so thet wanted and still want to disarm the people.
Resistance to tyranny by a submissive, fickle electorate
I can see this, clearly, for what it is and the point being made. The REASON it will work, again? Most of today's largest cities are already "gun control" and highly populated by people in need of every scrap the government gives them. Why fight, when, you probably don't even work - might never have - right now? LOOK at the folks during the Boston bombings who READILY allowed door knock searches on their homes? No, we'll never survive a jackbooted siege. We've given all the best toys to the government and with the wrong people in total power, they will be used against us. WE just showed politicians and the world in the past four months, how easily we can be cowed.— Debra Nix, Arizona (FB)
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although you may be correct, I think you are judging "the people" too harshly. For one thing, the people have been scared to death , as if the Coronavirus was the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Moreover, you live in state, Arizona, that used to be free, but is becoming enslaved by the things you describe. Your Senator McSally who should have been winning is losing to her chlallenger. She previously lost to a senator, Sinema, who dressed in a pink tutu protested a war, while Mc Sally was flying planes (I"m contributing to her campaign) —speaking volumes about your electorate there. Before that you had the #1 GOP traitor McCain, not to mention GOP traitor #2 Jeff Flake, a wimp and the biggest snowflake west of the Mississippi. So I can see your frustration. But I live in GA, still a free state, surrounded by free states, where we still hunt deer and wild hogs, and many gun owners reload their ammunition, and have trophies lining the walls of their home of which they are very proud. You need to move to a freer state... ---MAF