Marcus Warren: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Communism’s deadliest foe
[Marcus Warren is the Editor of Telegraph.co.uk and a former Moscow correspondent who covered Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia from exile in 1994.]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn did more to demolish the moral and intellectual case for Communism than any of its critics, writer or statesman, poet or legislator of the world, acknowledged or not.
Of course, the tyrants and grey bureaucrats who actually tried to turn Marxism into a working polity contributed as much if not even more to the destruction of the system they ruled over.
But those figures who are usually proclaimed winners of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and Baroness Thatcher among them, built their victory on the foundations of his life story and testimony from the Gulag.
He transformed a then obscure acronym (standing for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies”) into a one-word symbol of Soviet brutality which resonated across the world, not least in his own country.
And he managed this at a crucial point in the 20th century. In Russia itself the extremes of Stalin’s terror were an ugly memory, but one in danger of being suppressed once and for all amidst the atmosphere of fear cultivated under Brezhnev. The Russian people themselves seemed resigned to a life of misery and lies.
At the same time the West was pursuing something called détente (appeasement to some) in its relations with the Kremlin. The Left, emboldened by America’s defeat in Vietnam and student ferment, was convinced anew that history was on its side.
Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, when finally published in 1973, undermined any claims to moral superiority Communism had over its enemies. And it did so in devastating fashion.
Where “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” his first portrayal of life in the camps, was a miniature and avoided judgment, “Gulag Archipelago” was a three-volume denunciation of Stalin’s system and the ideology that powered it. It was a masterpiece of literary endeavour, language and polemic. Once read, it destroyed any argument for accommodation with the Soviet Union beyond that of realpolitik. That was all that remained until Mikhail Gorbachev ended the need for even that by presiding over the country’s collapse...
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn did more to demolish the moral and intellectual case for Communism than any of its critics, writer or statesman, poet or legislator of the world, acknowledged or not.
Of course, the tyrants and grey bureaucrats who actually tried to turn Marxism into a working polity contributed as much if not even more to the destruction of the system they ruled over.
But those figures who are usually proclaimed winners of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and Baroness Thatcher among them, built their victory on the foundations of his life story and testimony from the Gulag.
He transformed a then obscure acronym (standing for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies”) into a one-word symbol of Soviet brutality which resonated across the world, not least in his own country.
And he managed this at a crucial point in the 20th century. In Russia itself the extremes of Stalin’s terror were an ugly memory, but one in danger of being suppressed once and for all amidst the atmosphere of fear cultivated under Brezhnev. The Russian people themselves seemed resigned to a life of misery and lies.
At the same time the West was pursuing something called détente (appeasement to some) in its relations with the Kremlin. The Left, emboldened by America’s defeat in Vietnam and student ferment, was convinced anew that history was on its side.
Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, when finally published in 1973, undermined any claims to moral superiority Communism had over its enemies. And it did so in devastating fashion.
Where “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” his first portrayal of life in the camps, was a miniature and avoided judgment, “Gulag Archipelago” was a three-volume denunciation of Stalin’s system and the ideology that powered it. It was a masterpiece of literary endeavour, language and polemic. Once read, it destroyed any argument for accommodation with the Soviet Union beyond that of realpolitik. That was all that remained until Mikhail Gorbachev ended the need for even that by presiding over the country’s collapse...