[Infowarrior] - RIP, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

[Richard Forno]

Soviet Dissident Writer Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

Reuters
Sunday, August 3, 2008; 7:03 PM

MOSCOW -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and  
Nobel literature prize winner who revealed the horror of Stalin's  
camps to the world, died late on Sunday aged 89, Russian news agencies  
reported.

Itar-Tass news agency quoted Solzhenitsyn's son Stepan as saying the  
writer died of heart failure in his home outside Moscow at 11:45 p.m.  
(1945 GMT). Interfax news agency quoted literary sources as saying  
Solzhenitsyn died of a stroke.

"President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's  
family," a Kremlin spokesman said. Members of the writer's family  
could not be contacted immediately.

For more than 20 years, the bearded World War Two veteran, who spent  
eight years in Stalin's camps for criticising the Soviet dictator,  
became a symbol of intellectual resistance to the Communist rule.

His monumental work "The Gulag Archipelago", written in secrecy in the  
Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and  
1978, is the definitive work on Stalin's forced labour camps, where  
tens of millions perished.

A short-lived policy of de-Stalinisation by the then Soviet leader  
Nikita Khrushchev made possible the publication in 1962 of  
Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which  
described the horrifying routine of labour camp life.

Other literary works, including a series of historical novels and  
political pamphlets, were banned from publication in the Soviet Union,  
where their distribution was made a criminal offence.

Major works including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought  
Solzhenitsyn world admiration and the Nobel Literature Prize in 1970.

Four years later, he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a  
plane to West Germany for refusing to keep silent about his country's  
past, and became an icon of resistance to the communist system from  
his American home in Vermont, where he remained until his triumphant  
return in 1994.

RETURN JOURNEY

In 1989, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed the  
publication of Solzhenitsyn's works as part of his "perestroika"  
reforms and restored his Soviet citizenship.

However, Solzhenitsyn refused to return to Russia until after the  
Soviet Union collapsed, marking his comeback in 1994 with a long train  
journey from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to Moscow.

Russia's post-Soviet leadership paid great respect to Solzhenitsyn,  
who lived in seclusion outside Moscow.

Solzhenitsyn remained critical of what he saw as the decadence of post- 
Soviet Russia and had little time for Western-style democracy, which  
he felt was not a solution for his homeland.

"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the  
world," Solzhenitsyn said in his last television interview last year.  
"But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be  
achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism ...

"As far as the state, the public mind and the economy is concerned,  
Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."

© 2008 Reuters