Monday, August 04, 2008
The Russia loses a large plume: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is gone, by Francis Chartrand
According to his son, quoted by the Itar-Tass agency, he died as a result of acute heart failure. 
A student at school and university science Rostov-on-Don, he studied literature, mathematics and Communist doctrine he knew well. He joined the revolutionary ideals of the time. During the German invasion in 1941, he fights as a gunner. He was sentenced in 1945 to 8 years imprisonment in labour camps for activity against-revolutionary, having maintained a critical match against the Stalinist political skills and his warriors. According to Solzhenitsyn, the war with Nazi Germany could have been avoided if the Soviet government had reached a compromise with Hitler. Solzhenitsyn accused the Soviet government and Joseph Stalin have been more responsible Hitler of the terrible consequences of war on the Soviet people. He was sentenced to time as a traitor. When he left the camp in 1953, a few weeks before Stalin's death, he was sent to perpetual exile in Kazakhstan. He was rehabilitated in 1956 and settled in Ryazan, 200 km south of Moscow, where he teaches physical sciences.
It was his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 in the journal Soviet Novi Mir, thanks to approval by Nikita Khrushchev in person, who acquired him international acclaim. However, three years later, it is impossible to publish anything in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and his novels Prime Circle and The Cancer Pavilion and the first volume of his historical epic The Red Wheel, appeared in the West where he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, reward it may levy that four years later after being expelled from the USSR. It has not been able to travel to Stockholm for fear of being stripped of his Soviet nationality and unable to return to the USSR, the Swedish government refused to submit the price to its embassy in Moscow.
His life becomes a permanent conspiracy to steal the right to write in spite of monitoring more and more diligent KGB. A portion of its archives is entered in one of his friends in September 1965, and there is insufficient be assassinated in August 1971 (by a "Bulgarian umbrella"). One of his closest collaborators has narrowly escaped a strangulation and a car accident. In December 1973, appears in Paris (in Russian) The Gulag Archipelago, where he exposes the system of the Soviet Gulag concentration camps, he lived on the inside, and the nature of the totalitarian regime. Written between 1958 and 1967 on tiny pieces of paper buried one by one in gardens friends, a copy was sent to the West to escape censure. He decided his release after one of his aides was found hanged: she had confessed to the KGB cache whereabouts of a copy of the work. This publication brings him to be stripped of his citizenship and be expelled from the USSR in February 1974.
He settled first in Switzerland, then emigrated to the USA. After a turbulent period of interviews and speeches (including the famous speech delivered at Harvard in 1978), the USA, Solzhenitsyn was often invited to major conferences. On 15 July 1975, he was even invited to give a lecture on the world situation in the U.S. Senate. The West discovered a man and deeply conservative Orthodox slavophile very critical of Western society of consumption. He withdrew with his family in Vermont, in St. Johnsberry, to write the work which he dreamed since his youth: The Red Wheel. Historical epic tells the embourbement of Russia in the revolutionary madness, it has several thousand pages.
After the fall of the USSR, the Russian nationality he is returned and the Gulag Archipelago published. Via France (inauguration of the memorial Lucs Boulogne-sur-(Vendée) on September 25 1993), then he returned to Russia Friday, May 27, 1994 where he resides since. Until 1998, it retains an intense social activity at its own television show, travels through Russia, meets a multitude of people. The disease has interrupted this activity.
A committed intellectual ... and finally recognized
Long a symbol of intellectual resistance to Soviet oppression, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is regularly attacked. The operations of destabilization against him have practically never ceased since the 1960's. A zek (detainee), manipulated by the KGB, accused of being an informer of the communist authorities, and why writing a false denunciation. The KGB did write a few books against him by former friends, as his former editor, Alec Flagon, and even by his first wife. During his literary career, no indictment has not been spared: successively or at the same time accused of being nationalist, tsarist, ultra-Orthodox, anti-Semitic or supported Israel, traitor, accomplice objective of the Gestapo, the CIA, francs Masons, french secret services and even the KGB. Solzhenitsyn has responded to these accusations by juxtaposing to cancel them, in writing his autobiography, The grain fell between the millstones, and again recently in an article of the Litératournaïa Gazeta, "barbouilleurs not looking light ". In fact, his political opinions, forged throughout his life by a common destiny outside, are too complex to be labelled. He did not believe that the country can move, overnight, a totalitarian regime to a regime-type Western democracy. If it supports a strong presidency, it is especially supporter of local democracy, quite close to the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville: Solzhenitsyn, true democracy is not established by the electoral system but by a fabric d 'associations managing local affairs independently of the central government which, he should take care that national affairs (army, foreign policy, etc.).. It is a fervent patriot, but not a nationalist: for example he always opposed the war in Chechnya. He had a favorable comment to President Putin during his coming to power, hoping to significant changes, then took his distances quickly. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has never refuted the accusations of royalisme brought against him by Soviet power. His orthodox religious beliefs are also distrust in progressive circles.
According to Moshe Lewin, who relays this criticism, "as long as [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] conducted its battle of the interior, foreign observers have assumed that he fought for a democratic system [...]. But once Solzhenitsyn exiled in the West, they quickly realized that was not automatically anti-bearer of democracy. The battle Solzhenitsyn was actually in the service of an ideology deeply undemocratic, which combined elements of "national-statism" archaic traits of the Orthodox religion, but the very concept of Democracy. In short there were at Solzhenitsyn a deep attachment to a authoritarianism of its own which, if it was not made during his first appearances in the public arena, has developed during his fight. "
The American historian Richard Pipes, whose work on the history of Soviet Russia had been described by Solzhenitsyn "Polish version of Russian history" (Pipes is of Polish origin), responded to it in the taxing of anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism. In 1985, Pipes has developed his remarks in his criticism of a new Solzhenitsyn, August 1914: "Each culture has a clean form of anti-Semitism. In the case of Solzhenitsyn, it is not racial. This has nothing to do with blood. He [Solzhenitsyn] is not racist, the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. It has many similarities with Dostoyevsky, who was a devout Christian, a patriot and a fierce anti-Semitic. Solzhenitsyn takes place in doubt the vision of the Revolution defended by the extreme-right Russian, as a creation of Jews."
It has been throughout her literary accusations of anti-Semitism because of the publication named administrative manager of the Gulag, its historical work on the Bolshevik revolution and, more recently, because of its opposition to Russian oligarchs and the publication of his book historical Two centuries on relations between Jews and Russians from 1795 to 1995: the writer and former Soviet dissident Vladimir Voinovich has tried to demonstrate anti-Semitic character of this book in a study controversy. In France, Trotskyist historian Jean-Jacques Marie devoted a section to each of Volume Two centuries together, which he describes as "anti-Semitic Bible." According to Jean-Jacques Marie, "Solzhenitsyn describes, in two centuries together, a conception of the history of Jews in Russia worthy of being included in a handbook of falsifying history" by restoring a history of pogroms "as it was seen by Tsarist police." The British historian Robert Service, however, defended the book by Solzhenitsyn, arguing that a study of the place of Jews in the Bolshevik party was fully justified and that Trotsky himself had criticized their overrepresentation in the leadership of the party.
The end
Solzhenitsyn lives near Moscow withdrew in the midst of his family. The Fund assists Solzhenitsyn former zeks and their families in paying their pensions, paying for medicines. After thought he would play a decisive role in post-communist Russia, then disappointed, having already more or less "buried", the Russians seem these days look again at its figure and rediscover value of his writings politico-social. An international symposium on his work was dedicated in December 2003 in Moscow.
On 12 June 2007, President Vladimir Putin paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn in awarding him the prestigious State Medals.
Friend of Philippe de Villiers, Chairman of the Vendee, he called a college of Aizenay College Alexander Solzhenitsyn, inaugurated by the son of the writer.
He died at his home in Moscow to 89 years in the night of 3 to 4 August an acute heart failure.
Labels: Art and culture, Francis Chartrand, Russia
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