Passing of a Titan
Posted August 5th, 2008 at 9.19am in American Leadership.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a titan in Russian literature and politics of the 20th century. As a child, I read his “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and later smuggled “The Gulag Archipelago” and “The Cancer Ward”, which were illegal in the USSR and available as the underground Samizdat hand-typed copies only.
True, Solzhenitsyn’s life was full of contradictions. He was a harsh critic of the West, of liberal democracy, and of America, which gave him shelter and protection for 18 difficult years of exile.
Solzhenitsyn has embraced today’s Russian rulers, the KGB officers, whose predecessors tormented him and millions of other GULag victims, has received the State Award from hands of Vladimir Putin, and has not criticized the recent strangulation of freedom in Russia, over which the Putin regime presided.
Yet, Solzhenitsyn’s books and life had an effect of a thermonuclear explosion, which scoured the legitimacy of communism. Mikhail Gorbachev recognized his great role in bringing the Soviet empire to an end, and so should we, his contemporaries, who lived through those momentous developments and who benefited from the man’s talent, moral stature and courage.
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August 5, 2008 Darvin Dowdy, Houston, TX writes:
Solzhenitsyn probably understood something that I wish our U.S. State Dept understood. And that is that Russia must operate its nation the way it sees fit. There will be mistakes made, true. Not unlike our own nation in its infancy. But after the Dubrovka Theatre siege and the Beslan School Massacre we should have approached the Russian leadership and said, “lets team up and defeat these radical jihadists”. [and what a team that would’ve been!] Instead our pathetic state dept wagged its self-righteous finger in the Russians face and warned them to exercise restraint. That’s when relations between the 2 countries began to sour. Again.
I’m sure Solzhenitsyn recognized this lost opportunity. The relationship between the U.S. & Russia would’ve been so different today had we tried to understand what Dubrovka and especially Beslan meant to the Russian people. It was their 9/11. Darvin Dowdy