In Memoriam: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

[thatcrazycajun]

With thanks to filkertom for the heads-up: Just five months shy of what would have been his 90th birthday, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate and one of the most famous political dissidents of all time, has died of a stroke in Moscow. Yahoo! News has his obit here.

As a Red Army officer in World War II, Solzhenitsyn helped defend his country against the Germans...and was thanked for it by persecution and imprisonment by his own government when he dared speak out against its policies of brutal repression. His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, reported in blistering detail on the slave-labor camp system to which he was condemned; his next, The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the police state his country had become, earned him exile and revocation of his citizenship in the USSR—and the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. His writing, smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain, helped tear down the Soviet empire from within, fully as much as anything Reagan or any other Westerner did from the outside.

Dosvidanya, gospodin...and spaceeba (thank you).

Comments

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Small quibble. The GULAG Archipelago wasn't his next book after Ivan Denisovich. There were at least two others, First Circle and The Cancer Ward. It's a minor quibble, though, even more so because his works were seized while he was in the Soviet Union, only to be smuggled out and published in the West before he was sent into external exile in 1974.

I'm of the (admittedly ill-informed) opinion that the Soviet Union would have collapsed under its own weight eventually, Reagan or no Reagan, Solzhenitsyn or no Solzhenitsyn. There's no doubt whatsoever, though, that he gave it a good hard push.