Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Dies At 89

WHAT CAN we say about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn except to say that he was a Witness. He was a witness to perhaps the greatest evil mankind has ever seen. We shall not see his like again.

Solzhenitsyn’s place in history is his witness to the horrors of the Soviet penal camp system. His Gulag Archipelago describes the gruesome islands of labor camps that were spread across the Soviet Union. An estimated 60 million people entered those camps, millions of them to die.

But Solzhenitsyn did not thunder in his witness. He could have issued a thunderbolt to rock the world. Instead he launched an earthquake. He laughed. He laughed at at evil. That is the great takeaway from Gulag. The laughter.

In the New York Times obituary we are treated to a quote from Susan Sontag.

“We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,” she said. “And then Joseph said: ‘But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it’s all true.’”

Er, no, Susan. In Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the West, made in his address at Harvard in 1978, he was exactly right.

Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

But you can understand why a liberal wouldn’t have liked his critique.

Alekxandr Isayevich was, before everything else, a Russian. And it will be as a Russian, and as a Witness to evil, that he will be remembered.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.